For true sports fans here in America, the football season is by far the most exciting time of the year. The combination of college gridiron action on campuses all around the country each Saturday plus the follow up of a full venue of NFL games on Sunday is unbeatable in the sports world. No other sport offers such a variety of action packed into such a short period of time and then we turn around and do it all again the next week!
But it’s not just the fans that enjoy football. Sportsbooks and bookmakers everywhere call football season the ‘high season’ and with good reason. During the month of September, just in the state of Nevada, over $336,000,000 was wagered on college and pro football. The books and the bookies ended up keeping an impressive 8.29% of that figure, $27,854,400, not a bad month!
In fact sportsbooks in Nevada won over $39.6 million during the month of September and almost 28 million bucks of that figure came from football bets.
Believe it or not, that total was down more that 25% from last season when the books won over $43,500,000 thanks mostly to a strong showing by underdogs in the NFL last year. Yes, the bookmakers usually do well when the dogs win!
In all, there was about $23 million more wagered this year on football than last year. The difference was that the books held onto 5% less of those wagers. For some years now, Nevada books have been averaging a hold percentage of around 11.5% in September, by far their best month of the year, followed by the month of December when the hold percentage goes down to a bit over 6%.
An additional windfall for the sportsbooks was the big fight between Floyd Mayweather and Canelo Alvarez. Boxing is classified as ‘other sports’ by the Nevada Gaming Commission and the books saw about $22,000,000 wagered on ‘other sports’ in September, 258% up from last year when there was no big fight.
Of course the World Series had a few bettors as well. 2013 saw a huge 136.2% increase in profits over the same period last year with Las Vegas books winning over $4,700,000 on baseball during the month of September.
Nevada Gaming Control reports that during the month of September the states’ casinos won over $130 million on Blackjack and Craps, $140 million of Roulette and Baccarat, almost $40 million in sports wagers and an amazing $216,000,000 on Penny Slot Machines. Go figure.
