Will Levis's bizarre prop bet odds manipulation on Reddit is the new Meme Stock
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Sportsbooks are typically thought of as all-knowing monoliths. If anyone out there really has “the script” it’s the fine folks running things in Las Vegas. Bettors spend all season trying their best to come up with algorithms that can beat the best handicappers in the world and are lucky if they win 52 percent of the time.
Except when it comes to draft season.
Oddsmakers need information in order to set accurate lines, which makes the run up to the NBA and NFL drafts nightmarish. The playing field is level for a change. Bettors have equal footing, if not the upper-hand, when it comes to figuring out which players are being targeted by which teams.
Convince enough people that the Carolina Panthers are going to take quarterback Will Levis with the No. 1 overall pick on Thursday and the sportsbooks have no choice but to respond — no matter how absurd the origins of the information is.
In other words: Prop market manipulation.
Levis’ odds popped off on Tuesday out of seemingly nowhere. His odds to go No. 1 overall vaulted from +4000 (bet $100 to win $4,000) to +400 (bet $100 to win $400) in just two hours. All because of a random Reddit post from an account created days ago with no history of getting this stuff correct.
This wasn’t Adam Schefter or Ian Rapoport dropping a nugget in an AMA. This was u/SaleAgreeable2834 posting that Levis was “telling friends and family Carolina will in fact take him”.
“If you think this post moved a line from 4000 to 400 you probably shouldn’t be gambling,” u/SaleAgreeable2834 commented after the post blew up.
Au contraire. As wagers started to flood in on Levis, books had no choice but to continue improving the QB’s odds until bettors were no longer satisfied with the line.
“Given the nature of the draft, we drastically cut the price based on this action and eventually came to a price where the bets stopped,” a DraftKings spokesperson told ESPN’s David Purdum. “We are still seeing some small bets trickle through at the current price, but the speculation is all the action was off the back of a Reddit post.”
If any of this is starting to remind you of the whole Reddit GameStop stock saga, well you’re not far off.
What we have here is an unverified, random scoop that bettors wanted to believe in so badly they actually moved the markets. Much like GameStop, if bettors want to cash out at the top, there are services like PropSwap that will let them sell their wagers to buyers looking to jump on Levis’ previous odds as a long-shot. Or they can ride “Levis to the Moon!!” and see if he’ll actually go No. 1 overall (again, there’s no indication he will). Meme Props might not exactly be the new Meme Stocks, though the logic is rather similar. Hype something up until it becomes reality.
And much like Meme Stocks, there’s more than one way to make money off all the action. By moving Levis’ line, bettors had access to improved odds for Bryce Young — the true favorite for No. 1 pick — or they could have grabbed Levis’ draft position over/under at a better price than before the hysteria.
What are sportsbooks supposed to do? Not react? Take the risk on a wildly inflated handle as bets keep coming in? They don’t have much of a choice beyond pulling lines off the board and letting bettors take their business elsewhere.
“[The draft is] the only event where the bettors have more information,” SuperBook’s Jay Kornegay told Action Network’s Darren Rovell.
Sometimes you don’t need any real information at all.
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