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Small Time Player
by Ray Lastinger
For almost five years, until the play lost its flavor, I made a living
as a sports bettor. I suppose it's possible that my success was merely
a protracted run of luck--luck certainly played a part, as it does in
every facet of our lives--but I believe it was due mainly to a certain
talent for the game, to having the right instincts and a relaxed
temperament. I had no intention of trying to become wealthy; my goal
was to earn a modest living wage to augment the money I earned as a
writer (my son was planning to attend an expensive university, so the
added income would come in handy), and unlike most bettors, I went about
the task with the dedication of a factory worker learning to use a
complicated and potentially dangerous machine.
In the early fall of 1987 I found myself with a little extra money, and
I decided to test my assumption that I could win on a regular basis. I
knew that Gamblers Anonymous meetings were full of people who'd embraced
similar assumptions, but I told myself that if I lost my stake I would
simply back away. I had before me an example that proved a reasonably
intelligent person could beat the oddsmakers by dint of studious
application: my friend, James T., had made his living at the racetrack
for nearly a decade, taking home a considerable annual profit. I have
no doubt that the sport of kings provides the surest ground for a
bettor. The past performances of horses and jockeys yield valuable data
upon analysis, and even more significantly, there is a great deal of
inside information to be gained by hanging around the paddocks and in
other less savory venues. But due to an unfortunate incident with a
runaway gelding at Camp Pinnacle in North Carolina during my seventh
summer, I hated horses; I had no desire to be in close proximity to them
and felt uneasy about wagering a significant sum on a thousand pound
animal with a brain the size of a Milk Dud. It may seem unreasonable
that I would feel easier about wagering on any sport, given the
frequency of news items testifying to the erratic and irresponsible
behavior of collegiate and professional athletes; but then I had never
been carried on a terrifying cross-country ride by a spooked offensive
lineman or dumped in a thicket by a deranged power forward.
To start with, I set myself two rules:
1) Never bet on any team that I was rooting for...unless the
proposition was so solid that I could be certain I was not affected by
emotion.
2) Never bet just for the sake of betting.
John C., a bartender in the restaurant I used for an office, was
testimony to the importance of this second rule, by far the easiest of
the two to break. He was a encyclopedia of sports knowledge and had a
fine understanding of odds and point spreads, but he was unable to watch
a televised sports event without having something down on the outcome.
The thrill that drives a compulsive gambler is the risking of more than
he can afford to lose. John had not reached this level of sickness,
though he was clearly on the path to compulsion. For him, it was all
about the action. He enjoyed winning, but he enjoyed more the sense of
the interactive that betting gave him, the feeling that while he was not
truly a participant in the game or fight or race, neither was he merely
an observer. As a result he rarely had a profitable week, blowing what
he made from carefully considered bets on spur-of-the-moment fliers. I
will admit that early on he infected me with this passion and I made
several rash bets; but I learned my lesson and thereafter wagered only
when confronted by a proposition that I judged to be winnable. If on a
given day nothing interested me, I did not bet; if there were seven or
eight games that attracted me, I bet them all. Even when John
understood that I was having success with this method, he refused to
change his ways and continued on his downward spiral.
Another example of a gambler whose pyschology I had no wish to emulate
was Davey D., a Boston Irishman, a bartender at a upscale club who took
home up to four hundred dollars in tips each night and whose main claim
to fame was that he had been part of a group of drunks who had one
night beaten up Larry Bird in a Southey bar. Whether or not this was
true, I'm not sure; but just the fact that Davey would claim
responsibility for such a dubious act stood as evidence to the extent of
his intelligence. I played poker in a weekly game at which Davey was a
regular. None of us particularly cared for him, but we all appreciated
his lack of skill at cards. No matter how much he was losing, and he
almost always lost a lot, when asked how he was doing, he would
invariably answer, "Ah, you know, I'm about even...maybe down a
little." This answer was not based on a misapprehension, it was due to
the fact that Davey's self-esteem was inextricably bound up with his
image of himself as not only a mugger of NBA stars, but as a master
gambler, a sort of Irish Kenny Rogers/Bret Maverick, If a habitual
loser could delude himself to this degree, I figured anyone might fall
prey to some similar delusion, and thereafter, whenever I had an
especially good week and began to feel gifted with powers of prescience,
I would think of Davey and reconsider my position.
