Welcome to Action Network’s recurring “Ask a Bookmaker” column, where Jay Kornegay, the Westgate SuperBook's executive vice president of race and sportsbook operations, answers many of the questions novice and seasoned gamblers alike might have about how legal sports betting operations function.
A Colorado State alum whose putting stroke tends to betray him on the back nine, Kornegay has been in the sports betting industry for more than 30 years. After getting his start in Lake Tahoe, he took his talents to Las Vegas, where he opened the Imperial Palace sportsbook in 1989 before taking the reins of the 30,000-square-foot SuperBook in 2004.
Have a question you’d like to ask Kornegay? Send it to mseely@bettercollective.com. The Q&A below has been edited for length and clarity.
Action Network: Am I correct in assuming the NFL is the betting market where you and your traders have to be most on your toes when it comes to emerging injury news and how it might affect game lines and futures markets?
Jay Kornegay: We take the largest limits on the NFL, so we have have to keep our eyes and ears open on any breaking news. However, you've got daily baseball games going on and there's a lot of information breaking on these games with lineup changes and somebody is sitting out, and you could say that as well with the NBA. Nowadays, it seems like NBA players are taking days off whenever they want.
Among the players who've been knocked out for multiple games in the early going this year are MVP or Offensive Player of the Year candidates like Tua Tagovailoa, Jordan Love, Cooper Kupp, Puka Nacua and Christian McCaffrey. How quickly do you move to suspend and/or adjust season-end award markets when news like this breaks?
First of all, you just named my fantasy team. I do have Kupp, Isiah Pacheco, Love and Tua. I usually do pretty well at fantasy and I'm not getting a lot of sympathy from my league. As the information comes in, we make our adjustments accordingly, whether it's two games or eight games that they’ll be out. We continue to have these markets up, and we'll have them up as long as they're still competitive.
Specific to McCaffrey, it seemed like word broke very late that he'd be sitting out Game 1 with a calf injury. Was it especially hectic having to contend with that news given how prominent he is in so many individual prop markets, or was it a case of "been there, done that"?
It was very late-breaking news, and he's one of the few running backs who might have an influence on the line where it'd be half a point. But nothing more than that, because we obviously saw that Jordan Mason can be a very adequate replacement. We knew that. We know who the backups are. Sometimes it's a big drop-off and sometimes it's not. Even though McCaffrey's one of the best in the league, we still believed that Mason was an adequate backup short-term.
There were reports about Mason saying he was told he'd be starting on that Friday prior. We don't know if that's true or not, but it is concerning that that information was out there and it wasn't shared by the team. It's very concerning for us if teams, coaches and leagues are not transparent. Transparency is our friend. With injuries, everybody should know. Once you try to keep it to a select group, you're going to run into problems.
Slowly but surely, college football conferences are adopting more strict injury-reporting standards. Is that something sportsbooks have quietly hoped would happen for a long time? And how has it impacted your pricing process for college games?
I can't say we've been campaigning for it, however, whenever you ask a bookmaker, they're going to tell you the same thing: The more information that's shared, the better. And that goes back to transparency. It should be very transparent on the injuries. It's problematic when you keep it to a select few, because it always seems to leak out. It could be a player's agent's sister that leaks that information out, and it gets into someone's hands who can take advantage of it.
With players who are coming off recent injuries or who have some sort of injury history — and I'm thinking about Aaron Rodgers here — do you price them more conservatively on futures markets heading into a season?
For sure. Guys who are injury prone, they're always going to have that built into their odds.
Shifting to the possibility of a player getting suspended, another woman recently came forward to accuse Deshaun Watson of sexual impropriety. What sort of discussions did you have — and what sort of odds modifications did you make — in the wake of that news?
First of all, it's very unfortunate. It's not something we want to hear, but everybody reacts to these things differently. Some players can really handle adversity really well and come out and perform like an All-Pro, and other times it really affects their game. In this particular case, it really didn't have any major impact on what we were doing, outside of watching to see if he would be suspended again. It's something like, “Here's a red flag in Cleveland; let's keep an eye on it.”
