In the 1940s, Charles McNeil, a Connecticut math teacher turned Chicago bookstore, revolutionized American sports betting. McNeil is credited with inventing the point spread, which has been the main way to bet football for 80 years.
The point spread represents the margin of victory of the perceived favorite in a game. A 7-point favorite, for example, must win by more than seven points to cover the spread. The spread can make extreme underdogs more attractive to bettors and add intrigue to thin matches. Academic studies have shown that spreads can even boost TV ratings, including overlooked issues when the outcome of the game is determined but who will cover is still up in the air.
Point spreads for football games have appeared daily in newspapers since the early 1950s, although betting was only legal in Nevada until recently. A 2018 US Supreme Court ruling launched a massive expansion of legal betting. Now, with leagues, teams, media and more than 30 states getting into the book business, the point spread is more visible than ever. But its days as America’s favorite way to bet on soccer appear numbered.
Young bettors, many of whom won their game in daily fantasy sports, are gravitating toward player betting based on individual player performance rather than traditional offerings such as point spread, over/under or line. of money. Soon, it’s expected that more money will be spent on Tom Brady’s passing, for example, than the bottom line.
“This is the future,” said Jay Croucher, head of trading for PointsBet sports.
Bettors not teams
In 2019, PointsBet’s first year in the US market, 80% of NFL bets at the sportsbook were in the three main markets — point spread, over/under total score and moneyline odds for the outright winner — – while only 20% were in player trials. Croucher says the split is evening fast and he expects it will soon be a “50/50” split.
Other sportsbooks are seeing similar trends. FanDuel, which began as a daily fantasy company, said its younger customers (ages 21-34) tend to bet on “player narrative” rather than teams, especially the more popular games in the same season. game (SGP), where bettors build multi-leg bets on events in a single race. In the NFL, point spread, over/under and moneyline only make up 11% of shares in SGP on FanDuel.
“It’s the popularity of professional and college players and their story arcs that lead to a game,” Kevin Hennessey, a FanDuel spokesman, told ESPN. “It’s not just in sports betting, the focus on the players over the team can be seen in pre-match news coverage. You also see it in fantasy football.”
For decades, in most states, fantasy contests were virtually the only legal ways to bet money on sports predictions. It created generations of fans who were often more invested in the individual performances of the players than the teams. Now, fans who grew up competing in fantasy leagues are finding more options with legal sportsbooks and fueling the growing popularity of player props with the expanded legalization of sports betting.
“I took my knowledge from daily fantasy sports and pretty much carried it over to sports betting,” said Grant Neiffer, a 33-year-old Colorado Springs-based bettor and contributor to Scoresandodds.com. “Now, I’d say 90% of my job is sports betting instead of daily fantasy sports.”
Sportsbook and oddsmakers are racing to meet the demand for punter props by launching new products and expanding their offerings. PointsBet is planning to offer refresh odds for player stats during games and allow punters to place live bets involving trials. Huddle Gaming, a Las Vegas-based company that offers domestic and international sportsbook odds, aims to send its customers 100 player props for each NFL game.
“The next generation of sportsbook will include the same consistent games during games with player support,” Matthew Davidow, CTO for Huddle Gaming, told ESPN. “To do that, you need very deep simulations and models to deliver real-time pricing. Everything we’re doing at Huddle is aimed at the next generation. In my mind, a customer should always be able to click on every sportsbook offer and put it on a ticket to heaven. And here we are.”
The modern prop betting market
Player odds include over/under in passing, receiving or rushing yards, odds on a player scoring a touchdown and a variety of other stats-based bets. They’re not new, but until the last decade, they were usually reserved for the Super Bowl. Las Vegas’ chance for Bears defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry to score a touchdown in Super Bowl XX in 1986 was the player’s first endorsement to garner national media attention. Offshore sportsbooks have offered individual fixtures for NFL players for the past several years, but have typically waited until Sunday to post them and limited betting limits to just a few hundred dollars, bettors say.
Now, the first set of weekly NFL player picks are usually posted in Tuesday’s sportsbooks. More props are added throughout the week, with punters eagerly waiting for each new offer. Some bookies have even created software that notifies them when a new player’s equipment is posted.
