Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Richie Schwartz says he's not interested in the NCAA tournament, and while that's oddly refreshing in the current firestorm of hoop hype, it further stands as a rather amazing statement, considering the source.
For a gambler with Schwartz's pedigree to pass on tournament action seems jarringly counter-intuitive; it's like trying to imagine a wolf passing up a pork chop.
"I prefer games that are played every three or four nights, pro basketball, not this tournament where everything is happening so fast, with young kids, and they're very emotional, no," Schwartz said flatly at a downtown hotel yesterday.
Right. Who needs it?
Not when you've won more than a million dollars betting on sports.
"Yeah, you could say a million or more," he said. "I'm not saying the exact figure."
I got the feeling it was closer to the more than to the million.
Richie Schwarz is from New York, and though his gambling aptitudes have brought him bursts of publicity over several decades, he's still a little skittish about the attention. The things he wants people to know are the things that tend to position him more conventionally than the balance of his amazing story would suggest.
He got a math degree from Michigan in 1965. Worked in the defense industry as a mathematical analyst for a few years. Right about there, the story veers off like a runaway horse, appropriately enough. This was years before he took up competitive bridge and won five national titles, which is what he's doing in town this week, playing in the North American Bridge Championships.
"A trainee came into the place I was working, Airborne Industrial Laboratories," he remembered. "I was just above a trainee myself. I was in charge of some project. I was just another guy in a suit and tie, and this trainee picks up the phone one day in the office and starts talking about a race at Yonkers. So, one day I went up to Yonkers with him, and it seems like he knows some people, the big bettors, guys betting thousands of on each race. It turned out the trainee got fired at work, but I always felt that I owed that guy, that he got me to go in the right direction."
What was right about it wasn't evident at the time, but that's because Schwarz didn't know he'd eventually discover that he had a latent aptitude for evaluating the arcane and viciously nuanced work of race handicappers, specifically for reading the kind of handicapping sheets pioneered by Len Ragozin, which take into account track variations, weights, wind resistance, trainers, and, perhaps most important to Schwarz, an animal's energy expenditure rating.
"What I discovered was, at least this is what they told me," Schwarz said, "was that I could read these things better than anyone who'd ever used them. They say that 'the sheets' will make a blind man see, but this wasn't something I invented. I could just see the patterns in them."
Schwarz compares this cognitive gift to that of a piano prodigy's, and it's a testament to how hard he worked refining it that his theories and successes (he's hit on several Pick Sixes in his track life) have now contributed to Cary Fotias' ground-breaking handicapping text, "Blinkers Off." In that volume, with the backing of Schwarz and Dr. William Ziemba, who taught management science at the University of British Columbia, Fotias' posits to take handicapping "beyond the sheets," by examining a animal's running style, the race's pace demand, the distance, the surface, the track bias, and the process of determining amount of energy the animal has to distribute.
Schwartz "retired" from that game along about the time he started to get serious about competing at the highest levels of bridge, but his gift for seeing the foreshadowing qualities of numbers has surfaced in virtually every application he's bumped up against.
"A guy told me once how to bet jai-alai," he said yesterday. "I didn't believe it could be that simple, but, when I started looking at the results, I was finding a pattern in the numbers. I won, I don't know what, 30, 40 thousand on jai alai."
The guy makes you want to pull out numbers, just in case. I wondered if I showed him the juxtaposed numbers reflecting minutes in travel delays endured by Pitt's basketball team, its free-throw percentage, and the figure in square inches of the bald spot on Jamie Dixon's head, could he tell me, you know, something.
Instead I said something pointedly pointless.
"Good luck in the tournament."
Yeah, like he needs it.
