Twice weekly, we’ll comb through as many articles, tweets and podcasts as we can find related to the world of sports betting and daily fantasy sports, and publish the good stuff here.
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A bettor lost $1.1 million betting on the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl.
A bettor using his phone app made a $1.1 million wager on the Falcons plus 3 points Friday at CG Technology, and a string of six-figure bets were placed on the Patriots at Wynn Las Vegas on Saturday as a wave of big money poured into Las Vegas sports books in advance of Super Sunday.
“I’ve seen more six-figure bets before the Sunday of the game than in previous years,” Wynn sports book director Johnny Avello said. “(Saturday) there were quite a few, and Friday there were some. Even over the past 10 days. I’d say 70 percent of them are on the Pats.”
Avello said he’s taken wagers of $300,000 and $200,000 on New England and “a lot” of $100,000 bets and said the action for Super Bowl LI is comparable to last year’s title game, which produced a record Nevada betting handle of $132.5 million.
“Last year was a record year, and this year feels a lot like it,” he said. “If the first 13 days of action are any indication of what (Sunday) will bring, it’s very possible we’ll see another record broken.”
The New England Patriots opened as 5-to-1 favorites to win next year’s Super Bowl at Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook.
Fresh off their fifth Super Bowl title, the New England Patriots head into the offseason as the consensus favorites to win a sixth.
The Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 in overtime in Super Bowl LI on Sunday. They sit atop the early odds to win Super Bowl LII, at 5-1. A sixth Super Bowl title would tie New England with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most in NFL history.
The Dallas Cowboys, at 8-1, are the only other team with single-digit odds at the Westgate SuperBook.
A Detroit man reportedly won $1 million by finishing with a perfect season on a weekly four-game teaser contest app.
But Mirabella’s story, previously reported by Channel 7/WXYZ, wasn’t a result of betting one game properly, but dozens of games, from the first week of the NFL regular season through the Super Bowl. Mirabella won the money using an app called FourPlay Football, a Birmingham-based company. This required successful bets against “the spread” in four games a week, all 17 weeks of the regular season, as well as games throughout the playoffs, 81 in all.
Jeff Johnson, co-creator of the FourPlay app along with partner CJ Karchon, told The News Monday that Mirabella had to be lucky as well as good to win. In week three, Mirabella made his move too late. He had to buy in using a “late picker power up” to participate. Late picks are made randomly by the app. Mirabella still went 4 for 4 on those random picks.
During the Super Bowl, tennis player Eugenie Bouchard agreed to go on a date with a male fan on Twitter if the Patriots came back to win.
After Tom Brady threw a pick-six late in the first half, Bouchard figured it was safe to declare the game over and boast that she thought Atlanta was always going to win. That’s when a fan in her mentions decided to throw a Hail Mary.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal published an article about the launch of Brent Musburger’s sports betting network.
Musburger, who assumed the role of VSiN front man as of the final buzzer of Tuesday night’s Georgia vs. Kentucky basketball game on ESPN, rode in on a carriage drawn by the magnificent Budweiser Clydesdales. Other VSiN principals — Musburger’s “Friends in the Desert” including Las Vegas boxing analyst Al Bernstein and Magliulo’s fellow oddsmakers Jimmy Vaccaro and Chris Andrews — simply walked in with a throng of curious onlookers.