Las Vegas Did Las Vegas's Super Bowl Black Sunday actually benefit the casinos?

It’s one of gambling’s most peristent urban legends: the day Vegas took a historic bath on a moving point spread for Super Bowl XIII. But did it really happen?

In Las Vegas, they call it Black Sunday.

Football fans know it as Super Bowl XIII, one of the greatest football games of all time. The Dallas Cowboys met the Pittsburgh Steelers. Both teams were trying to become the first team to win three Super Bowls. Pittsburgh had previously won Super Bowl X over Dallas. This time, the Cowboys were defending champs. There was even a controversial pre-game soundbite: Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson said Terry Bradshaw was “so dumb, he couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him a C and an A”.

The game lived up to the hype. The teams traded touchdowns until a few crucial plays went the Steelers’ way: Pittsburgh scored a touchdown with seconds left in the first half, then the Cowboys’ Jackie Smith dropped a pass in the end zone that would have tied the score in the third quarter. (“Oh, bless his heart,” Cowboys radio announcer Verne Lundquist said of the drop, which forced the Cowboys to settle for a field goal. “He’s got to be the sickest man in America right now.”) Then, after a Steelers touchdown, the Cowboys’ Randy White fumbled the ensuing kickoff deep in his team’s own territory. Pittsburgh scored the next play. The Cowboys scored twice around an onside kick to cut into an 18-point hole, but lost 35-31.

That 35-31 finish was bad for many sportsbooks, who probably didn’t have any blessings for Jackie Smith (who, coincidentally, later worked in marketing and customer relations for the Casino Queen in East St Louis). The most popular way to gamble on football is with spread betting: A punter picks either a favored team to cover or an underdog to be within the point spread. And at sportsbooks that year, the line fluctuated between Cowboys +3.5 and +4.5. Bets on the Steelers -3.5 won. Bets on the Cowboys +4.5 won. Bets when the spread was at 4 pushed, and were returned to gamblers.
“We opened the game -3.5, and it ran to -4, and when I moved to -4.5, that’s when we got all the Cowboys money,” the legendary oddsmaker Jimmy Vaccaro told The Sporting News last year. (Some sources put the opening odds at -2.5.) Vaccaro was running the Royal Inn sportsbook at the time, and said it lost $180,000 on the Super Bowl that year. He told TSN he heard the Plaza lost $700,000 and the Stardust $1.4m.

He now works for the South Point sportsbook — known as a welcoming one to knowledgeable gamblers — which will be rooting for the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. Many sportsbooks listed the Seahawks as 2.5-point favorites even as the Patriots were finishing up their demolition of the Colts in the AFC Championship game. As money quickly came in on the Patriots, that line fell; the best odds for Patriots bettors are now -1 (which is what most major Vegas casinos have). Other sportsbooks are giving the Seahawks as many as 2 points. Vaccaro said South Point took a $10,000 bet on the Patriots on Sunday.

This has some predicting Vegas sportsbooks could take a bath on the game. “Vegas really screwed up with that line,” ESPN’s Bill Simmons said on a podcast. While quoting that Simmons line, Business Insider reported the move “could cost millions.”

But the line shift isn’t exactly a sign casinos are going to lose that badly on the game. Early lines are soft. Though bookmakers put in plenty of research into predicting lines that will get action on both sides, they’re not perfect. But they’re not always in that much trouble because casinos limit action, especially early on. (Sometimes casinos will refuse bets.) Then the market hammers the lines into place and the books adjust.

Not all books shoot for money on both sides; some choose to accept varied amounts of risk on one team. Kevin Bradley of Bovada, a popular online casino,told SB Nation’ Seahawks site Field Gulls about two-thirds of the money wagered there was on the Patriots and the book is “comfortable holding that line right now.” Bovada lists the game at Seahawks +2. “We will need the Hawks,” Bradley told the site.

