I knew a bookmaker who had a heart attack during the frantic end of a football game on television.
He stood as the point spread teetered on a pass slung
into the end zone with seconds left in the game, fell to his knees, his
wife and partner called 911 like that, and he lived to collect another
day.
The only time you would expect a bookmaker to even think
about experiencing chest pains is on settle-up night when somebody
might say listen, the dog ate the cash.
What does a bookmaker having a heart attack over a football game tell us?
That all is not as it seems in Palookaville.
People think that bookmakers make their money on the
commission charged against losing bets, which is true to a degree. But
the books on a game are not always balanced with half the bettors on
each side. Bookmakers frequently wind up betting against an
impressionable public because it's good business. The average person is
not always wrong; but some weekends it's close.
In subjective wagering, like sports betting or horse
handicapping, where an opinion is required to come up with a winner,
the obvious can be a thief.
To be a successful bookmaker, you have to trust the
line, which is to say that you are betting your livelihood that the
people who set point spread after point spread after point spread know
more than anybody except our Lord, who, to date, has never said a
single thing against wagering.
Say you are a bookmaker and here comes Super Bowl champ
New England going to play hapless Miami, hapless if you're a friend or
relative of a Dolphin player, hopeless, if you're objective: And
Patriots are only favored by 9! And here comes the money on New
England, hundred-dollar bettors wagering five times that, people ahead
two grand betting all and more. So what do you do? If you're relatively
new to the bookmaking business, you lay off the excess on New England
and keep your little 10 percent commission on the losers and buy the
kiddies a new puppy. But if you've been around a good while, you have a
nitroglycerine pill and let the sheep-like masses bring it with both
hands on New England. If you have learned to trust the people who make
point spreads more than you trust people who bet cash they can't afford
to lose, you take all the New England money the schmucks can scrape
together and let human nature take its course.
The impossible final score Dec, 20: Miami 29, New England 28; Hummers all around the bookie's household.
To be a successful horse handicapper in 2005, you have
to trust the numbers as well, the big numbers -- you have to trust that
the people making most of the favorites at the race track are the same
ones who unloaded on the Patriots over Miami, they're victims of the
obvious.
Anybody can play what's obvious at the horse races. You don't even need a pencil. All you need is a dollar or two.
The obvious is 6-5, it's 2-1; and it could lose as easily as it could win.
So there, the first unhealthy aspect of the obvious play at the horse races is that it doesn't pay enough.
As bad, it's not your pick. It's the program picker's
pick. The obvious is thoughtless. It's what people without a Form bet.
Many people have personalities that subconsciously put them onto
obvious bets, no matter the abilities of the animal or conditions of
the race. If you think you're at least slightly better than everybody
else, you're prone toward playing what's obvious, the favorites. Nobody
likes to say I'm comfortable playing underdogs because life has beaten
the hell out of me since I was 16.
You have to learn to play what's unobvious.
There are times when you can bet the obvious. That's
when your original thought trumps the tourists. I am at that wonderful
point where even thinking about losing money on what's obvious makes me
a little queasy.
It's all about trust.
Sometimes you really have to trust that the general public doesn't know what it's doing.
ESPN
