Pennsylvania, Nevada and Illinois sportsbooks score big in Super Bowl

The Nevada Gaming Control Board released figures on Tuesday that showed $136.1 million was wagered in the state on Super Bowl LV that featured the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, marking the fourth-best win for the state's books in the last 10 years.

The sportsbooks ended up holding 9.2% of the money wagered for a "win" of $12,574,125, KTNV reports.

According to the gaming control board, Nevada is home to 184 sportsbooks and several were still able to have guests enjoy the game under COVID-19 restrictions.

As for Pennsylvania, the state's board preliminary figures show $53.6 million was wagered on Sunday's Super Bowl through retail and online sportsbooks, which represents a 74% increase over wagers placed on the game last year.

After payouts, revenue is expected to be $9.4 million following a negative revenue amount from 2020 Super Bowl wagering, the Reading Eagle reports.

This was the third year in which legal sports wagering was available in Pennsylvania for the Super Bowl, but just the second in which online wagering options were available. This year, patrons could choose to place Super Bowl wagers at 15 retail locations and through 12 online wagering sites. Those numbers last year were 12 and eight respectively.

The board also reported that there were 320,000 unique users that logged onto online sports wagering sites in Pennsylvania on Super Bowl Sunday based on data it obtained from geolocation technology service GeoComply.

Figures from last year’s Super Bowl Sunday were 200,000 unique visitors to Pennsylvania regulated sports wagering websites. These figures do not include customers who were visiting and wagering at any of the retail sports wagering locations in the Commonwealth.

Finally, in Illinois, taking their first chance to bet legally on the Super Bowl, football fans laid down $46 million in wagers, an amount called “historically the largest amount ever in Illinois.”

According to figures released Monday by the State Gaming Board, the total handle was $45,610,513 — with $42,756,647 of those bets being made online. The state’s cut of that is $1,148,890 in tax revenue.

“That number, that 1.1 could go up,” said Joe Miller, the board’s policy director. “There’s still some outstanding wagers still out there. So yeah, though, these are all preliminary numbers, just raw from the sportsbooks this morning.”

Miller said the big game was the biggest event since sports betting was legalized in 2019 and launched last year.

“I just don’t know that there was a comparable event since last March when the first sports betting started,” he said. “Maybe some European soccer or something, but I don’t even think that that comes close. I think this is historically the largest amount ever in Illinois, and it’s that way for other jurisdictions as well.”

The money bet on this one event is “nearly 20% to a quarter” of the total amount of all bets made in November, the last month for the state has data, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.