Vegas Odds On Coin Toss
With kickoff of the Super Bowl just minutes away, the scene inside the backroom of the Las Vegas sportsbook is intense.
Betting on that coin toss is still a somewhat new thing, however. Since it has become available it has quickly turned into one of the more popular and interesting Super Bowl props. As the only true 50-50 proposition you can find, sportsbooks also charge a lot less juice on the coin toss. For example, I’ve seen the Super Bowl coin toss vig ranging anywhere from -101 to -105. In layman’s terms, it takes a $101 bet to pay out $100 at -101, while a bettor needs to. There are plenty of outside-the-box Super Bowl betting props to keep you entertained during - and after - the big game. Here are the best and most bizarre for 2021, from the coin toss to the. Hard Rock in Atlantic City is offering even odds +100 on both sides of the coin toss, making it the only bet (outside of the free odds bet in craps) that will have no house advantage. But the difference is in the juice. For the coin toss the juice (or vig) is usually -110 or -105. For this wager it is +180 for a field goal compared to -240 for the first score being a touchdown.
Bookmakers stare at their computers, and an executive paces back and forth, already sweating through his Sunday suit. Bets are pouring in; millions of dollars are at stake. It's nonstop action.
Suddenly, the room goes silent and everyone stops to look up at the TVs. Referees, team captains and the honorary coin-flipper are gathering at midfield. Out in the sportsbook, there's a gasp of anticipation as the coin is tossed into the air. Heads or tails to determine which team gets the ball first -- and who gets to keep the money bet on the coin flip.
The coin turns end over end, bounces on the field and settles on heads. The stressed-out boss quickly asks, 'How'd we do?'
An employee hastily grades the bets, takes a deep breath and replies with trepidation, 'We just lost $38,000. We're stuck 38 dimes, and the game hasn't even started.'
The boss asks another question: 'What the f---?'
The Super Bowl coin flip may be the greatest two seconds in sports betting, and the amount of money that changes hands on it is ludicrous. Out of the hundreds of betting options on the Super Bowl, from the color of sports drink dumped on the winning coach to whom the MVP thanks first in his acceptance speech, more money is riding on heads or tails than any of them.
'You put in all this work to put out all these props, come up with cross-sports and everything else,' Dave Sharapan, a longtime Las Vegas bookmaker, said. 'And the coin flip prop is the most-bet-on prop of all the props, every year.'
Heads vs. tails
The Super Bowl coin flip has been on the board at Las Vegas sportsbooks for decades. Heads or tails, which team will win the toss and will that team decide to take the ball, play defense or defer to the second half -- you can bet on all of it. And a lot of people do, despite being charged upward of 5 cents on the dollar in vigorish on what is essentially a 50-50 proposition. (This study from Stanford University used angular momentum vector to prove that a coin flipped and caught in the hand is biased to landing the same way it began. But the Super Bowl coin lands on the ground and often bounces, and besides, what does Stanford know, anyway?)
Vince Bohbot, on the other hand, knows everything about the actual coin used for the Super Bowl. Bohbot is an executive vice president at The Highland Mint in Melbourne, Florida. For the past 28 Super Bowls, The Highland Mint has made the coin for the opening toss.
In the 1990s, the coins were made of pure silver. Now, with the price of silver spiking, the coins feature silver plating and 24-carat gold selective plating. The coins are similar in size to a silver dollar. They weigh about an ounce and have a diameter of 33 millimeters.
This year's coin features ocean waves running horizontally in between the team logos of the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers on one side. The Super Bowl LV logo, with the Lombardi trophy between the L and V, is on the other side. Traditionally, the side with the Lombardi trophy is designated heads. Both sides weigh practically the same, according to Bohbot.
'It's so close; there might be a minute difference on one side or the other. It depends on the design every year,' Bohbot told ESPN. 'It doesn't appear to have affected where the coin is landing each year.'
Massive interest in flip of a coin
Betting on the coin flip is silly, of course, and the size of most wagers reflects that. Most, but not all.
As wild as it sounds, five-figure bets on the coin flip are practically a regular occurrence. And there have been even bigger.
Art Manteris, who has spent more than 40 years running Las Vegas sportsbooks, remembers one of his high rollers at the old Hilton betting $100,000 on the coin flip, only to come back just hours later to bet the other side for $200,000.
'Said he changed his mind,' Manteris, now a vice president at Station Casinos, recalled. 'The change worked for him that day.'
Get it? Change. Bookmaker humor is just the best.
The bet number on the coin-flip prop is one of the first that tellers who work the betting windows for the Super Bowl memorize. They need the number to enter the bet into the computer system, something they do repeatedly on the coin flip. The coin-flip bettor rarely knows the bet number, Sharapan says.
In his time working the betting windows on Super Bowl Sunday, Sharapan has heard all types of theories from coin-flip bettors, from the tails side allegedly being heavier, to turf surfaces producing more heads than grass because of the extra bounce. Nothing, though, is cited as the reason behind a coin-flip bet more than 'tails never fails.'
'We used to make a line between me and the guy or girl next to me at the counter on how many times we would hear 'tails never fails' during a shift,' Sharapan said. 'We'd keep a tally sheet behind the counter to keep track. We would set the line at 18.5. I'd always go over.'
