EDITORIAL: NCAA tournament is big business in Las Vegas

As family, friends and co-workers fill out their brackets and get their office pools ready in anticipation of the NCAA Tournament — which kicks off today — a cascade of betting action unrivaled by even the Super Bowl will soon be sweeping over Las Vegas, as well.

The state’s sports books took $422 million in wagers on basketball in March of last year — $46.5 million more than in 2015. While Nevada doesn’t track the NCAA tournament betting handle, according to feedback from the books, Gaming Control Board research analyst Michael Lawton estimates that roughly 70 percent of that action — approximately $295.4 million — was on tournament games.

“When I first started looking at it 15 to 20 years ago, college basketball in the month of March was about equal to the Super Bowl,” South Point sports book director Chris Andrews told the Review-Journal.

It’s now much bigger than that.

The amount of money bet on the tournament in Las Vegas last year was more than twice that of the state’s record Super Bowl handle of $138.5 million. And it’s expected to get even bigger.

In a recent piece in USA Today, Nick Bogdanovich, head oddsmaker for William Hill, which runs more than 100 sports books in the city, called this year’s tournament an uncommonly “wide-open year.”

“Usually, there are seven or eight teams that you can narrow it down to,” he said. “But this year, I think there are more teams that can win it than ever before.”

The amount of betting on the tournament has doubled over the past decade, and this year’s wide-open field should drive betting even higher. And while the amount of money kept by the books after the tournament pales in comparison to, say, the amount of cash brought in by slot machines in a given month, as David G. Schwartz of VegasSeven.com points out, a little money is better than no money. And the multiple tournament games spread out over multiple days goes a long way toward selling more hotel room stays.

Las Vegas casinos are expecting such big crowds, USA Today reports, that some resorts will be opening up overflow areas to accommodate all of the fans.

Now if only the hometown team had earned a tournament berth. But that’s another issue. Of course, there’s always UNR, which opens tonight in Minneapolis against Iowa State.