Those Steelers, eh? Awesome.
For the ignorant among you, I’m talking Pittsburgh Steelers, who opened up the new NFL season last night with a win against Miami. Now, as a Dolphins fan when I was a kid, ordinarily this would be a horrible result to wake up to, but I kind of lost interest when Marino retired, and besides, thanks to an incredible sportsbook offer that someone pointed me to, I had the nearest thing to a free bet that you will ever find on this game.
For some reason, a sportsbook called Mansion were offering a deal whereby if you bet $1.1k on Pittsburgh with a particular handicap, they’d pay out if the bet won, and refund you if the bet lost. A winning bet would mean a profit of $1k. Nice, huh?
But not wanting to wake up with either all or nothing, like many other players I covered myself by betting on the exact opposite outcome of the game at another sportsbook. Had I got this part right (in other words, had I been able to place the bet I wanted, rather than argue with customer support at another sportsbook) I could have guaranteed myself something in the region of $470 regardless of the outcome of the game.
But I was too slow, and events turned against me. For the first time in my life, I found myself unduly annoyed because of an appendectomy (not my own - Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger had surgery on Sunday) which meant the lines on the bets shifted, and I was unable to find good odds on a Dolphins win. I hedged nonetheless, perhaps too much in the end, but still, I woke up this morning over $400 up. Which is a handy present to receive on the day before my birthday 