Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Bettor Days

You have read my carping about the obvious and subtle impact that big business, advertising and network television have on sports. But at least this influence, or most of it, is reasonably above board. The fight between the NFL and the big cable companies is splashed over the sports and financial pages. If you don’t like it, you can always write your Congressman.

Readers have pointed out to me that gambling is probably the black hole that most warps the space-time continuum of athletics. As with Rick’s Café in Casablanca, we should not be shocked to learn that gambling occurs on the premises -- or that it involves huge sums of money, often in less than savory hands. The professional and college sports establishments are well aware of the risks. To give one obvious example: the NFL feels compelled to issue injury reports every week, with players rated from “probable” to “out” – not for the benefit of ordinary Joe Fan but to dissuade gamblers from looking to beg, borrow or steal inside information about a team’s health. Pete Rose is banned for life for baseball’s equivalent of the sin against the Spirit, which cannot be forgiven. Paul Horning and Alex Karras, then arguably the best offensive and defensive players in the NFL, were banned for one season in 1963 for betting on football. (Horning played for Vince Lombardi, for God’s sake.) Point shaving scandals, involving a few individuals, surface once every decade or so in college basketball.

One strongly suspects that another Black Sox scandal, probably worse – the corruption of entire teams or officiating crews or even league offices – is lurking not far below the surface. There is too much money to be made in too many ways. Too many shady figures surround today’s athletes. Michael Konik, who has written several books on gambling, describes one tip of the iceberg.

The Brain Trust [is] a shadowy cabal of gamblers who wager enormous amounts of money on sports events, using a supercomputer and a SWAT team of injury and weather experts to take advantage of minor discrepancies in the point spreads set up by the Vegas linemakers. It’s a multimillion-dollar business — and legal — but there’s a wrinkle: they like to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars per game, and whenever the casinos sniff out betting syndicates like the Brain Trust, they show them the door in a heartbeat. That’s because in addition to risking huge losses each week, the bookmakers are forced to adjust their betting lines — sometimes by two or three points for a football game — whenever the “smart money” wades in, since they desperately need other customers to bet the other side to balance their action and stand a chance of making money.

The Brain Trust and its like manipulate the point spread the way hedge funds and currency speculators jigger the stock market – or the famous MIT blackjack team card- counted its way to fame and fortune in the casinos. Such creativity with such high stakes won’t be limited to the front parlor of Rick’s Café.

Discussions - 1 Comment

I can’t see how the Braintrust or the MIT blackjack team(system) can be made out to be villans. Casinos and bookmakers have such incredible advantages that I always cheer for those who are trying to come up with intelligent ways to beat the house, it is essentially American in the highest sense. You take the worst of it...and then figure out how to structure your actions and prioritize competing concepts so as to gain an edge. Most Casino games despite what nefarious authors of schemes and strategy books say have no long term positive expectations... the truest type of gambling is the lottery... gambling itself is a bad habit and evil...because it is hopeing to get lucky against reason. Games like Poker(provided the game is loose and the rake is small relative to the blind structure) and Blackjack(with blackjack theory+card counting+knowledgable players who won’t screw up the order) and sports betting with a true knowledge of relevant factors all hold out the promise of true positive expectations.

Somebody please explain to me why forms of gambling that are actually marginally intelligent(i.e. poker, blackjack and sports betting) are actually under so much fire from politicians...while state lotteries which produce incredible amounts of vice are lauded as admirable.

Creativity with high stakes is actually the height of virtue... blindly playing the lottery is incredibly evil and destructive.

Seriously...if you want to know something about the "libertarian" center...you should know that this is the group that plays poker and blackjack and bets on sports(albeit this is usually incredibly foolish, given that you need to win at least 62% of all bets to break even)

I would love to know why republicans who should rightfully be sceptical of gambling...have succumbed to an inversion of values in targeting forms of gambling that at least hold out the possibility of positive expectations and thus rational behavior.

God bless the smart money!

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