GI Joe's article condensed.
LAS VEGAS – Sportsbooks in the city come to life only grudgingly.
In Harrahs a couple from the Midwest, the only customers, talk football a little after 8 a.m. with a yawning clerk who patiently explains how the pointspread works. The clerk smiles when the wife asks about what the -185 posted next to Indianapolis means, then explains the moneyline.
At the plush MGM Grand, there are no customers at 7:30. “The bettors haven’t arrived yet,” a clerk says to a visitor. “But when they come this weekend it will be bedlam in here.”
But Super Bowl Week in Las Vegas is a gathering storm. In contrast to the early-week quiet, on Sunday thousands of bettors will storm the windows – many in the final minutes before kickoff and others playing every conceivable prop bet during the game – in what may produce the biggest, single handle ever for a Super Bowl.
At the Las Vegas Hilton, work has been ongoing for weeks. Sportsbook director Jay Kornegay and his staff have put together a 24-page booklet listing just about every possible proposition, from the distance of the first made field goal to whether Marques Colston or Reggie Wayne will score a touchdown first. You can bet that Paul Pierce of the Celtics will have more points that the margin of victory in the Super Bowl (Pierce is -6.5).
Kornegay is the king of props in Vegas. Prop bettors would flock to the Imperial Palace for their fix when Kornegay ran the show there. Now the Hilton offers a whopping total of 432 prop bets; just reading them would take longer than the 3-hours-plus the game will take.
Kornegay and other sportsbook managers will be knee-deep in stress this week and thousands of bettors – some of them six-figure wagerers – descend on the city to get their money down for football’s biggest game. For bettors, Vegas is Ground Zero, and you could ask a lot of sportsbook customers for a long time before finding one who would rather be at the game itself than in Vegas.
Kornegay feels that the story lines created by the Colts and Saints could produce one of the biggest – if not the biggest – handles in Vegas Super Bowl history.
“This time it may be the public and not the smart money which moves the line,” says Kornegay. “People love the Saints story and a lot of people might be liking the Saints on emotion. My wife, my friends . . . people not in the business . . . they all like the Saints.”
The Colts, he says, are good, but vanilla. “No one from Indianapolis ever gets arrested,” he says with a laugh.
Bosses work long hours during Super Bowl week, and at the Wynn, sportsbook manager John Avello is no exception. Avello is in his office crunching numbers long before the first customer buys the first ticket of the day.
“It’s just the nature of the business,” says Avello, who has been in the casino business since 1979 and has worked his way up the ladder after starting as a blackjack dealer. “We have to be ready for their play in.”
To accommodate the hordes of bettors, sports books make it clear that it’s all hands on deck.
“You can’t call in sick unless you’re in the hospital,” says one sportsbook employee. “You could find that you don’t have a job on Monday morning.”
Most sports books, in fact, bring in other casino employees just to handle the crush of wagers that go down in a short amount of time. The Hilton advises everyone to bet early and cash late to avoid the crush of lines that swarm toward the windows, but Kornegay acknowledges that not enough heed the warning.
In the end, though, it’s all about the line, and the number has remained steady at 5 or 5.5 for several days. At the Hilton, Kornegay massaged the number a bit several times, dropping it 5 from 5.5 last week, and then moving it as high as 6 on Monday before it settled back to 5.5 the same day.
Harrahs also posted 5.5, but on Tuesday morning MGM properties had lopped off the half-point.
Just about everyone has the O/U at 56.5, but Kornegay is keeping an eye on the weather (“There’s a 20 percent chance of rain in Miami on Sunday,” he notes). No one was willing to wager a guess where the line would be at kickoff, after the high rollers hit town and start betting.
In Vegas, it’s sunny and calm, but the deluge is on the way.
Larry Josephson is filing stories on the Super Bowl for Covers.com from Las Vegas all week. He'll be at the Las Vegas Hilton sportsbook Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and blogging live before and during the game. Larry will have comments from some of the top handicappers in the game. So if you were planning to come to Vegas that week but Tiger Woods isn’t returning your calls and you have to stay home, check the Covers.com home page on Super Bowl Sunday and Larry will keep you up to date with the scene at the Hilton sportsbook keep you up to date.
