Caesars sportsbook executive Adam Pullen has taken sizeable bets in his two-plus decades establishing the betting lines for the Super Bowl.
Just not a six-figure wager on which side a coin will land.
That changed when a gambler visiting the famed Las Vegas casino plopped down $100,000 on the outcome of the opening coin toss Sunday night for Super Bowl LVIII between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs.
The bet was on tails.
“He’s either going to be in the hole or up big before the game even starts,” said Pullen, the assistant director of trading at Caesars in Las Vegas.
The coin toss is one of the more popular prop bets — a wager that isn’t tied to the outcome of the game — for the Super Bowl. It’s among the hundreds of ways bettors can place a wager on an individual performance or sequence that is unrelated to the final score.
“Each play, once the game has started, there are bets being decided,” Pullen said. “It just shows how Super Bowl betting and betting in general has transformed the country. This used to be a closet Vegas thing. Now it’s everywhere.”
Prop betting’s origins can be traced to January 1986 when the Chicago Bears’ 335-pound defensive lineman William “The Refrigerator” Perry scored a touchdown during a 46-10 rout of the New England Patriots. Trafford native and Sports Gambling Hall of Fame charter member Jimmy Vaccaro was one of the few oddsmakers who had established odds on whether the big man would find the end zone.
When word of the bet spread, Vaccaro began receiving calls from sports writers across the country curious about the wager.
“It was pure insanity,” Vaccaro said. “From that point, if there was anything unique, we as bookmakers would find a way to make a wager out of it.”
The popularity of prop bets increased exponentially in 2018 when a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to authorize legalized sports betting. That made it legal for a gambler to place a bet on whether the opening kickoff will be returned or a touchback or whether Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes will have 300 yards passing.
“It’s also a correlation of the popularity of playing fantasy sports,” said Stephen Andress, editor of the sports gambling site TheLines.com. “Because of fantasy football, bettors are aware of which player is the best, who has the most yards, who is struggling. Now they could make a bet on any given game based on their fantasy sports opinions.”
