Major betting company loses huge $5,500,000 on one bet just days after reopening
A betting company that recently reopened after being shut for two years has already suffered a staggering financial loss.
The firm is Hard Rock and it reopened its sports book in Florida following a two-year-long legal battle.
The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but the company finally reopened 14 November.
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Then, almost immediately, someone scooped a staggering $5.5 million win on a football game.
They say the house always wins, but a win like that must be hard to take.
The win came after a match between the Houston Texans and the Cincinnati Bengals.
Things had been evenly matched, with the win coming down to the final seconds of the game as the Houston quarterback C.J. Stroud authored a drive.
This led to Houston ultimately claiming victory with a score of 30-27 over Cincinnati.
Jon Chapper is the senior director of communications for Hard Rock Digital, and confirmed the enormous bet to ESPN.
He told ESPN: "With such a large and diverse population, nothing is 'low profile'.
"We see great interest in wagers across our deep betting markets. That said, we're always performing due diligence, especially on large wagers."
Shahrouz Ebadian works as a tech executive in Fort Lauderdale, and has placed a number of very large bets in the past.
These have included wagers ranging from $10,000, to a whopping $100,000.
While he didn't the begrudge the size of the bets, he was a little perplexed by what the gamblers chose to bet on.
Ebadian said that he was sat with his girlfriend at a bar when he saw that someone had placed the enormous bet.
He was in disbelief, but was told by a host at Hard Rock VIP that the bet was in fact genuine.
He said: "Why the hell would somebody put a million [dollars] on a 1-8 team? Why would you do that?
"But the amounts, I think you're going to see that all the time down here. I know there's money in New York, where it's legal, too, but I think South Florida is a different animal."
A scoop of $5.5 million is a mammoth win, but even that pales into insignificance compared to a bet placed by Texas furniture businessman Jim McIngvale, known as 'Mattress Mack'.
He won an astonishing $75 million back in 2022 after betting that the Houston Astros would win the World Series.
This is believed to be the largest win in legal sport betting.
Kit Roberts