SuperContest announces administrative fee – ESPN
LAS VEGAS — The famous SuperContest will have an 8 percent administrative fee taken out of the prize pool starting this year, the Westgate Las Vegas sports book announced on Friday.
The SuperContest, which costs $1,500 to enter and requires players to pick five NFL games against the spread each week, had a record 1,727 entries last year with a 44-year-old Colorado man using the contest alias of “rounding again” winning the $906,675 first-place price. It marked the fifth straight year that the number of entries had increased as the field has quintupled since 2010.
Jay Kornegay, the Westgate vice president of race and sports, said he knows the “rake” will be unpopular, but the costs of running the contest have also risen over the years.
“We know there’s going to be some push back, we expect that,” Kornegay said, “but as the contest has grown it’s also taken a lot more on our end. We start working on the next season as soon as the previous season ends, plus add staffing to take all the entries and the SuperContest Weekend. It had turned into a loss leader; we’re just making it so we’re not losing money on the thing. I feel we’re doing what anyone else would do if they were running it.
“Also, we’ve been allowing people to pay their entry fees with credit cards and the credit card companies charge us around 3 percent [$45 on a $1,500 charge]. When there only a few hundred people in the contest and a few dozen using their credit cards, it was easy to eat that cost, but last year we paid around $25,000 in credit card surcharges.
“We looked at poker tournaments, which could be between a 6-to-20 percent rake, and DFS contests in the 20 percent range. We thought 10 percent would be too much, so we settled at 8.”
If the contest draws 1,800 entries this year (a conservative estimate based on recent growth, but kept low in case there is more of a backlash), that would be a prize pool of $2.7 million and the Westgate’s takeout would be $216,000.
The Westgate has long paid bonuses for a mini-contest over the last three weeks of the season and another for those that hit 67 percent overall. Those are being increased from $15,000 to $20,000 aggregate (meaning ties split the pots) this year. Kornegay said those would continue to be paid by the casino and not from the prize pool and would also allow the Westgate to continue drawings for free entries at SuperContest Weekend and through promotions such as those held on the Gamblino app.
Not many people remember this, but when Art Manteris started the SuperContest in 1989 (when the property was the Las Vegas Hilton), there was a 10 percent “marketing fee” taken off the top of the prize pool. It was later dropped by the turn of the century.
“The purpose of the SuperContest when it was started was to get people on property,” Kornegay said. “People would come to the Hilton to get the lines, then come again to put in their picks and see who everyone else was taking. The explosion in entries has come from social media getting the word out in recent years, but people can come to town and get a local proxy to put in their picks every week. So even though we have a lot more entries, those new people might just come to the property one time.”
Kornegay said the Westgate will start taking signups on Friday, July 1. Entrants must sign up in person with their designated proxy (if needed) and then are issued plastic cards for use at the kiosks to submit weekly selections.
SuperContest Weekend, which includes handicapping seminars and a golf outing, is set for Aug. 26-27.
