A local Florida TV reporter disrupted the international gambling market on one of the most popular Super Bowl proposals on Friday by a 2 minutes 16 seconds video he posted on Twitter.
Zach Maskavich, a multimedia journalist for Orlando’s WESH Channel 2, was working from his car in the parking lot of Hillsborough Community College opposite Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, the site of Super Bowl LV, when he heard rehearsal for the national anthem begin.
This is the first Super Bowl that Maskavich, 31, has covered, and all week his friends have been asking him to keep an eye out for inside info on everything from what color Gatorade the teams were using, to tidbits about it. the pregame and music performances during half time. So when performers Jazmine Sullivan and Eric Church began their rehearsal performance of the national anthem, Maskavich pulled out his phone and made a video of himself showing how long the rendition would take.
National anthem length betting during the Super Bowl has long been one of the most popular novelty bets on international sportsbooks. Bettors and oddsmakers scour the internet looking for past performances for clues. State regulators don’t allow US sportsbooks to offer the bet due to fears of corruption, but it hasn’t stopped gamblers – at home and abroad – from trying to figure out how long the national anthem will last each year.
The over / under on Sullivan and Church’s duet was about two minutes earlier on Friday, but that was about to change. Maskavich tweeted his video at 6:30 p.m. ET, showing that the rehearsal had lasted 2 minutes and 16 seconds. In Australia, bookmaker PointsBet reported that there was a flurry of action about the over-show shortly after posting the video, which caused them to stop betting on the prop.
“I just thought it was quite funny,” Maskavich told ESPN on Saturday. “Some of the responses were hilarious; some people are really angry.”
Multiple sportsbooks reported that they had made a lot of money from the hours before Maskavich posted his video. Pinnacle Sports, an online sportsbook based in Curacao, had an over / under 1:58, with a -110 chance of betting on both sides. At around 3:30 pm, Pinnacle started to receive enough bets to push the price up to -1,500 before the sportsbook stopped betting.
Betonline.ag, a Panama-based online sportsbook, said it received about two dozen limit bets of $ 250 for three minutes on Friday around 3 p.m.
“There is a leak in the national anthem almost every year and we see a wave of one-sided action a few days before the game,” Dave Mason, Betonline’s brand manager, told ESPN on Saturday. Yesterday, that wave of action was more suspicious than previous years. Within seconds, we took about two dozen maximum bets from sharper accounts. They kept going from 2:00 to 2:10. At that point, we knew there was something bad. strong information out there somewhere, so we decided to narrow the odds. “
Living in Florida with no legal sportsbook options, Maskavich said he’s not much of a gambler, but he knew people were interested in the national anthem.
“I felt like it would gain some traction in the run-up to the Super Bowl, and people who like prop bets,” Maskavich said Saturday morning. ‘But I didn’t think it would explode like that. People are contacting me wondering if Vegas paid me for it and all the other crazy things. ‘
This isn’t the first time that Maskavich has gone viral. In 2018, while playing a high school game, a video in which he is hit by a football made it to the SportsCenter “Not Top 10”. Still, he has been withdrawn because of the reactions he got on Twitter for his national anthem. Some called him a “man of the people” because he passed on the information; others were furious because they thought he was spoiling the action and made the books stop betting. One person said they would not rest until he was fired.
However, Maskavich’s favorite reactions hinted at his unfortunate clash with the football. ‘Quarterback should have thrown it harder,’ wrote a responder who retweeted the video.