Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Bookmaker edgy about title game
Somewhere out there — the best guess would be in Alabama — there are 14 anxious gamblers with more than just school pride riding on Auburn winning the national championship.
They’ve got the Tigers at 1,000-1 odds to win the national title — and they’re only one victory in the BCS title game from collecting a windfall.
That has the bookmaker who sold the tickets a bit nervous, but maybe not as much as you might think. In the sports betting business, it’s not just the customers who take all the risks.
“Being in the gambling world, every once in a while you’re going to get in situations that might not be favorable for your property,” said Jay Kornegay, who runs the sports book at the LVH hotel in Las Vegas. “This is one of them.”
Kornegay says all of the bets are relatively small, though they do add up when multiplied by 1,000. They were taken during the spring when Auburn had a new coach, was coming off a 3-9 record and the general consensus was that there were five or six teams in the SEC alone that were better than the Tigers.
It didn’t take long for Auburn supporters to notice, and put a few bucks on their team just for the sport of it.
“We’re a player-friendly book and are very aggressive with our futures odds,” Kornegay said. “I wish we had opened them at 100- 1, but we didn’t.”
There’s no reason to feel sorry for the bookmakers at LVH. They can tinker enough with the lines on the title game to draw money on Florida State and avoid taking too much of a bath.
“It’s not like we’re going to have to raise the price of our grilled cheese sandwiches,” Kornegay said. “Certainly we’re rooting for the Seminoles at this point, but we have a month to adjust our money lines to make it a softer blow.”