hat Rhonda Hunt knows about football could fit into a thimble.
“I don’t know anything about it, to tell you the truth,” said Hunt, credit manager for Tejas Industries in Amarillo. “I try to watch a little with my husband, and he tries to explain it to me. There’s too many rules. I don’t even know who’s playing in the Super Bowl.”
So today is just the first day of the new month? There’s nothing Super about it and Hunt just ignored all talk, any office involvement last week with Super Bowl XLIII? Right.
“It is the Super Bowl,” she said. “It’s different than any other game. A lot are involved in it. It’s kind of a group thing.”
That means when it comes to the time-honored office pool, for the picking of the squares, Hunt is like millions across the country. Casual football fan or no fan at all, she’s all in.
“Because that’s where the money is,” she said.
No event - not the Kentucky Derby or the NCAA basketball tournament - generates the massive amount of wagering like a Super Bowl. It’s like a moth to flame.
For each of the last five Super Bowls, more than $90 million has been wagered in Las Vegas alone, according to sportsbetting.com. Six years ago, that figure was $70 million. Las Vegas consultants believe what is wagered in their city legally is just 1 percent of the entire action.
Estimates are that $10 billion - that’s with a ‘b’ - will be wagered on today’s game. It’s not just the point spread between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers, but more than 300 proposition bets surround the game, too. There are opportunities to win - or more likely, lose - hundreds of times during the game.
A huge bulk of the wagers come from online gambling sites where just one site last year for New England-New York averaged 700 bets a minute in the nine hours before kickoff.
The rest comes from wagers between individuals and the office pools, the games of chance that seem to draw everyone from the hard-core fantasy-league player to those who may not know who’s playing, but know a fun thing when they hear it. There’s myriad Web sites on how to set up grids for “pick the score” squares.
“We do the grid and I guarantee you, we’ll get everyone to participate,” said Sam Spradlin, chief financial officer for Tejas Industries. “We’ll get 100 percent participation. People will not miss out on a chance.
“We’ll get wives to play. Guys will pick for their wives. You don’t have to know anything about the game or teams. People jump on it like lottery tickets.”
In a 2008 survey of office betting pools, vault.com, a jobs-oriented Web site, found 58 percent of office workers have participated at least once in a betting pool, and that 77 percent of their co-workers did.
In the survey, the Super Bowl edged out the NCAA basketball tournament as the most popular event. Only 9 percent surveyed said their office had a policy against such pools.
In essence, the office pool is like buying a raffle ticket to win a prize. Throw down a few bucks and hope the football gods smile. If it helps with office morale, so much the better. The vault.com survey said 72 percent of participants said “harmless fun” was the top motivation.
“We charge a couple of bucks a square with 49 to 50 squares, and so maybe the winner of each quarter gets $25,” Spradlin said. “There might be $100 in the whole thing. We keep it so it’s not too crazy. It ends up being basically coffee money.”
But a huge segment do get a little crazy. Those who bet on football each week of the season online or with a bookmaker certainly aren’t going to simply watch the Super Bowl.
“The only betting I did was on football, so the Super Bowl was like going for broke,” said Scott, 34, an Amarillo blue-collar worker who asked that his last name be withheld. “It was definitely the adrenaline rush. You got a financial interest in it. It’s like someone watching the stock market.”
Scott bet for years until he quit after last season. He was worried he could drift into being a problem gambler if he didn’t stop. So he did. Before this year, he would bet $125 on a weekend of games.
For the Super Bowl, his average was around $300. One game he bet $500.
Last year, he bet the point spread, the over/under and the coin toss with a bookie. And for the Super Bowl, unlike any other event, he had friends wanting to get into some action.
“I’d get people calling me because they knew I had a bookie and say, ‘Hey, can you get me $300 or $100 on so-and-so,’ ” Scott said. “It was almost like I had my own bookie service. People who’d not normally bet liked to do it a little and make it fun.
“It absolutely sucks-in the one-time bettor. The guy who used to handle the book for me, before he got computerized, he’d get a call from a client who’d say, ‘Hey, my brother wants to put $100 on this team.’ He’d complain about it because how was he going to find Joe’s brother when it’s time to pay?”
Brian, 36, an acquaintance of Scott, bets pro and college regularly.
He won $3,200 two years ago when the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears played. He likely will wager around $300 on most Super Bowls. He has plenty of company.
“There are quite a few who do this,” he said. “It’s pretty big around here as a local type deal, definitely.”
For Scott, his gambling participation today will be like most of those at his Super Bowl party - throwing $5 to $10 into a pot.
He’s gone from the weekly $125 with a bookie to the occasional $5 bet with friends.
“Of all the people I’ve known, and this is probably true just about anywhere, about 50 percent who bet on the Super Bowl are casual bettors, who just do it for the major events,” he said. “The other 50 percent are the guys who are there for every game.”
The innocent $2 office square to the online bookies to the major casinos in Las Vegas. The Super Bowl explodes into a billion-dollar wager industry every year. And that’s a sure bet.
