Sports betting on this year’s Super Bowl spiked to massive levels online, especially within minutes of kickoff. Many gamblers waited to place real-time wagers on the championship matchup.
Data firm GeoComply, which verifies user locations, logged over 122 million verification checks over the weekend. That exceeded 2022 by more than 22%.
Millions opened accounts for legal betting apps in preparation. GeoComply saw over 8.5 million active users during Super Bowl weekend itself, a 15% year-over-year surge from 2022.
GeoComply processes skyrocketed up to nearly 15,000 per second before kickoff – an all-time traffic peak, nearly double last year’s totals. The Kansas City victory capped a historic weekend for mobile sports wagering.
“The continued transition to the legal market set the stage for a historic first Super Bowl in Las Vegas, and the record-breaking results we saw did not disappoint,” GeoComply CEO Anna Sainsbury said.
The game heading to overtime also slammed sportsbooks, who’d offered odds against OT occurring. “It was a bad Super Bowl for the sportsbook,” Tristan Davis, a senior trader at BetMGM, told the Associated Press.
Caesars Sportsbook alone lost seven figures on the roughly 9-1 overtime prop bets, Vice President of Trading Craig Mucklow told the outlet.
Bets averaged just $16, but the surprise extra period multiplied potential payouts.
Player proposition bets like Travis Kelce, Isiah Pacheco, Deebo Samuel, or Brandon Aiyuk scoring touchdowns also largely disappointed, but props that didn’t hit still benefited the sportsbooks.
One operator saw 14 million total wagers amounting to $307 million, shattering their previous highs. And multiple sportsbooks quickly rolled out 2024 Super Bowl odds shortly after the game.
The surge illustrates mainstream embrace of mobile sports betting.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.