The average Mayweather bet is 50 times as big as the average McGregor bet

Saturday’s Mayweather-McGregor fight is a big sports betting event, and the betting patterns ahead of the bout are pretty funny:

That’s per the manager at the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook. What it means:

• Floyd Mayweather is a massive favorite.
• If you bet $100 on Conor McGregor, and the MMA fighter somehow wins, you win $400.
• To win $100 on Mayweather, you’ve got to throw down $550.

It appears almost everyone who’s betting on the fight is trying to get rich quick by taking the long-shot McGregor. A full 92 percent of the total bets are for McGregor to win, which would trigger a 4-to-1 payout.

But nobody’s that confident McGregor will actually win. Eighty-one percent of the total money being on Mayweather, compared to 92 percent of the tickets being on McGregor, means that the people betting on Mayweather are many, many more times as confident in him as McGregor’s backers are in the Irishman.

The average bet on Mayweather is 50 times as big as the average bet on McGregor.

Think of it like this, as a hypothetical:

Let’s pretend there are 100 betting tickets sold at a casino in Vegas. Of those, 92 favor McGregor to win the fight, and just eight favor Mayweather.

But all of the McGregor tickets could be worth $2, and all of the Mayweather tickets could be worth $101. Then, McGregor money would only be 19 percent of the total money wagered. That’d be pretty funny, right? But it’s exactly what’s happening.