“Mattress Mack” is back.
Jim McIngvale, the Houston furniture magnate known by that moniker, flew from Houston to Colorado Springs on Wednesday night and placed a $3.46 million wager with DraftKings, broken up into two bets, on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers +3.5.
The bet is, by far, the largest made for this year’s Super Bowl by a $1.1 million margin. Last week, a bettor at BetMGM had previously bet $2.3 million on the same bet — Bucs +3.5.
“Tampa Bay is loaded with talent on both sides of the ball and led by the greatest football player of all time in Tom Brady, so I’m betting big on the Bucs who have overcome tough matchups throughout this postseason,” Mack said in a statement.
Mack is apparently not a Kansas City Chiefs fan, either. Last year, he bet $1 million for each of the final three weeks of the season, including the Super Bowl, against the Chiefs. He did it as insurance to pay off a promotion he had that would rebate customers who spent more than $3,000 on items in his Furniture Gallery stores if the San Francisco 49ers won.
But Mack insists it's nothing against the Chiefs, telling The Action Network it's just that he always has a promotion involving the Super Bowl underdog. He says the $3.4 million bet should be a decent hedge against the people who would get free mattresses if the Bucs win, "not unless there's a last minute surge."
In fact, as a young boy at a catholic school in East Dallas, Mack was a fan of the Dallas Texans, which became the Chiefs in 1963 when the franchise moved to Kansas City.
“Mack” has frequently used sports betting to hedge promotions. In 2019, he lost $13 million on Houston Astros championship futures to hedge against a similar promotion if the Astros won it all. His liability on the other side, if it happened, was about $20 million, he said.
He originally started to use betting to hedge in 2014, when he made a bet of sorts that Peyton Manning and the Broncos would beat the Seattle Seahawks. When they didn’t, he lost $7 million on a promotion. Mack later told The Action Network that the calculated publicity from the national attention generated added up to more than $30 million.
Mack’s $3.4 million bet is not the biggest Super Bowl bet of all time, but it’s certainly close. In 2010, famous Vegas gambler Billy Walters bet $3.5 million on the New Orleans Saints to win the Super Bowl.