I should state from the outset that I rarely bet on boxing. If I had
lived in Vegas, I might have bet more frequently on the sport--in Vegas
you can find a line on even the most obscure bouts, but I lived in a
small New England island community and the local bookies refused to take
bets on most fights because they couldn't get enough action on both
sides of a proposition to make it risk-free; thus I was limited to a
handful of high profile fights. In order to bet a mere $50 on Buster
Douglas against Tyson (I never believed Douglas would win, but the 42-1
odds were too high to pass up), I had to get my bookie to lay the bet
off on a bookie in Hyannisport, who in turn laid it off with someone in
Boston. The majority of televised fights are mismatches, and not good
bets--if you are a blue-collar bettor there is little more than anxiety
to be gained in putting down $800 or $1000 to win a hundred on a
favorite. So I hunted for live underdogs and had a number of
successes--for instance, I went with Terry Norris and the over against
Sugar Ray Leonard. I liked over bets in any competitive match-up.
(Vegas assigns every major fight an over-under line, a round--and
sometimes a minute--that defines the bet; if you think the fight be will
shorter than the time stated, you bet under; longer, you bet over.) If
you check out the results of recent quality match-ups, fights involving
Reid, Trinidad, Mosely, Quartey, Vargas, Page, Lopez, Morales, Barrera,
and others, you plainly can see the wisdom of taking the over. But at
the time, since I bet intermittently on the sport I did not develop a
feeling for the action. It may be something of a conceit, but when I
was betting regularly on other sports, though my wagers were informed by
analysis, I had the idea that I had gotten into a good rhythm, just like
an athlete, and this sharpened my instincts. Even if I were still
betting today, I'd be wary of boxing. Look at the major fights that, as
of this date, we have upcoming: Tzyu-Chavez; Botha-Lewis;
Ruiz-Holyfield, Tyson-TBA, Hamed-Sanchez; Bailey-Julio; Trinidad-Thiam.
Holyfield may have slipped sufficently so that a Ruiz bet would be
appropriate, but no one of them jumps off the page and yells, Bet me!
If you're sitting in a Vegas sports book or are located in large urban
area and have a good knowledge of the fight game, you can find
interesting propositions in smaller fights; but if you're out in the
hinterlands, your options are limited unless you want to start dealing
with Vegas sports books. I did this when there was a line I could not
get locally, but I didn't like betting over the phone. It was too easy,
the money I was putting up had no reality. I preferred to sit a the bar
with little envelopes containing bills in front of me, each marked with
the details of an intended wager--it made the idea of loss more poignant
and inspired me to caution.
I had been studying the Vegas lines for several years, and I habitually
read a number of national publications focusing on the upcoming
football and basketball seasons. Each morning after breakfast I read
the sports sections of four or five newspapers. That, aside from being
a lifetime sports junkie, was the sum of my preparation for the job. I
subscribed to no tip sheets, no weekly newsletters. If had a question
about a player's health (something that rarely factored in to my wagers)
I would call a sports desk or, that failing, call an SID office and
pretend to be a reporter (despite the NCAA's professed concern about
gambling, I never had any trouble in gaining up-to-the-minute
information this way). On a typical day I would walk to the restaurant
around 11 AM, take a seat at the bar, and go over my picks for the day.
At noon I would phone in my bets, and then I would either return home or
stay to watch a game on televison. Like John C., I enjoyed the company
of other bettors. Unlike him, I enjoyed not only the comraderie but
also the unspoken competition among us, a competition I felt I was a
lock to win.
For the most part I steered clear of betting on pro basketball and pro
football, though late in the season I would bet on games in which one
team had more to gain playoff-wise than did their opponents.
Small-time bookies will sometimes tell you that NBA and the NFL are
better bets than the collegiate game, because the outcome of many
college games turns on emotion. However, it's been my experience that
the listlessness that afflicts almost every pro athlete at some point
during a long season is a more difficult a variable to gauge than the
passions of sophomores, juniors, and seniors (now that parity--or as
Marty Schottenheimer calls it, "parody"--has been achieved in the NFL,
pro football is even shakier a proposition). Further, professional
handicappers don't seem to have as thorough an understanding of college
ball as they do of the NFL and the NBA. Their lines, especially early
in the season, are frequently way off, and they tend to overrrate many
teams. Then there are teams like the Notre Dame football squads of the
late 80s, early 90s. Ideally, handicappers like to set lines so that an
equal number of bettors will wager on both sides in any given contest
and then make their money off the vigorish. But with a poor team such
as Notre Dame had in those days, I believe they knew they could set the
line too high and make losers out of the legion of Irish fans. In New
England the lines on the Boston Celtics, still a very good team at the
time, were often skewed up from the Vegas lines so as to keep people
from betting on them, and I found if I picked my spots, I could make
money betting against them. Now and then when the line was
exceptionally skewed, I would bet a middle, getting down on a game one
way through Gene and the other through a Vegas sports book.
