A local television reporter in Florida on Friday disrupted the international betting market by one of the most popular Super Bowl proposals with 2 and 16 seconds. video he posted on Twitter.
Zach Maskavich, a multimedia journalist for Orlando’s WESH Channel 2, was working outside his car in the parking lot of Hillsborough Community College, in front of Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, home of Super Bowl LV, when he heard the rehearsal of the national anthem. .
This is the first Super Bowl that Maskavich, 31, has covered and that throughout the week his teammates had asked him to be attentive to internal information about everything from the color of Gatorade used by the teams to information about the previous match and musical performances in the middle part. So when artists Jazmine Sullivan and Eric Church began their national anthem rehearsal performance, Maskavich launched his phone and made a video about himself to calculate how long the performance would take.
Betting on the length of the national anthem in the Super Bowl has long been one of the most popular new bets on international betting. Gamblers and odds makers scour the Internet for past performances for any clue. State regulators do not allow U.S. sports betting offers to bet on fears of corruption, but it has not prevented bettors (domestic and foreign) from being able to stab how long the national anthem will last each year.
The oversized duo of Sullivan and Church was sitting down two minutes into Friday, but that would change quickly. Maskavich tweeted his video at 6:30 p.m. ET, showing that the rehearsal had lasted 2 minutes and 16 seconds. In Australia, PointsBet reported that a series of actions appeared shortly after the video was released, prompting them to stop betting on the accessory.
“I just thought it was pretty funny,” Maskavich told ESPN on Saturday. “Some of the answers have been funny; there are people who are very crazy.”
Several sports books reported that they had taken budget money during the hours before Maskavich released his video. Pinnacle Sports, an online sports notebook based in Curacao, had the excess / minor set at 1:58, with -110 odds of betting on both sides. Around three-thirty in the afternoon, Pinnacle began receiving enough bets above to raise the price to 1,500, before the sports house stopped betting.
Betonline.ag, a Panama-based online sports house, said it received about two dozen US $ 250 limit bets over a three-minute stretch around 3pm on Friday.
“Almost every year there is a leak in the national anthem and we see a wave of unilateral action a few days before the match,” Betonline brand manager Dave Mason told ESPN on Saturday. “Yesterday that wave of stocks was more suspicious than in previous years. In a few seconds we made about two dozen sharper maximum account bets. They kept betting from 2:00 to 2:10. At that time we knew there was some very strong information out there somewhere, so we decided to lower the odds. “
Living in Florida with no legal sports betting options, Maskavich said he wasn’t a great player, but he knew people were interested in the national anthem.
“He had the feeling he would gain some traction, until he got to the Super Bowl, and people liked props betting,” Maskavich said Saturday morning. “But I didn’t think it would explode like it did. People are contacting me, wondering if Vegas has paid me to do it, and all those other crazy messes.”
This is not the first time Maskavich has gone viral. In 2018, while covering a high school game, a video of his football shot arrived at SportsCenter “No Top 10.” Still, the responses he received on Twitter left him behind for the publication of the national anthem. Some called him “man of the people” for conveying information; others were angry because they believe it ruined the action and caused the books to stop betting. One person said they would not rest until he was fired.
Although Maskavich’s favorite answers referred to his unfortunate collision with football. “The quarterback should have pulled it harder,” wrote a respondent who retweeted the video.