Sportsbooks still protect themselves in player props with smaller betting limits and charging more liquid for bookies than a spread bet. In general, bettors must risk $110 to win $100 on a points spread, while it can cost them $120 or more to win $100 on a player prop. However, the caps and edges that exist in the prop market are large enough to make it worthwhile for high-end punters, who say they can easily drop $3,000 to $5,000 on an individual player’s gear when distributed. in many sports books. The vast majority of bets are not that big, but there are a lot of them.
“Lawyers [U.S. sportsbooks] changed everything,” said a Los Angeles-based punter who is mentioned by Joey Isaks on Twitter. “They’re easier to beat and they’re softer.”
The props market has matured in several ways. Porter, a 36-year-old punter also based in Los Angeles, says that until just a few years ago “99.9%” of his plays were in the end, when over/under passing yards, for example, seemed to be based heavily on season averages.
“If the game was bad, you could just hit,” Porter, who goes by @MLBksPYSCHIC on Twitter, said with a laugh. “When I’d have one over a month, I’d look back and be like, did this happen?”
Searching the betting market for the highest betting totals and automatically laying down bets used to be a successful strategy, Porter said, but the market has caught up and his props these days are much more evenly split between overs and unders.
“That’s the cool part about sports betting,” Porter added, “things changed. So the old guard was still doing it. They’d see somebody against Jalen Ramsey, when he was elite a few years ago, and bet on him. receiver against him. And you know what? That worked for half a decade, honestly. And here’s what happened: It didn’t work anymore, and those guys aren’t in business anymore because they didn’t adapt.
“It still makes me feel weird to this day every time I bet the finish, just because of how I started.”
The king of player supports: kicks
Stars generate the most betting interest, with public bettors routinely flocking to bet on the passing yards of Aaron Rodgers or Patrick Mahomes. But bookmakers say it’s often the elusive backup tight end or running back that can give them the biggest headache in what has emerged as the most popular market to offer player equipment — the odds of scored a hit.
In February, more money was bet on Los Angeles Rams receiver Cooper Kupp scoring a touchdown against the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI than was wagered on the game’s point spread at PointsBet.
“That’s how popular that type of betting has become,” Croucher said.
Sportsbooks regularly place odds on 20 or more players and each team’s defense to score a touchdown, sometimes going far down the depth chart to see if they can draw a bet on a third team at 100- 1. Bettors love it. FanDuel says its all-time market is “king” among NFL bookmaker offerings, and other companies echoed the sentiment.
“That’s actually been a big focus,” Huddle Gaming’s Davidow said of the relegation odds.
He recently spent time fine-tuning his hitting odds models and is aiming to have odds on not only which player will score the first shot of a game, but also updating prices on who will score the next shot during every NFL game this season. He says that the formulation of probabilities around punts centers on the use of: “What are the chances that each player will get the ball on each play and in each situation, and what are the chances that a punt will be scored on that play?”
Pre-match injuries and player suspensions can wreak havoc on all player equipment markets. If a starter is ruled out on Sunday morning, bettors are ready to pounce.
“Suddenly we see all these bets coming in about a guy I’ve never heard of,” Croucher said.
It happened last season in a Week 15 matchup between the Carolina Panthers and the Buffalo Bills. About an hour before kickoff, pregame broadcasts showed Panthers kicker Zane Gonzalez limping after a warmup hit. Gonzalez, the only hitter on the roster, would have to be helped off the field. For supporters’ punters, the late injury created an opportunity.
“I think they had the quarterback trying to kick and the punt returner,” said Porter, the Los Angeles-based bookie. “I was like, ‘wait, they can’t kick a goal. So I literally kicked one [same-game parlay] for some combination of field goals, distance goals and mothers to hit”.
Player props are still not the main attraction, especially at the Las Vegas retail sports books where Vinny Magliulo has worked for four decades.
Magliulo says that when he first started posting odds, he looked at them similar to complementary bets on a craps chart.
“I’m trying to create more in-game action,” said Magliulo, now a vice president for the Vegas Sports Information Network (VSiN) and part of Gaughan Gaming’s sportsbook odds team. “Props are great handle generators and also good for marketing any money management. They give you an opportunity to take action no matter what the outcome is.”
For now, however, the point spread remains king in Las Vegas and around the country, but chances are that will likely end soon.