Another thing small-time bookies are prone to tell you is that major
league baseball is a not such a hot bet. They tell you this because
they know the opposite is true. To win at baseball you want to bet
streaks. Winning streaks, losing streaks--it doesn't matter. Just find
a streaking team and stay with them. Some gamblers of my acquaintance
like to increase their bets on each successive game. You may wind up
with a terrible pitching match-up and decide to get off the train, or
you may ride it to the end and lose big on the game that stops the
streak, but you'll make out overall. One of the more reliable bets in
baseball is to bet against the previous year's World Series teams during
spring training. Only a few times over the past thirty years have any
of these teams had a winning record in the spring.
My favorite bet was college basketball. Between the time the season
begins until the conference seasons open, you can win a lot of money if
you pay attention. It never fails that the handicappers will present
you with some outright gifts during those months, and you have to have
the confidence to jump all over them. My first such gift was Iowa by 9
points at Northern Iowa. Northern Iowa was an small college with an
undistinguished program picked to finish in the middle of their
conference. Iowa was one of the favorites for the Big Ten crown, led by
All-American center Acie Earl. I assumed that the handicappers had
viewed it as a rivary game and felt that emotion would keep it close.
But Iowa-Northern Iowa did not make my list of storied rivalries. Nine
points was ridiculous. If I were handicapping the game, I told myself,
I would set the line, conservatively, at 20. I jumped all over it.
Iowa won by 28.
It was at this juncture I realized that if I was to maximize my
potential as a bettor, it would be best not simply to look at the lines
and judge if they were correct, but to become a handicapper myself,
>From that point forward, before reading the morning lines, I would make
a list of twenty basketball games and, using the information I had
accumulated during the season, I would set my own lines. Then I would
compare them to the Vegas lines. I found that in the majority of games
my lines were remarkably close to those of Vegas, but there were always
a handful of games in which the two numbers differed by a wide mark. I
concentrated my wagers on these games and found that my winning
percentage improved dramatically. In one stretch during the conference
and NCAA tournaments of '88, I won 25 college basketball games in a
row. Anytime you win 25 straight at anything there's a significant
measure of luck involved, and I had my share. I lucked out one game
when after the final buzzer the losing point guard threw the ball at the
ref, earning himself a technical, and an eighteen year old freshman from
the victorious team stepped to the free throw line and sank two
meaningless (to him) foul shots, changing the winning margin from 1
point to 3, and thereby causing a $500 positive swing in my income.
John C., who was down on the same game, took the result as sign that he
should bet more and immediately phoned in a bet on several games to be
played later that day. I thought, however, if there had been any
message implicit in the result, it was a cautionary one, and I stayed
away from the action until the euphoria generated by this unexpected
turn of fortune had dissispated.
Wednesday was payday. As I've stated, I lived in a place where trust
was enforced by geography, and gambling debts were handled with less
rigor than they might have been in a larger town on the mainland. So it
was that shortly after noon on Wednesday my bookie--a portly, fiftyish
man named Gene--would drop by the restaurant to pay out to and collect
from the various people who had bet with him during the previous week.
One Wednesday in the fall of '89 he casually mentioned that I'd been
doing so well, he had taken to betting game for game along with me,
except he had been risking considerably more per wager. I found it
irritating that he was making more money off me than I was off him, and
I told him, only half-jokingly, that he ought to find some way to
compensate me. I expected him to laugh or say "Fuck off", but he
actually seemed to be considering the matter.
A couple of weeks later, on a Monday, Gene dropped by my house and
handed me a sheet of paper on which he'd copied the early Vegas line for
that weekend's college football games. He suggested that I try betting
some middles. The idea was to bet games I liked using the Monday point
spread, then wait until the lines shifted later in the week and bet the
opposite side using the Saturday lines. For example, if I were to bet
on USC getting seven at Washington on Monday, and then the spread
narrowed to five and a half, I would bet Washington on Saturday, and
hope that Washington would prevail by six--if they did, I would win
both bets. The virtue of betting middles was that worst case I could
only lose the vigorish on one of the wagers, and this allowed me to
wager more on a single game. I had bet middles before, using the
variant lines offered by different bookies, but I'd never had the
advantage offered by using the Monday morning Vegas lines, which
sometimes changed during the week by as much four points. And four
points was a massive middle.
I managed to hit several decent middles during the remainder of the
season--Gene, of course, hit them even bigger. He had come to see me as
kind of a cross between a protoge and the goose that laid the golden
egg, and apparently felt that he should secure my loyalty by tossing me
a bone. He told me he had a friend at a small southwestern racetrack who
knew when a longshot was coming in a couple of times a year. He would
share this information with me--the only proscription was that I could
not wager more than $750. If a larger sum were added to that already
being bet on the particular horse, he said, the stewards might become
suspicious.
