For sportsbooks, that’s way ball bounces

Table tennis is second only to UFC in handle

UFC’S fight card Saturday night on ESPN generated the weekend’s largest betting handle at Las Vegas sportsbooks.

But on a weekend that also featured the return of NASCAR, golf and Bundesliga, Russian table tennis was the surprise runaway runner-up in money wagered at William Hill.

“UFC was No. 1, Russian pingpong was No. 2 and the rest were far, far, far below,” said William Hill sportsbook director Nick Bogdanovich, who estimated there was five times as much money bet on table tennis Sunday than on NASCAR, soccer and golf combined.

“It’s just so much bigger than anything else going on on a daily basis,” he said. “Every bookmaker I talk to says the same thing. For whatever reason, it draws a ton of action.”

While William Hill took close to $1 million in bets on Saturday’s UFC event, Bogdanovich said it takes close to $1 million in daily wagers on Russian table tennis.

“There’s 100 matches a day and steady action all day long. By the end of the day, it adds up,” he said. “We didn’t know we’d write that kind of

Bogdanovich also expects books to do more business on that event than they did on Sunday’s skins match in which Rory Mcilroy and Dustin Johnson defeated Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff on a tiebreaker decided by a closest-to-the-pin contest.

“Just because those four names are huge compared to the four names we saw (Sunday),” Bogdanovich said.

NASCAR returns

Compared to the 2019 Darlington 400, Sunday’s race was up 25 percent on futures and 50 percent on matchups at William Hill.

“There were not very many big bets on NASCAR, but there were lots of tickets,” South Point sportsbook director Chris Andrews said.

A William Hill bettor won a $300 wager that paid $2,400 on Kevin Harvick at 8-1 odds to win the Darlington 400.

NASCAR will return to action at Darlington Raceway on Tuesday for the Toyota 200 (Xfinity series) and Wednesday for the Toyota 500 (Cup series).

Kyle Busch is the -135 favorite to win the Toyota 200 after opening at -110. The Las Vegas native is the 6-1 second choice, behind Harvick (+450), to win the Toyota 500.

Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@ reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on Twitter.