“Will a football be used as a prop? Will a lyric be muted? Will Bad Bunny expose a nipple?”
Joey Isaks is reading the menu of options for bets on the Super Bowl halftime show, trying to decide if there’s anything he’s interested in putting some money down on. “Will Bad Bunny perform a cover song? I actually like ‘No’ at -300 there. They never do cover songs anymore.”
Isaks is a professional gambler, and he’s made some fairly big scores on the Super Bowl halftime show over the years. “The last one I made a lot of money on was probably the SoFi one … ‘What color shoes will Snoop Dogg wear?’” Isaks’ win was in the low five figures. His secret? He received the information in advance. “It leaked that he was wearing white shoes … it was like 7-1.”
This year an enterprising gambler can find places to bet on all sorts of propositions for Bad Bunny’s halftime performance. While regulated American sportsbooks like FanDuel or DraftKings are generally restricted by state laws to only taking bets on “authorized sporting events or closely related outcomes,” American prediction markets (which fall under federal commodity and futures regulations) and offshore sportsbooks (which aren’t located in the U.S.) will take bets on just about anything you can imagine. In addition to the aforementioned offerings, there are bets on what color Bad Bunny’s hair will be, what kind of hat he will wear, and who might make an appearance onstage with him.
“This year it’s a layup with Bad Bunny given all of the politics associated with Trump, ICE, etc. The possibility of him wearing a dress,” says Adam Burns, sportsbook manager at BetOnline.ag.
The dress and ICE questions are popular options so far this year, according to Burns, but the most popular bet has been the same every year: What will be the first song? “Tití Me Preguntó” is the odds-on favorite at 1-2, but there are some long shots on the board like “I Like It” at 18-1. If you think Karol G will join Bad Bunny onstage, you can get that at 2-1. If you think Joe Biden will join him onstage, you can get that at 50-1. “The ideas are endless.”
In addition to the halftime show, there are bets on the length of the national anthem, and even a few bets available on Green Day’s pregame performance, though nowhere near as many as the halftime show. At the Panama-based offshore sportsbook BetOnline.ag, you can bet on Green Day’s first song and whether or not Billie Joe Armstrong will call Donald Trump “fat.”
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“This is definitely the biggest halftime show menu we’ve seen in the history of the Super Bowl,” says Dave Mason, BetOnline’s brand manager and an industry veteran. “Last year’s with Kendrick Lamar and the Drake/Taylor Swift side stories was also close to this number, but Bad Bunny and all the surrounding storylines takes the cake.”
“We’ve got a prop on how many times the camera will cut to a confused-looking older guy in the crowd,” says Robert Cooper, odds manager at SportsBetting.ag. “We’re calling it the ‘Kevin reacts’ prop.”
In the gambling world, there is perhaps no event with as expansive a betting menu as the Super Bowl. There are literally thousands of potential bets on the game and everything surrounding it — from the coin toss to who will score the first touchdown to who will appear onscreen during the ads. The behemoth menu of “props” can be traced back to the 1995 Super Bowl, when the 49ers beat the Chargers, 49-26. Fans were expecting a blowout, so Jay Kornegay, manager of the sportsbook at the Imperial Palace casino in Las Vegas at that time, gathered his staff and came up with more than 150 bets on the game to keep fans engaged in what was otherwise going to be a one-sided affair. It worked, and every year since, the menu at sportsbooks across Nevada continued to expand.
Halftime shows for many years were also fairly boring affairs. Up until the 1990s, the show was usually dominated by marching bands and beauty queens. Occasionally the international organization Up With People would sing and dance to spice things up. In 1992, the halftime show was considered such a bore that the fledgling Fox network aired a special episode of the sketch comedy show In Living Color to coincide with halftime, complete with an onscreen timer to let viewers know how much time they had left before they needed to change the channel and catch the second-half kickoff. The NFL’s halftime show was called “Winter Magic” and featured ice skating and a rendition of Frosty the Snowman. Winter Magic got clobbered in the ratings by In Living Color.
The following year the NFL booked Michael Jackson for the halftime show and has tried to up the ante every year since with increasingly large-scale pop music spectacles with special effects, pyrotechnics, and surprise cameos. They’ve never again had to worry about viewers tuning away. Today, the halftime show is as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. For some viewers, even more so.