Over the course of my involvement with sports betting, I wagered
considerably more on single events, my largest bet being $2500 on the
Denver-San Francisco Super Bowl, but the idea of risking more than
pocket change on a horse had little appeal. But Gene informed me that
once in a while at this track, there were races in which six or seven
horses went to the post and all but one had little sponges inserted into
their nostrils to hamper their breathing. I laid the bet, and took home
nearly $13,000. Having these occasional windfalls to look forward to
allowed me to be more aggressive in my daily bets, and as a result I
started making nearly half again as much money on a weekly basis as I
had previously.
Because of the Mayberrylike (relatively-speaking) atmosphere of my
home, I saw little of the seamier side of gambling life. When people
failed to pay Gene, he never resorted to muscle--Gene was a successful
businessman with strong political contacts, and he was usually able find
a way to squeeze a non-payer without breaking any bones. On one
occasion a fishing boat full of Portuguese men from New Bedford took
shelter in our port from a nasty storm, and were stranded among us for
several days. The fishermen spent most of their time in the resturant
where I hung out, spending money freely at the bar, and on the second
night of their stay, the captain got hold of Gene and wagered a thousand
on that evening's Celtic game, taking Boston and giving points. The
Celtics got hammered. When Gene came to collect his money, it seemed
the captain and his crew had spent all they had. According to the
weatherman, the storm was due to blow over by the next afternoon. Gene
called the harbor master, who owed him, and the harbor master declared
the captain's boat unseaworthy, ordering it held in port pending
inspection. A battle of the wills ensued between Gene and the captain.
For 24 hours, it was a stalemate. But finally the captain capitulated
and off-loaded codfish worth about $1100 dockside, which Gene sold to
local restaurants for somewhat more.
I had my bad weeks betting, but I never made the mistake of the causal
bettor and looked for a way to get even quickly; I simply continued to
do my reading and to follow my instincts and my rules. A majority of
the losing bets I laid were due to my breaking one of those rules,
allowing myself to think of what I was doing as entertainment or sport,
as anything less than an avocation. Betting on sports can't be reduced
to a science, though you should begin by familiarizing yourself with
the percentages that pertain to every proposition. Being a successful
bettor requires the kind of application and passion that you would
bring to any discipline you're trying to master. I came to think of
betting in much the same way I thought about writing. When I started
writing, I tried to gather as much information about the process, I read
a great many books, but I did not overeducate myself, I did not study
the subject formally, because I knew this would smother my instincts,
and the instinctual choices one makes as a writer, their surety, is what
distinguishes good work from ordinary. When I took up betting, I
gathered information, I watched a great many athletic contests, but I
did not attempt to formalize the resultant knowledge. Becoming a
handicapper was the key to the success I had--it provided me a tangible
framework upon which to focus, like the beginning of a novel or an
article, and when I focused I brought to bear not only my informational
resources but also my instincts, and I made choices informed both by
sound research and a sense of what felt right within context of what I
absolutely knew--I learned to differentiate between anxiety and the
inner voice that tells you stop and think some more. Handicapping also
allowed me to gain an understanding of the motivations of the men who
set the Vegas lines, to recognize that there were occasions when they
set those lines not so as to generate a 50/50 split on either side of a
proposition, but for other reasons--reasons that had to do with their
reading of certain elements of the public mind. This is not to say that
pure percentage players cannot flourish--they do. My friend James T.,
the horseplayer, was a statistics junkie, and his plays were most often
based on analytical judgments. But as stated, I believe horse racing is
more suited to this sort of analysis than is sports betting in general.
The hybrid of method and instinct I employed is simply the way I managed
the problem and is not intended to be a template for other bettors,
though I imagine there are many people who might utilize a similar
approach with equal or better results. At the same time, not everyone
is suited to be a successful bettor, just as not everyone is cut out to
be a trapeeze artist or a sculptor or a dog trainer. It takes a certain
talent, the capacity to judge when patience is appropriate and when it
makes sense to be imprudent. If you don't have that talent, you're
going to be in a world of trouble.
In late 1991 I moved across country to Seattle, a city where I knew
almost no-one. My son's education had been taken care of, my financial
situation had improved, and the city did not appear to offer a
comfortable bar where gamblers might gather--it was a place of
yuppied-out microbreweries and sports bars. So I quit betting. It's
been nine years now since I made a serious bet. Once in a while I'll
see a line that looks tempting, and I'll get the urge to hunt up a
bookie. I have to admit I miss the action. I miss having a couple of
shots of good bourbon after a big night, while jotting the plus figures
in my ledger. I miss John C. flourishing his winnings, laughing, and
saying, "I shoulda bet more!" I've got another run left in me, I'm sure
of it. But I listen to my inner voice, I stop and think, and before
too long, the urge passes.
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