Online betting on the Super Bowl has surged this year, and many bettors have been waiting to start betting, according to a company that tracks the whereabouts of online gamblers.
Data released Monday by GeoComply showed the number of inspections completed over the weekend was up more than 22% compared to last year.
The company has processed just over 122 million checks this year in 28 of the 29 states that offer online sports betting, excluding Florida.
The company ensures that players are where they say they are before allowing their online bets. This process is known as geolocation and is the basis of online betting in the United States.
The data records the number of times the company was called to verify a customer’s whereabouts. This is considered a good indicator of at least a minimum level of sports betting activity, more than 80% of which is done online in the United States.
“The ongoing transition to the legal market set the stage for a historic first Super Bowl in Las Vegas, and the record results we saw did not disappoint,” said Anna Sainsbury, CEO and co-founder of Vancouver, Canada-based GeoComply. .
The Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers 25-22 on Sunday night to win their second straight NFL title.
States require a player to be physically within their borders in order to place online bets. Geolocation technology uses a combination of cell phone data, software, hardware and databases to determine where the phone or laptop attempting to place a bet actually is at that moment.
While it is true that customers can log in and confirm their location without placing a bet, many players also place more than one bet after one login.
Over Super Bowl weekend, GeoComply registered a total of 8.5 million active accounts, up 15% from last year’s Super Bowl.
In the two weeks leading up to the big game, the company saw more than 1.77 million new users sign up for legal online betting accounts.
Since the start of the 2023-24 NFL season, customers have added more than 13.7 million new accounts, up 28% from last season.
And, as usual, many people waited until the last moment to place their bets. The company said it saw a spike in traffic minutes before the event began, amounting to nearly 15,000 transactions per second. This was the highest level ever recorded by GeoComply’s systems, nearly doubling last year’s peak.
The game going into overtime for only the second time has hit many bookmakers hard, offering high odds that it won’t happen. And many bets were on the Chiefs to win, although the 49ers entered the game as slight favorites.
Bookmakers suffered multimillion-dollar losses because the game would go into overtime, a popular bet that had a roughly 9-to-1 odds, said Craig Mucklow, vice president of trading at Caesars Sportsbook. He said “Caesar” only lost seven figures on an overtime bet, with the average bet on it being $16.
Caesars did a better job with player props, many of which never materialized. This includes bets on whether big names like Travis Kelce, Isaiah Pacheco, Deebo Samuel or Brandon Aiyuk would score a touchdown, which none of them did.
“It was a bad Super Bowl for the sportsbook,” said Tristan Davis, senior trader at BetMGM. “Many bettors had Chiefs wins and overs on popular players,” referring to bets on the statistical performance of individual players.
FanDuel, the official odds provider of the Associated Press, said 14 million bets were taken for a total of $307 million, with both bets setting records. These bets came from 2.5 million FanDuel customers.
DraftKings will not release its Super Bowl performance data on Monday.
Several sportsbooks have also released odds for next year’s Super Bowl winner, with the 49ers slightly ahead of the Chiefs.