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2011 Final Statewide Sports Book Numbers

As a whole, Nevada sports books won $140 million (4,8% hold), a 6.8% decrease from 2010 with most of it due to football (-21.5%), baseball (-13.9%) and believe it or not, parlay cards (-7.35%) were also higher. The football and parlay card decreases this year has more to do with the public getting it handed to them in 2010’s NFL season while having several more stellar weeks in 2011, including handing the sports books a miniscule win in the Super Bowl with the Packers winning.

“We’ve been accustomed to expect about three to four huge weeks out of the 17 annually during the pro football season and last season we had only one,” said Bert Osborne of the South Point who also noted that college football was consistently strong for the first seven weeks of action.

The sports books started out doing quite well in baseball with several teams like the Pirates and Royals playing competitive ball in the early going, much to the dismay of the bettors. But the bettors got their revenge in late August and September when four-team parlays were regularly hitting with the Rays, Phillies, Brewers and Cardinals.

And then the big bomb hit when the Cardinals paid out at some sports books with 250/1 odds to win the pennant and 500/1 to win the World Series.

It’s always a big win for the sports books when a favorite like Yankees win the World Series. Even though they may have the most tickets written on them, or second most -- Cubbies usually lead that category, they have so much volume from the season to overcome payouts of 10/1 or less.

Most sports books build in an average theoretic hold in their futures at around 37%. No matter how high you make the hold percentage, 500/1 is going to do some damage.

The NGCB lists one of the categories as “Other,” which includes combined revenues of the NHL, Soccer, Boxing, Golf and NASCAR. That category dropped 24% below 2010 with much of that due to the World Cup being missed. Because of the Euro Cup this summer we should see a boost in revenues for this category in 2012.

It’s well understood that $140 million is a lot of cash, but to put the sports book’s contributions to the casino in perspective, consider that Nevada casinos had $10.7 billion in revenues. It may be the most exciting place to be in every casino, but it’s got a long ways to go before it can match penny slots.