Books win another Sunday
By Micah Roberts
VegasInsider.com
One week after the betting public got buried by selecting so many NFL favorites, they got treated to a little bit of the same in Week 4 action with seven underdogs winning outright. However, the story is a little this time around.
"When people see seven underdogs winning outright they automatically think the books had a great day, but it wasn't anything like last week," said Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook VP Jay Kornegay. "It was a good day, but we still lost large amount to the Steelers, Bengals, Saints, Lions and Broncos. We also lost to the Jets, a game the sharps loved but the public stayed away from. There were a lot of hidden losses in between."
However, there were still more wins than losses and most the books came out ahead despite the Seahawks (-12.5) rolling to a 48-16 win in the Sunday night game over the Colts.
"It was an okay day," said MGM Resorts VP of race and sports Jay Rood. "Sharps are having a good day and the public is getting beat up a little bit. We had some house players do well on their games, one of them rolled over their Denver winnings to Seattle."
Rood said the initial bet on Denver was more than $100,000.
"Our best game was Atlanta losing just because it beat out all the large money-line parlays and teasers," said Rood. "We didn't have a lot of takers on the Bills. We had +330 on the Bills money-line and only had $1,000 total bet on it between 19 tickets. The Patriots losing was good for us, but it was tied to Atlanta on lots of plays."
The Falcons (-9) lost their two starting WRs during the game which aided in the Bills' 23-17 road win. Tom Brady erased 14-point deficit to tie the Panthers 30-30, but the Patriots woeful defense couldn't stop the Panthers from driving and kicking a game winning field goal. The Bills are now in first-place at 3-1 in the AFC East, a division the Patriots have won the past eight years.
"Denver was one of the worst losses of the day," said Kornegay of the Broncos 16-10 win over the Raiders. "There should be some concern about the Raiders offense, and that was even before Derek Carr got hurt. They don't have a running game and then you have Amari Cooper dropping easy catches everywhere and then they had no Michael Crabtree. It was a limited offensive attack. But in the end, they were right there and couldn't have taken the lead if Jared Cook makes that late catch in the end zone. This is a problem for Denver, the falling apart late, in three of their games when they seemed to have things in control."
One of the negative effects of the public losing last week is that some people just didn't have the liquid funds to ante up.
"Handle was off this week compared to last week, as well as the win,' said Rood. "We're about one-third of what we did last Sunday (win) heading into the late game."