To irritate his coworkers and win his bet, Sharapan would ask customers who bet the coin flip if they'd ever heard of that old saying about tails. Inevitably, the bettor would blurt out, 'tails never fails.'
By the way, tails sometimes fails. In the 54 Super Bowls, the coin toss has landed heads 25 times.
Coin-flip betting isn't just an American debacle, by the way. It's popular overseas, too.
'It's always been a popular prop bet, be it in the U.S. or abroad,' said Andrew Mannino, a senior analyst for PointsBet, a longtime Australian bookmaker who joined the American market in recent years.
Bookmakers don't know exactly what drives the betting interest on the coin flip, and they don't really care. It's nice being able to charge a 5-cent vig on a 50-50 bet, after all.
Last year, more money -- a few hundred thousand dollars -- was bet on the coin flip than any other prop wager at William Hill U.S. books. With the company operating in several more states this year, coin-flip betting is expected to increase significantly this year.
'Last year, we were needing 'tails never fails' and we got the result we wanted,' said Adam Pullen, assistant director of trading for William Hill U.S.
FanDuel wasn't as fortunate last year and paid out $200,000 on bets on tails before the game even kicked off. There was plenty of money on heads, of course, just not as much as was riding with tails, and the $200,000 payout gives you an idea of just how much is being bet on a flip of a coin.
'I'm startled every year by the dollars,' Nick Bogdanovich, director of trading for William Hill U.S., said. 'They just pound it. I'm utterly amazed every year.'
A value bet is a bet where the probability of a given outcome is greater than the bookmakers odds reflect. Simply put, when value betting you will be placing bets that have a larger chance of winning than implied by the bookmakers odds. This means you will have an edge over the bookmaker in the long run.
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Some capital to invest (you can start with as little as a few hundred euros).
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Check out the full manual to learn the interface of ValueBetting and to get more in-depth explanations.
When tossing a coin there can only be two outcomes; heads or tails. We know that the chances of the coin to land on either heads or tails are 50% each. This equals to an odds of 2.00 for either outcome.
To calculate odds we use this formula: Odds = 1/probability in decimals. In this case, this is 1/0.5= 2.00
Now imagine you were offered odds of 2.10 on Heads and odds of 2.00 on Tails from two different bookmakers. What would you bet on?
Since the actual probability of the two outcomes is the same you should, of course, bet on the higher odds.
The odds of 2.10 is higher than what the underlying probability suggests, creating a value bet. The bigger the difference, the more profitable the value bet will be.
Finding value when sports betting is not as easy as detecting value in a coin toss. In sports, we cannot know the exact probability for a given match.
However, some bookmakers have proven that they are extremely good at determining odds that reflects the actual probability of an outcome. These are often referred to as “sharp” bookmakers, or “sharps”. Some sharps are better than others on certain sports as well. By evaluating these sharp bookmaker’s odds, taking betting bias and market efficiency into account, our servers can determine the “true odds” for any given match. This means that we also know when other bookmakers odds are off and where a positive expected value occurs.
Value betting situations in sports can occur when new information enters the market. For instance, if the line-up changes or if a key player gets injured. The sharp bookmakers automatically adjust the odds for that game according to this new information.
Other bookmakers will follow, but it could take minutes or even hours before they adjust their odds according to the market changes. These bookmakers will still show odds that doesn’t reflect the actual probability of the outcome.
Some bookmakers also set higher odds because of market reasons, or well-known betting biases like customers overvaluing long shots and winning streaks.
As a result of this, there will always be inconsistencies in the odds offered by the bookmakers. This means there will always be plenty of value betting situations for you to profit from.
In our earlier example with the coin toss, the expected value is 5%. It’s calculated as:
(Odds / true odds) -1
(2.10 / 2.0) – 1 = 0.05
Note that this is a trivial example, and our service also takes into account:
- The margin of the bookmaker, also known as the “juice”.
- Betting bias. Most bookmakers don’t balance their odds perfectly, they adjust their odds to players betting bias and the market.
- Market efficiency. A newly open market can offer a lot of value, but the true odds are also more unreliable.
- A proven staking strategy, the Kelly criterion.
- Several sources for the probabilities (true odds), that are proven over time to be profitable.
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It’s important to see value betting as a long term way to profit where the number of bets plays an important role. It’s all about volume. You need to place as many bets as your time and bankroll allow. The number of bets required to reach statistical significance is much higher than what most people think intuitively. You will have to place a couple of thousand bets before you will know with a great deal of certainty.
Variance will have a large impact on your results if you have a small sample size of bets. But with a large number of value bets, your results will always move towards it’s expected value over time. Learn all about expected value and variance.
Vegas Odds On President
You have to be prepared for downswings since you only bet on a single odds. Meaning you can lose since you do not cover all the possible outcomes (like you do when arbitrage betting). But you will profit in the long run.
Value betting differs in a number of ways compared to sports arbitrage betting. Check out the differences between value betting and arbitrage betting.
Want to learn more about value betting?
Vegas Odds On Coin Toss
Get a head start by reading our best tips for value betting beginners. Remember, when value betting you have the upper hand on the bookmaker. But you have to build confidence in the value betting process and put trust in making money long term.