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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Tiger Woods has returned to competitive golf and a For The Win blog post said there was a free money prop bet available for his debut.
That’s right; the odds were in your favor if you bet on Tiger Woods missing the fairway. And, apparently, they were even better in other place.
Any self-respecting golf fan should have seen the value in this one. Even in the best of times he wasn’t very accurate off the tee, his first-tee jitters before tournaments have been very well documented.
Woods was listed at 40-to-1 odds at Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook, the longest odds in the field, to win the Hero World Challenge.
The Dallas Cowboys and Oakland Raiders were the first two teams to go over their season win totals this year.
The Cowboys and Raiders have become the unlikely first two teams to surpass the preseason over/under win totals set by sports books before the season began. Dallas was the first to clinch, eclipsing 8.5 wins two weeks ago with a 27-17 victory over Baltimore. It created further separation by beating Washington, 31-26, on Thanksgiving to improve to an NFL-best 10-1 for the season. Oakland joined the over-8.5 wins club a few days later, downing the Panthers, 35-32, to move to 9-2 on the year.
Four other teams are already sitting on their exact win total—the Atlanta Falcons at 7-4, the Detroit Lions at 7-4, the Miami Dolphins at 7-4 and the Tennessee Titans at 6-6—with only one more victory apiece needed to go over. But backers of the Cowboys and Raiders are the only ones who know for sure that they have a reward waiting for them at season’s end. Not bad for two franchises that had gone under their win total in four of the previous five seasons.
Sharp action moved the Michigan-Ohio State point spread to make the Buckeyes a 3.5-point favorite just ahead of kickoff after they were favored by as much as 7 earlier in the week.
“We started getting sharp action [on Michigan] that morning,” MGM vice president of race and sports Jay Rood said. “Usually, you get one [sharp bet] and another shows up while you’re in the middle of changing (the line). You’ll see four or five guys try and hit it, before you can move it.”
Caesars Palace sportsbooks also saw rush of Michigan money as word spread that Speight would start.
“We took a fair deal of late Michigan money,” a Caesars sportsbook manager said Sunday afternoon. “The line kept dropping and people kept betting them. We didn’t take any monster plays right before kickoff, but we did get a lot of smaller bets on Michigan in the half hour leading up to kickoff.”
A bettor holding a ticket that would pay $10,000 if Louisville’s Lamar Jackson won the Heisman is trying to sell it for $9,000.
The current owner of the $10,000 Jackson ticket bought it from the original bettor for $4,000 in the middle of the season. He became concerned about not only Jackson’s performance against Kentucky, but also didn’t like that his perceived closest competition — Washington quarterback Jake Browning and Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson — will each be playing in championship games this week, while Jackson won’t be.
October was the third largest sports betting month ever in Nevada.
The total handle for the month — $517.3 million — was the third biggest month in state history for sports betting.
The only other months that eclipse October in terms of total wagered are November of 2014 ($535.5 million) and 2015 ($557.4 million).
It was a year-over-year increase from October 2015, which featured $505.3 million in handle.