Most fans of Conor McGregor (0-0-0), the Irish southpaw with UFC fight stats of 21-3-0, seem to be betting with their hearts. A lot of the money being placed on Floyd Mayweather Jr. (49-0-0) appears to be based on picking up a few points on a “sure bet”.

If you put $100 with your heart you’d make about $500 at today’s odds – but if you made that safe bet with your wallet, you’d make about $16 at a Las Vegas sports book. Profits for the technical underdog bettors are even better online hovering around +550 for McGregor right now.

With a chasm that wide, especially if it holds, expect somebody – the books or the betting public – to fall into the abyss on this one.

The August 26, 12-round super welterweight match-up will go down at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. It is set to be the biggest money fight in history and legal sportsbooks are doing everything they can to leverage it into a fat payday. The Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook has gone all out offering the sort of proposition bets based on the fight usually only seen online. Casino.org illustrates this tack with an example stating that punters can take odds on such far-flung possibilities as a Yankee slugger hitting more home runs than how many times McGregor will get knocked down. Further examples include rushing yards to punches landed by Mayweather.

No matter how you bet on the fight, you’ll either come across as a sharp or a gambler. As it stands today about 75% of the money from over 90% of bettors is in the gambler camp, looking for that long payout from a McGregor win. The odds keep shifting with sharp money bringing the odds back in line. Some of those bets are in five and six figures. That $16 payoff by today’s odds would have only paid $4 if placed in the middle of February.

So yes, the books could get hurt. According to an interview that appeared in Yahoo News in the middle of July, Bovada.lv sports book manager Kevin Bradly said betting was already getting heavy. “We knew this fight would be big, potentially even bigger than the Super Bowl, but now we are almost certain it will be,” said Bradley. “The recent trash talking and promotional tour are only encouraging bets and at this rate, we cannot even imagine how much we will take on it. One thing is for sure though; we will need Mayweather huge. A McGregor early round KO as he promised would be a potential disaster and is partly a reason we are giving a great price on Mayweather at the moment.”

Ticket sales are reportedly slow with nosebleed seats going for  $3,500 and ringside bringing in about $25,000. The first round of tickets went on sale last Monday and some were immediately up for sale on third-party websites. The price? More than $100,000 (£76,000) according to the Independent.

The fighters are expected to earn over $100 million each for the bout. The fight purse is expected to exceed $390 million with total revenues passing half a billion dollars. We can’t tell you how much each fighter will make because they signed a confidentiality agreement. Best guesses are putting the lion’s share in Mayweather’s pocket at around 75% of the split.

Based on the over-under odds we can look for about 5 million PPV buys at around $100 a pop. Ticket sales are still a mystery, but the haul could be just shy of $80 million for straight sales, forget about predicting the scalp values!

According to another report in the Independent sponsorship should clock in at as much as $25m and merchandise could generate another $2 million.

Bovada.lv is taking action. Be sure to check your local laws to know if you are allowed to bet on this fight online.