In 2004, Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson scandalized the NFL when Timberlake ripped off a part of Jackson’s costume at the end of their performance, something they later said was a “wardrobe malfunction.” The fallout and controversy from the incident was huge and created an outsized interest in Paul McCartney’s halftime show the following year.
“The year after the Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson fiasco, we posted a prop asking if there would be another ‘wardrobe malfunction,’” says Jacob Crossman, director of trading at BetDSI.eu. “The media ate it up, and the bettors were betting on it happening again!”
Over the next few years, the bets on halftime shows increased. In 2006, you could bet on what the Rolling Stones’ first song would be (it was “Start Me Up”), and in 2007, you could bet on whether Prince would split his pants onstage (he didn’t).
“The first time I can recall a Super Bowl halftime show prop bet was at Super Bowl XLIV in 2010,” Mason says. “The Who was the performing artist, and there was a prop on how many ‘guitar windmills’ Pete Townshend would execute.”
“I think one of the most famous, or infamous, was in 2013 when we offered odds on whether or not Beyoncé would show cleavage,” Burns says. “Initially she was pretty covered up, but by the end of the show cleavage was in full effect and the bettors cleaned up.”
While sportsbooks (and professional sports bettors) will determine the odds for a typical on-field Super Bowl bet using statistical modeling tools like linear regression and Monte Carlo simulations, when it comes to halftime show bets, there’s just not really data to work with.
“There’s not a lot that goes into it. We do a little research, set a soft line, and then the action dictates where the odds go. It’s all speculation … more art than science,” Crossman says.
In terms of what goes into the art of setting halftime show lines, it’s a little bit of everything. “A mix of frantic Googling, watching three TikTok predictions, and what we overheard at the water cooler. It’s basically organized chaos,” Cooper says. “We’re all just guessing together.”
According to Isaks, some gamblers will try to handicap these bets, applying some sort of statistical analysis to find an edge. “People go through previous set lists,” he says. “So if he opens that tour every time with X song, then you maybe think he’s going to open it again.” But Isaks doesn’t put much stock in those methods. “I mean, that sounds like a waste of time.” The only real reason to bet on these bets, according to Isaks, is if you already know the winner ahead of time.
The sportsbooks have a simple way to protect themselves against this type of insider trading: They don’t take very much money on these bets. “We only allow customers to make relatively small wagers on these props. You can’t come in and bet $10,000 on Bad Bunny’s first song. There are many people who know what he’s going to sing first, so we have to protect ourselves against that insider knowledge,” Burns says. (The maximum bet on any of BetOnline’s halftime show props is $25.) “Sometimes they beat us to the punch, and that’s just the cost of doing business.”
Usually the inside information originates at the dress rehearsal the week of the Super Bowl, which is closed to the public but does have some invited guests in the stands watching. That information spreads among gamblers quickly. “Everyone kind of gets it at the same time, and it’s like a race to bet it before they take it down,” Isaks says. “It’s actually crazy; it’s always accurate.”
Sometimes, though, that inside information might still not be good enough to win a bet. In 2024, when Usher performed, he opened his show with a few lines from the song “Caught Up” but blended it into the song “My Way.” Some sportsbooks paid “Caught Up” bettors, some paid “My Way” bettors, and at least one sportsbook, BetOnline, paid both. Isaks didn’t get paid. “Even though Apple releases the set list after the show, they still didn’t grade it by that,” he says. “I remember my wife being like, ‘It was “My Way”! You were right again!’ and pumped I won, but I never told her the site graded it a loss. Sometimes things are better left unknown.”
In years past, trafficking in this inside information was highly lucrative because a number of sportsbooks would take sizable bets. Today, almost nobody will take more than $10 or $25. “You used to be able to make like $50,000 probably on it. Now I don’t even know if you can make $1,000 on it,” Isaks says.
Robert Cooper at Sportsbetting.ag isn’t too concerned with getting beat by inside information, limits or not. He says, “Our average bettor is a dude whose girlfriend introduced him to Bad Bunny and all the corresponding conspiracies last week, so we’re not too concerned about inside information beating us.”
From Rolling Stone US
