With the start of the Super Bowl just minutes away, the scene inside the Las Vegas sports house’s room is intense.
The bookmakers stare at their computers and an executive takes a step back and forth, already sweating his Sunday suit. The bets are taken advantage of, there are millions of dollars at stake. It is a non-stop action.
Suddenly, the room is silent and everyone stops to watch TVs. Referees, team captains and the honorary pinball machine meet in the middle of the field. In the sports box, there is an excess of hope as the coin is tossed into the air. Heads or tails to determine which team gets the ball first and who manages to keep the money wagered on the coin.
The coin spins from end to end, bounces in the field and sits on top of the heads. The stressed head quickly asks, “How did we do that?”
One employee ranks the bets in a hurry, takes a deep breath and responds uneasily: “We just lost $ 38,000. We’re hooked on 38 dimes and the game hasn’t even started.”
The boss asks another question, “What’s going on?”
The Super Bowl coin flip can be a maximum of two seconds in sports betting and the amount of money you change hands is ridiculous. Of the hundreds of betting options in the Super Bowl, from the color of the sports drink thrown to the winning coach to whom the MVP thanks in the first place in his acceptance speech, there is more money in the queue or in the tail that none of them.
“You’ve dedicated all this work to posting all these accessories, you have to do cross-country sports and everything else,” said Dave Sharapan, a Las Vegas bookmaker. “And the coin thruster is the most sought after prop of all accessories, every year.”
Heads against tails
The Super Bowl coin flip has been on the Las Vegas sports betting board for decades. Heads or tails, which team will win the throw and that team will decide to catch the ball, play defense or defer in the second half – you can bet on everything. And a lot of people do, even though they are charged five cents to the dollar in effect on what is essentially a 50-50 proposal. (This Stanford University study used the angular momentum vector to show that a coin that was turned upside down and held in the hand tends to land the same way it started, but the Super Bowl coin lands on the ground and often bounces, and besides, what does Stanford do? ways?)
Vince Bohbot, on the other hand, knows all about the actual currency used for the Super Bowl. Bohbot is executive vice president of The Highland Mint in Melbourne, Florida. For the past 28 Super Bowls, The Highland Mint has made the coin for the initial release.
In the 1990s, the coins were made of pure silver. Now, with the price of the silver rise, the coins feature silver plating and selective 24-carat gold plating. The coins are similar in size to a silver dollar. They weigh about an ounce and have a diameter of 33 millimeters.
This year’s coin features ocean waves running horizontally between the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers team logos on one side. The Super Bowl LV logo, with the Lombardi Trophy between the L and the V, is on the other side. Traditionally, the side with the Lombardi Trophy is designated as heads. Both sides weigh virtually the same, according to Bohbot.
“It’s very close; there can be a minimal difference on one side or the other. It depends on the design every year,” Bohbot told ESPN. “It doesn’t seem to have affected where the currency lands every year.”
Massive interest in tossing a coin
The bet on currency exchange is nonsense, of course, and the size of most bets reflects that. Most, but not all.
As crazy as they may sound, five-digit bets on the currency are pretty common. And there have been even bigger ones.
Art Manteris, who has spent more than 40 years directing sports books in Las Vegas, remembers one of his best bets on the old Hilton betting $ 100,000 on the coin, only to return a few hours later to bet on the other side for 200,000 dollars.
“He said he changed his mind,” recalled Manteris, now vice president at Station Casinos. “The change worked for him that day.”
Do you get it? Exchange. The humor of bookmakers is the best.
The coin thruster betting number is one of the first to be memorized by cashiers working the Super Bowl betting windows. They need the number to enter the bet into the computer system, which they do repeatedly on the coin. Shaparan says the coin gambler does not know the number of the bet.
In his time working the betting windows on Super Bowl Sunday, Sharapan has heard all sorts of theories, from coin bettors, from the face of supposedly heavier queues, to grass surfaces that produce more heads that grass due to the additional bounce. There is nothing, however, cited as a reason behind a reverse bet other than “queues never fail.”
“We used to draw a line between me and the guy or girl next to me at the counter about how many times we heard‘ queues never fail ’during a shift,” Sharapan said. “We would keep a spreadsheet behind the counter to keep track. We would set the line at 18.5. I would always go there.”
To irritate his co-workers and win his bet, Sharapan would ask customers to bet on currency exchange if they had never heard of this old saying about queues. Inevitably, the apostle would explode: “the tails never fail.”
By the way, sometimes queues fail. In the 54 Super Bowls, the coin toss has landed about 25 times.
By the way, betting with coins is not just an American debacle. It is also popular abroad.
“It’s always been a popular bet, whether in the U.S. or overseas,” said Andrew Mannino, a senior analyst at PointsBet, a longtime Australian bookmaker that joined the U.S. market in recent years. .
Bettors don’t know exactly what motivates interest in currency exchange bets and they don’t really care. After all, it’s good to be able to charge a five-cent vig in a 50-50 bet.
Last year more money was bet (a few hundred thousand dollars) on the currency than any other application bet on William Hill’s U.S. books. With the company operating in several more states this year, bets on flipped currency are expected to increase significantly this year.
“Last year we needed‘ queues that never fail ’and we got the result we wanted,” said Adam Pullen, deputy director of commerce for William Hill US.
FanDuel was not so lucky last year and paid $ 200,000 in queue bets even before the match started. Of course, there was a lot of money in the heads, not so much as riding with tails, and paying $ 200,000 gives you an idea of how much you bet on a coin toss.
“Every year I am surprised by the dollars,” said Nick Bogdanovich, director of commerce for William Hill US. “They just hit it off. I’m completely amazed every year.”