Although this Winter Olympics will likely end up being the most bet on Games, the Olympics are generally a small deal in the North American sports betting sector when compared to other spectacles. Events like the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby far surpass the Olympics in terms of the amount wagered by U.S. sports gamblers. Strode believes that this is due in part to some of the niche sports that take place in the Winter Games.
“When you look at the winter games we’re dealing with a handful of sports that we all recognize and know, but the majority of sports we have no idea what we’re watching other than we see it every four years,” he remarked. “It’s not surprising that we’re not necessarily seeing folks put money on the outcome of these sports that they aren’t very familiar with or don’t understand.”
Strode says that sports bettors for the most part are intense sports fans, so they enjoy relying on intuition, heart and feeling like experts when they place their bets. As a result, there is a lot more action on sports that are more commonplace in the U.S., like hockey.
“Ice hockey is the sport that is bet on the most in the Winter Olympics,” said Strode. “We recognize the players on the roster because they’re NHL or PWHL players.”
The biggest betting action this year was on hockey, familiar to most Americans, curling, a relatively easy to understand “bar game” similar to darts and medal counts, an outcome-based bet that is easy for gamblers to understand.
In a similar pattern of behavior, Strode found that U.S. bettors are most likely to bet on Team USA. This is also due to the familiarity with the athletes but may also be a display of national pride.
“Sports fans aren’t logical, we bet with our hearts. We won’t bet against our team, so certainly we wouldn’t bet against our country,” he said. “It makes sense that people are betting for their home country, even if they don’t have all of the information or depth of knowledge about a specific sport.”
The same way bettors are drawn to the familiar, they tend to avoid the unfamiliar or subjectively judged. There were far fewer bets placed on judged events like figure skating, freestyle skiing and slopestyle snowboarding, as well as on niche events like luge, skeleton and the biathlon.
