I was thinking this morning what if an average person somehow knew the Superbowl Giant’s-Patriots score ahead of time. What is the maximum amount of betting leverage an average person could bring to the table in order to walk away with the largest amount of money possible?
Let’s say you’re an average guy living an average life. One week before the Superbowl you are somehow mystically bestowed with absolute knowledge of the final score. There is no practical way you can prove the validity of this information to anyone else prior to the game. It’s your private information.
Let’s say you make 75,000 a year being a middle manager. You have a 5,000 thousand in the bank and 10,000 in an IRA, 40,000 in available credit on your various credit cards, and you have good credit. Your home is worth 300,000, and you owe 250,000 on it. You’re an average guy, in an average life.
Now … you are not a sports betting expert or even that enamored or football, and the office football pool is as much as you ever do. How do you maximize the profit potential of this information? You have 7 days before the game day.
Where do you go? What do you do? Can you make millions with this info given your limited resources?
Just the final score? You’d probably do better if you had other statistics. I bet the return for knowing the exact passing and rushing yardage, or exactly how many turnovers, or something silly like that would exceed the return from knowing the final score. If you know when the scores are, you may be better waiting until the winning team is at its worst position to make the bet.
Your return would depend on what the final score is. 14-17 is a pretty common final score for football. You’d likely get a much higher return if the final score ended up something like 5-22, since that requires a safety and either a 2-point conversion (and why would the team in the lead bother if the other team hadn’t even gotten a touchdown), 2 missed extra points, or 1missed extra point and another safety.
Totalling up the money, you’ve got a bit over $100K to bet, assuming you can get a HELOC and cash out your IRA in less than a week. I’m sure that you could get to a million with that (10-1 isn’t really that long), but I’m not sure how much more. I’m guessing you’d go to Vegas, unless you live in a country that has more permissive sports gambling laws.
I’d have to do some research on how casinos and the government track large amounts of cash. Mortgaging everything you own and putting it all on the Super Bowl would raise some eyebrows. Probably not that you knew the outcome because you can’t prove that, but they’d probably start some investigations into point shaving and other types of corruption.
I think prop bets would be very profitable for you. If you saw the game choose some crazy obscure prop bet that pays huge odds and go for it. There might be a “Giants win by exactly 3 points” prop bet that would pay well.
I also don’ t know if you can parlay these bets but that’s another option. “Giants win + Wes Welker >10 catches + Eli as Super Bowl MVP + Under” probably payed off at some rather nice odds.
So basically mortgage your house as many times over as you can (though I don’t know if you can do that in a week’s time) take out as many credit card offers as humanly possible, take out as many cash advances, get loans from friends and family, etc. Make lots of bets, make sure to put the most money on the highest odds bets, spread out some losing bets too for cover, spread between multiple casinos (though they’re on the same system usually) and locations.