How many mail-in winning tickets does a typical Vegas sportsbook receive and redeem per week, and how many hours does the book spend processing those tickets for payment (receiving, processing, cutting checks, mailing back, etc.)? How does this info compare to the weeks after a Super Bowl game?
[Editor’s Note: Question of the Day has a new contributing expert, who answered this question. Naturally, it took a sportsbook employee — in this case, a director — to give an accurate response and we’re all very lucky to welcome Chris Andrews to the ranks of Las Vegas Advisor contributors and Huntington Press authors.
Chris began his “official” career in the sports betting industry as a ticket writer at the Stardust in 1979, during the Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal era. He moved up a notch when he went to work for Michael Gaughan at the Barbary Coast a year later, then got a big promotion a year after that as the director of the sportsbook at the Cal Neva in Reno. After subsequently booking sports at the Golden Nugget, Leroy’s, and William Hill, Chris went back to work for Michael Gaughan as the director of the sports book at South Point.
But his “unofficial” career in sports betting began when he was just a kid in Pittsburgh. His uncle, Jack Franzi, is a legend among bookmakers and wiseguys and you can read all about the adventures of Uncle Jack, Chris, and a cast of a thousand bookies and bettors in our upcoming title, Then One Day, Chris’ sports-betting memoir.
We’re excited to have him on board and we hope you’ll appreciate the inside look at sports betting, which, when (not if) it’s legalized, we believe will make the poker explosion look like a little firecracker by comparison.]
During a typical week, we get about 100 or so “mail pays.” We gang them up and process them once a week. They take about an hour to process on our part in the sports book, maybe a little less.
Then they go in a batch to accounting. The turnaround there is fairly quick. The tickets spend about the same amount of processing time, an hour or less, in accounting and are typically sent out in the next day’s mail.
So you can see that we process mail pays fairly efficiently and get very few complaints.
Of course, the NCAA tournament, the World Series, the NBA Finals, and bowl season increase the amount of tickets we receive from out-of-towners—by about two to three times, for 200-300 mail pays per week in the weeks following those events.
But the Super Bowl is still king in this regard, with an average of 400 mail pays per week for many weeks. We not only have tons of action on the game itself, but the futures bets are up for a year, so we have to pay those winners too.
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Randall Ward
Apr-05-2018
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