The top/bottom set at sports books for one of this weekend’s wild card games took a dramatic plunge earlier this week. The reason? The weather.
On Sunday, the Buffalo Bills, no strangers to cold conditions, are set to host the Pittsburgh Steelers in 40 mph winds. Sports bettors and bookies took notice. Consensus opening odds for total points scored dropped quickly from Sunday to Monday, with the over/under on the Bills game quickly dropping from 43 to as low as 35.5.
“As soon as word gets out that he’s having horrible weather, [the under] He’s just getting hit relentlessly,β said Adam Pullen, assistant director of trading for Caesars Sportsbook. βIt will be interesting to see where the bottom is. Where do the sharps start betting the over?’
At BetMGM, that number was 35.5, 6.5 points lower than the opening number. Christian Cipollini, director of trading for sportsbook BetMGM, said the Buffalo prediction had caused a flurry of betting on the under from 7am. until 11 a.m. ET on Monday. Cipollini said they moved the set quickly, but still struggled to slow down the flow of bets on the under.
“Every time we thought we got to a place where the action was going to end, it just kept going lower,” Cipollini told ESPN.
Kansas City is also expecting severe weather for Saturday’s Chiefs-Dolphins game, but that forecast didn’t have the same impact on the betting line.
“The wind is usually the biggest indicator of changes in this set, more so than in that Chiefs game which will also have some weather,” Cipollini said.
The wind in Buffalo will make passing difficult and can affect the game by βforcing [the teams] to run the ball more, reducing the number of possessions, inaccuracies with kick direction and loss of distance, and then slower reaction time from the defense,β said Ivetta Abramyan, a meteorologist, professor and one of the three co-founders of Bettor Weather. a website that provides data on the effects of weather on games and betting lines.
Weather has always been an important part of the betting game, so much so that punters in the pre-internet days were willing to hire spies on the scene. But as sports betting has spread across the country since 2018, forecasters have seen increased demand for earlier, more accurate forecasts.
“With sports betting going, it just opened the floodgates for more people to be interested in sports weather,” said Kevin Roth, a self-proclaimed “sports meteorologist” at daily fantasy website RotoGrinders.
Games played in extreme weather pose a question for bettors and forecasters alike: Could the weather be an asset?
On January 7, when the Jets played the Patriots, Ben Knott saw Roth’s prediction of “heavy snow in the game and winds gusting over 40 mph” and decided to take a shot. The 21-year-old New York native bet $2.82 on no player reaching 40 receiving yards.
He won $256.62.
“I tried to put about five bucks into it,” he said. “But DraftKings only let me put $2.82 on it.”
Bettors today are not looking for qualitative statements about the conditions outside, but quantitative analysis.
“They don’t want, ‘It could be a little wet,’ or ‘It could be a little breezy,'” Roth said. “They want to know, “There’s been a 20% decrease in foot traffic. There has been a 32% reduction in home runs due to this wind direction of previous games.” This is the data that people now want to know, and that sharp bettors use to their advantage when the weather matters.”
At Bettor Weather, Abramyan and her team publish analysis of the impact of weather on games in college football, NFL, MLB and MiLB. Each week, they look for areas of the country that may have a weather impact before the betting lines come out and adjust their analysis as the weather develops. Their formula, or “the secret sauce” as Abramyan calls it, uses various factors such as precipitation, wind speeds, crosswinds and stadium orientation to calculate its impact on game production, kicks and punts, to we mention a few. They then publish an analysis that ranks the likely impact of the weather on quarters or halves of the game — and the advantage that will be gained from it.
Abramyan quickly saw the impact of Bettor Weather’s work after its launch in the summer of 2022.
“We just got something out, [people using the website] they would run and place the bets,β Abramyan said. βAnd they would actually move the line because they were putting so much money down. By the time we can bet it, put our money down, it’s already gone from 44.5 to 43 or something.”
Sportsbooks also try to keep up with the weather, but Chris Bennett, director of sports betting at Circa Sports, said he doesn’t have a meteorologist or weather advisor on staff. “In practice, it’s almost impossible for sports betting to really be in a good position and ahead of every customer in the evolving weather forecast,” he said.
Before the internet and advanced forecasting made detailed weather reports widely accessible, bettors found more creative ways to stay on top of the weather. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a man sat in the bleachers near the field at Wrigley Field during batting practice on game day. Sure, he liked the Cubs, but mostly, he was there to watch the American flag.
Over the years, other men took his place. But their purpose remained the same — watch the flag, feel the direction of the wind and see how it affects the shots. This information would then be shared with bookies in Las Vegas, including Steven “Fats” Diano, to factor in their bets.
When the Internet came out, Diano could access a camera in the outfield through the Wrigley Field website. But there was a problem.
“You couldn’t get the camera high enough in the stands to see the flag,” Diano said. “That’s the one thing you couldn’t see.”
And so, the men in the stands stayed. But the camera allowed Diano to keep an eye on things.
“We would call the guy one day because we want to make sure he’s really there,” Diano recalls. “Go to the center. Go to the row to the right of one and the other. And hold up your hand with three fingers, or something like that. So we’re going to zoom in, and we’re going to — we’re going to see him holding up three fingers.”
One day when the Cincinnati Reds were in town, the weatherman told Diano that the wind was blowing when the totals were expected to be blowing out. Diano couldn’t remember exactly how much they bet on the game, but said it would be around $10,000.
But when the game started, the wind was indeed blowing. The weatherman had guessed and no one had checked the camera.
“That was the last time,” Diano said. “We just said, ‘This is the end.’ We’re done with Chicago.”
For this weekend, Bettor Weather’s suggested edge was a “strong under” on the Bills-Steelers game.
“If they already liked the under in that game, use that to push you over the edge a little bit,” Abramyan said. “If they liked the over in that game, then maybe it will be a stay away game.”
Pro gambler Bill Krackomberger takes a different approach: Wait until kickoff, and when “bets are forced over the line,” bet the over, unless there are strong winds.
Abramyan noted that these extreme weather games are difficult to bet on because the sample size of similar games in the past is so small.
“You could do all your homework and have good faith in what the weather is going to do,” he said. “But in terms of how it affects the game, at the end of the day, you still only have a handful of games that have been played that meet that criteria.”
But as a punter with 30 years of experience, Krakoberger embraces the uncertainty.
“I prefer to have situations like this every week, because I know a lot more than the audience what to look for,” he said.
“It’s an overreaction to people just seeing snow. They don’t realize that it really doesn’t mean very much.”
ESPN staff writer David Purdum contributed to this report.