But he still had to drive two hours to do it in a legal state.
An estimated 31.4 million people will place a bet on the Super Bowl. Most of them won’t drive two hours just to place that bet. And most of them won’t lay down bets totaling $9.5 million. That’s how much mattress mogul Jim McIngvale bet on the Cincinnati Bengals to win the Super Bowl. If they pull it off as the underdogs, he’ll get a profit of $16.15 million. McIngvale started with a bet of $4.5 million with Caesars Sportsbook, which said it was the largest bet to ever be placed from the convenience of a mobile phone. When he placed another $5 million bet on the Bengals, Caesars said it was the largest legal wager in U.S. history, beating out a $4.9 million bet on the heavily favored St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI (they lost to a young upstart quarterback named Tom Brady). McIngvale is fortunate he didn’t have to go all the way to Las Vegas to place the bet, as he would have had to do before 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.
