March Madness Office Pool Betting Worth Over $2 5 Billion
Released on: March 15, 2008, 12:40 pm
Press Release Author: Nina Pendleton
Industry: Entertainment
Press Release Summary: March Madness is one of the most watched Sporting even in the United States and the betting from office pools around the country is worth serious money.
Press Release Body: San Jose, Costa Rica - Online sports and Live Dealer gaming website LazerWager.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 16, 2008 It's called March Madness for a reason. 41% of Americans and more than 58 million U.S. workers are college basketball fans. With March upon us, the NCAA Basketball tournament is weeks away and just about everyone is watching the games a little closer while trying to find their sleeper, or Cinderella team. Researchers found that 27% of American employees participate in March Madness office pools. The majority of these workers are men, as only 8% of American women have participated in the workplace pool. Surveys show that almost half of them spend at least 30 minutes at work to fill out their brackets. With bracket pools ranging from $5 to $25 per person, office pools are now worth an incredible $2.5 billion dollars! That's an incredible number considering that Vegas expects between $80 and $90 million to be bet on the College games in Nevada. According to news reports, Americans wager between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion on the NCAA tournament via online Sportsbooks. "Besides Super Bowl week, this is easily the busiest time of year for our office," said Dan Del Gato, Director of Operations at LazerWager.com. "We're offering plenty of deposit bonuses for the games, including a sweet 16% reload bonus to our current players and reduced -108 juice on the Elite 8 games."
The College Conference Tournaments tip off on March 4, with the winners earning automatic bids into the 64-team March Madness Tournament that begins on March 16 with Selection Sunday. CBS.com is capable of handling up to 300,000 viewers to watch video streams of games online at any given time, and their target audience is office workers. Last year, college-basketball related Web traffic was heaviest during the first week of the tournament, when 7.9 million people logged on to the top Web sites. According to the Chicago-based Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc., American companies will lose approximately $3.8 billion dollars in lost productivity due to the NCAA tournament. That number is calculated from 58 million workers spending an average of 13.5 minutes online for each of the 16 business days of action. With the average wage at $18 per hour, those 13.5 minutes cost companies $4.05. With high-speed Internet access common in many offices, the urge to keep tabs on favorite teams is becoming more difficult to resist.
Bosses understand is that they have employees who care about March Madness and are going to be paying attention to the games whether or not it's allowed. Most companies compromise with their employees, allowing bracket pools and tournament talk in the office as long as no work gets neglected, no client gets ignored, and no job goes undone. When employees clock out of the office, they head home to pick up the late action. On average, 7.6 million households are tuned in during each telecast, and each telecast lasts about 2.5 hours. It all adds up to 494 million hours of television. With 64 games played and two possible results for each game, the total number of possible outcomes for the tournament is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616! ### For more info contact Ms. Pendleton at pr@lazerwager.com . More about LazerWager. LazerWager ( www.lazerwager.com) based in San Jose, Costa Rica with corporate offices in Cyprus, is an online sports, casino and entertainment gambling website backed by over 50 years experience in the online gambling industry. They offer sports and race book betting, Live Dealer and digital casino software, odds on various news, entertainment and current events as well as exciting free content. LazerWager abides by all rules and regulations related to online gaming. Consult your local jurisdiction regarding gambling laws before placing any wagers over the internet.
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