So, still, casinos could lose some on Sunday. Black Sunday was not the only time casinos lost big on the big game. The Toronto Star wrote in 1996 that the 49ers’ 49-26 win over the Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX “killed the bookmakers” when San Francisco covered a spread that was anywhere from 18.5 to 20.5. The books lost about $400,000, identified as the biggest loss in Super Bowl history at that point since Nevada’s Gaming Control Board began tracking the day. There was a worse one. Nevada sports books lost $2.6m on Super Bowl XLII, where the Giants beat the undefeated Patriots 17-14. Gamblers won on a variety of bets: The Giants on the money line (a straight-up bet), the Giants with the points, parlays of a bet on the Giants and the under (on the over/under line for combined total of points in a game, another popular bet).
Black Sunday isn’t even the only Black Sunday. Week 7 of the 2009 season has also been called Black Sunday, where the casinos lost $8.5m in one day. Jay Rood, director of the MGM/Mirage sportsbook, told the Los Angeles Times it could have been double had the Cardinals failed to upset the Giants that Sunday night. “One of the worst NFL weekends in the history of Nevada,” he called it. Just three years later there was another.Week 9 of the 2012 season was a bloodbath for books. “I’ve been in this business for 26 years, and I have never seen what I saw yesterday,” LVH – Las Vegas Hotel & Casino SuperBook vice president Jay Kornegay told ESPN. And less than a month after Super Bowl XIII, the Washington Post wrote about a bookie named Jerry on the front page of sports. Jerry went into and out of the bookmaking business in just 37 days; the final day that wiped him out, the paper said, was “a black Sunday”.

In the long run, though, the sports books make out — it’s just not quite so publicized. Before the Giants’ upset win over the Patriots, the books hadn’t had a losing Super Bowl since the 49ers’ rout of the Chargers. A line shift happened last year, too: The Seahawks were favored by 2.5 points, but so much money came in on Denver the Broncos were favored by 2.5 by the time the game started. A record $119.4m was gambled legally, almost $40m more than 10 years earlier. The Seahawks routed the Broncos, and Nevada casinos won $19.7m — or about eight times what they lost during their worst Super Bowl on record in 2008. Even Week 9 in 2012 came in a season where sportsbooks made a killing: 61% of underdogs covered that season. The public tends to bet favorites.

Bettors had about three winning Sundays in the 2014 NFL season, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. It’s not just the pros. After gamblers won big on Oregon in the first College Football Playoff semifinal, the books “more than made up any losses” when Ohio State upset Alabama. In the first three months of football season, gamblers wagered more than $1.1bn. Casinos won $82m.

Of course, casinos have a vested interest in playing up times when they house didn’t win. In that 2009 Times article, LVH’s Kornegay was happy to mention paying out a $3,000 parlay to a 65-year-old grandmother, but didn’t reveal his sports book’s profit the following three weeks of the NFL season. They were simply “some good Sundays.” He even told the Times in 2008 that the Giants’ upset win “was a good day for Vegas.”

Sports books are a small part of a Nevada casino. In 2014, the sportsbook made up just 7% of casino revenues of casino revenues for an average small Vegas strip casino; for large casinos, the number was just 2.2%. In general, slot revenuealways outpaces the revenues of all other games (tables, sportsbooks, bingo, keno and others) combined. A sportsbook is merely a small part of a casino’s gambling operation. The people who manage them tend to talk about bad days in grave terms, which is understandable: Too many bad days and they could be out of a job. Stories about days where punters got one over on the bookmakers are fun, but often they read like advertisements to gamblers that they can get one over on Vegas.

They can’t. A day or two of big losses won’t hit the casino bottom line hard. They can survive a bad day at the sportsbook. They really struggle when people gamble less — that’s what hit Nevada’s casino industry hard during and after the 2008 financial crisis. Visitors to Las Vegas are still gambling less, according to UNLV Center for Gaming Research director David Schwartz, which is why the industry is diversifying into non-gaming attractions. The debt casinos owe is not to gamblers but banks. Caesars Entertainment is $23bn in debt and bankrupt not because of bad days at the sportsbook, but because Apollo Global Management and Texas Pacific Group took the company private with a leveraged buyout around the time of the financial crisis.

So if the Patriots do win big on Sunday and a lot of gamblers go home happy, don’t feel too bad for the sports books: They made a lot of money on football bets this season — and they will again next year, too. For bettors, most days are Black Sunday.

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