Going for Gold: Professional gamblers usually avoid the Olympics because it's hard to find an edge. But casual bettors are all in.
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eemingly against all odds, including a highly infectious virus, the Tokyo Olympics have begun. And thanks to the proliferation of legal sports betting in the United States—21 states now allow it—this is the first year that millions of Americans will be able to place bets on the Olympics from their mobile devices. But most of the action will be coming from amateurs betting on the number of gold medals Team USA will collect, or how the women’s basketball team will take first place. Sharp bettors, however, usually don’t give a damn about the Summer Games.
“Professional gamblers generally stay away from betting on the Olympics as they fail to see a true edge,” says Bill Krackomberger, a veteran sports gambler who has been living in Las Vegas for nearly two decades.
There are too many unpredictable elements to the Games to entice sharps. For team sports like basketball, baseball and soccer, most of the teammates do not typically play together, making it difficult to bet based on data or historical performance. This year, as Covid-19 spreads around the Olympic Village, there’s also uncertainty around whether an athlete or an entire team will get disqualified.
Toshiro Muto, the head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, said on Tuesday that he has not ruled out the possibility of the Games being cancelled due to a surge in Covid-19 infections.
Larry, a serious gambler who lives in New Jersey, says he’s made some future bets on the U.S. men’s basketball team, U.S. men’s soccer and U.S. women’s soccer team to win gold but he’s not that excited about the Games.
“I’m putting wagers down almost out of boredom,” says Larry, who did not want his last name published. He’s betting a few hundred dollars, but nothing substantial, especially compared to his action during the NFL season when he puts down $250 to $500 a game. Larry, who prefers to use his illegal bookie over apps like FanDuel and DraftKings, says there’s an aspect unique to the Olympics that clouds logic for bettors: patriotism.
“There’s a lot of emotion and pride when it comes to the Olympics, which throw things off,” he says. “I’ll wait for football season to start betting aggressively.”
Sure Thing: Simone Biles, the 24-year-old American gymnast, could win as many as five gold medals in Tokyo.
Getty ImagesAccording to a new report by the American Gambling Association, 1 in 10 American adults will place a bet on any one event during the Tokyo Games. That’s nearly as many people who bet on the Super Bowl, one of the biggest money betting events in the U.S. But bookies and gamblers around the country disagree and do not think that many Americans will wager on the Games, nor do they expect to see a significant amount of money.
“We’re not hanging our hat on the Olympic Games,” says Duane Colucci, race and sports manager at the Rampart Casino in Las Vegas. “A single Yankees versus Red Sox game will supersede the entire Olympics.”
Sportsbook directors in Vegas say interest around the Olympics is still relatively low as it’s a new betting opportunity—it was not legal to bet on the Olympics until 2016 in Nevada and sports betting was federally illegal, except in the Silver State, until 2018.
Colucci says most of the people betting on the Games are amateurs, or “recreational bettors.”
Waiting for Football: At the Westgate in Las Vegas, director John Murray expects the action will be soft during the Olympics.
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t the Superbook at Westgate Las Vegas, director John Murray agrees: the Olympics won’t be a big deal.
“This is when we encourage our guys to go on vacation,” says Murray. “It’s July, it’s a good time for people in our industry to leave Vegas and get ready for football season.”
There’s no comparison between the action during the Olympics and big sports like football. On Monday afternoon, a guy walked into the Westgate and put down $30,000 for the University of Alabama’s football team to win the national championship.
“You’re just not going to get that kind of money on the Olympics, but it’s typical for college football, pro football, college basketball,” Murray says.
That same afternoon at the Westgate, someone put $100 on Lily King, who is on the U.S. women’s swim team and hasn’t lost a race since 2015, to win the 200-meter breaststroke at 12 to 1 odds.
“These are inconsequential decisions to our bottom line,” says Murray. “If someone wins on these bets, we don’t really care. It’s not something that will determine how we’ll do for July and August.”
DraftKings, which is now offering sports betting in 14 states, is featuring a lot of Olympic betting lines because it’s the first year they’re able to do so. “Basketball will do well, soccer will do well, golf, tennis and table tennis will do well,” says Johnny Avello, the company’s head of race and sportsbook. But he says the handle for the most popular sport, U.S. men’s basketball, won’t surpass a regular season NBA game.
They’re also listing odds on more obscure sports to test the market, including badminton, handball, judo and surfing.
Across the pond in the United Kingdom, professional gambler Paul Krishnamurty, who specializes in politics and sports, says he wouldn’t count out the Olympics to generate a surprising amount of money.
“When an athlete is chasing their third or fourth medal and it becomes a global event, it will attract a wall of money,” he says.
Krishnamurty predicts that big standalone events will bring $5 million to $10 million to a single sportsbook and the total handle for every Olympic event combined will surpass $100 million for any given sportsbook.
Winner Take Olive: The ancient Greeks were known to wager on the Olympics.
(Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)Taking action on the Olympics is not new—people in ancient Greece apparently gambled on the elite sporting event. Olympic action is also not new for BetOnline, an unlicensed offshore gambling site in Panama that’s been taking money on the Games for two decades.
“We used to only offer lines on the big sports, but now we offer everything we can: rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, we’ll even have archery, without a doubt,” says Dave Mason, the sportsbook brand manager at BetOnline. “We take it a lot more seriously than we used to.”
While the betting limits are low—$1,000 compared to a cap of $50,000 for NFL games—any action during the dog days of summer is welcome.
“It gives us a good boost, especially for this time of year,” says Mason. “The line guys are on vacation, marketing is getting ready for NFL. It’s a welcome event, not niche event anymore.”
