MGM’s Very Terrible Awful Super Bowl Sunday Results in New York
Patrick Mahomes Handed The Operator A Big Loss
While DraftKings, FanDuel and the Kansas City Chiefs had a lovely Super Bowl Sunday two weeks ago, BetMGM — specifically in New York — did not. MGM’s Super Bowl Sunday losses totaled $4.8 million in the Empire State.
The big game capped a brutal week for BetMGM, which lost over $9.6 million in the seven days culminating with Super Bowl LVIII. Not a good couple of days for 49ers fans and MGM shareholders.
The total weekly loss figure for BetMGM crushed the New York State single-operator loss record for one week, set by DraftKings in September 2023 ($3.4 million).
BetMGM’s previous weekly loss high was a mere $1.8 million in April 2023 — thanks to the NCAA Tournament. Roughly half of the losses this time around were due to the Super Bowl, while the other half resulted from a variety of BetMGM’s other sports offerings.
Considering that New York operators generated a collective $12.5 million in revenue on Super Bowl Sunday, it was a disastrous day for BetMGM as competitors DraftKings and FanDuel cleared huge profits.
Also, BetMGM losing $4.8 million on $10.9 million of Super Bowl handle is just about as bad of a ratio as it gets. As numerous Twitter/X users noted when BetMGM’s numbers became public, it’s difficult for an operator to suffer those kinds of losses with that money handle.
What Went Wrong?
While it’s tough to pinpoint exactly what went wrong for BetMGM as compared to other operators to lead to MGM’s Super Bowl Sunday losses, it did not help that a very popular prop bet — the Super Bowl going to overtime — hit when a lot of public money was on that at +900.
Roughly 95% of the public handle was on “yes” for the overtime bet, so you can be sure that BetMGM executives were crushed when Patrick Mahomes led the Chiefs to a game-tying field goal at the end of regulation.
Also, despite the book taking some big individual bets on the San Francisco 49ers to win outright and/or cover the spread, most of the money bet on the big game was on the Chiefs as slight underdogs.
So, the combination of overtime and a Chiefs win led to a betting online disaster for BetMGM. What’s interesting is that the same combination of results should have crushed DraftKings and FanDuel who actually turned big profits on Super Bowl Sunday.
So, maybe it was just some bad luck that BetMGM suffered so much while its competitors cleared millions in profits. Sometimes, that’s just the luck of the draw even for these betting operators that have — in two years — turned New York from a state where online gambling on sports was illegal into a state where operators set a record by collecting $211.5 million in revenue in January 2024.
Non-Football Sports Didn’t Help
About half of BetMGM’s huge losses in the first full week of February 2024 are not directly attributable to MGM’s Super Bowl Sunday losses, meaning they were due to other sports.
Because the New York State Gaming Commission does not release specific handle or revenue numbers by individual sport, we don’t know if there was a particular sport that spearheaded BetMGM’s non-Super Bowl losses.
It’s possible that it was just a rough week for the operator and that things bounced back last week or will improve throughout February as the NBA, NHL and college basketball take prominence with the NFL season over.
On the flip side, that means New York bettors — at least during one week against one operator — were able to take home some serious cash.
Overall, though, the New York market has been great for operators and less good for bettors. Seemingly, on a monthly basis, New York operators are handling astonishing amounts of money on bets and routinely netting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
So, in the long run, Super Bowl week likely won’t make much of a dent in BetMGM’s profits. If there’s another big losing week for BetMGM in the future, however, then it could start to be an issue for the self-proclaimed King of Sportsbooks.
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