The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers, and the Death of Their Las Vegas
Posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Product Description
“One wild read” (Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated) about a unique city trying to find itself–and about three gamblers who win, lose, and risk everything during the college basketball season.
One gambler is a manic former cokehead with an Ivy League degree. The second is a college dropout trying to make a living at the only thing he enjoyed at school–gambling. The third, one of Vegas’s most respected bookmakers, is perilously close to burning out. The Odds follows the lives of these three professional gamblers through a college basketball season in a one-of-a-kind city struggling to reconcile its lawless past with its family-friendly makeover. With a wiseguy attitude and a faultless eye and ear for the sights and sounds of Vegas and its denizens, Chad Millman has created a portrait that the Wall Street Journal called “fascinating… often screamingly funny.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal had just one word for the book: “Superb.”Amazon.com Review
For sports gamblers in Las Vegas, nobody cares who wins; it’s by how much that matters. In The Odds, Chad Millman follows three professional gamblers through a year of college basketball, where meticulous research, betting discipline, and instinct clash with addiction, and no one relaxes until they’ve lost it all.
The three colorful gamblers Millman expertly portrays are a high-rolling career “wiseguy,” a slacker wannabe, and a bookmaker who sets the lines on games (for example, Iowa over Indiana by 4-1/2 points, meaning if you bet on Iowa, you win only if Iowa wins by five points or more). The idea behind the betting line is to lure bets (hopefully, losing ones) and make a profit for his casino from the action, but more importantly to stay ahead of those who pounce on a weak line like hungry wolves. Millman provides the answer to what makes these wiseguys tick: “While the casual bettor weighs common sense and financial realities with every bet, the wiseguy pushes those aside… [his] battle isn’t with what makes sense; his battle is with anyone who gets in the way of making his bet a euphoric experience.”
Along with lurid details of what these gamblers do to feed their frenzy, Millman enriches us on gambling’s history and sobering statistics, on Vegas’s decline and the rise of offshore casinos, and on the effects of media coverage and politics on sports and gambling. While you won’t learn how to get rich off the next office pool, you will get an inside look at those who make or lose money on some kid’s buzzer-beater or a garbage-time lay-up. –Michael Ferch
betting football is neither less nor more “euphoric” than winning at chess, ping-pong, or the stock market: euphoria is absolutely tangential to bringing home the bacon.
as a winning NFL and NCAA football bettor, i can say emphatically, books which emphasize the “inevitability” of losing at the game only promote the mentality of losing to an elevation akin to destiny, or worse, fate.
the fault is not in our stars but ourselves, that we lose thus or thus.
i have known other winning players; i AM a winning player; you, however, are probably not a winner, and the author of this book is CERTAINLY NOT a winning player.
tlt.
Rating: 1 / 5
As someone who loves to go to Vegas once or twice a year, primarily to bet on sports, I thought I’d like this book, but, in my view, it was awful. The characters the author picked to study were not at all interesting, they were just scum — including the sports book managers. In fact, scum like this is why i avoid the Stardust like the plague. Scum like this is also why the NCAA wants Congress to ban betting on college sports, which will be a shame for those of us who aren’t scum and who just want to enjoy betting on college hoops or pigskins every now and then. This book is a downer and time-waster — avoid it like you’d avoid the Stardust sports book.
Rating: 1 / 5
i lived in vegas during this time and as a 23 year old sports gambler i can say the author could have done a better job describing the atmosphere and lifestlyes a little better than he did because he makes it sound too dreary, it is a lot better than that. other than that it was ok if u know nothing about betting in vegas.
Rating: 3 / 5
The author has picked exactly the wrong subjects to profile in this poorly written book. None of the subjects, each of whom has ventured to Vegas to beat the pointspread, comes off as much more than a sick addict who is walking – tired stereotype alert! – life’s tightrope. Though most sports bettors know that beating the spread is less likely than becoming a leading man in Hollywood (some bookies swear not a single customer in decades has done it) Millman fails to provide meaningful insight into the gamblers’ methods or approach, other than to suggest that they simply throw darts or rely on feel or analzye the games any better than your average tavern fan. The result is a portrait of uninteresting men engaged in a sloppy attempt at something potentially fascinating. The one bettor who seems to have made huge money at his craft is also presented as an undisciplined wild man – a situation that, in reality, never results in the kind of winning seasons Millman suggests of the man’s past. Did this man change his system? Did he alter his approach? Did his psychology change? Millman never tells us, and worse, we get the sense that he didn’t know enough to ask the question. The result is a lingering feeling that the author either was too lazy to investigate and explain the most important and interesting parts of the gambler’s being, or worse, didn’t realize that this stuff mattered.
The writing in the book is awful. That is, unless you adore similes, in which case, there are mountains of them. Bad ones, too. Skip this book, like you would skip a stone.
Rating: 1 / 5
Indifferently written and poorly edited, this brief book about three sports gamblers in Las Vegas never really lives up to its potential. There are a few interesting details and insider tidbits here and there, but on the whole, the enterprise feels a bit rushed and incomplete. Millman tries to mix a broad overview of the history of sports gambling with the individual stories of three men over the course of the 1999-2000 football and basketball seasons, but ends up giving short shrift to both.
We get a shallow history of how sports gambling’s shady roots, gradual move into the light in Vegas, its meteoric rise over the last several decades, and in recent years its near total transition to internet operations based in the Caribbean. Millman continually implies that the increase availability of televised sports-especially via ESPN-was the direct cause of increased sports gambling. But then he also continually implies that increased viewership and ratings have been due to increased interest in sports from casual sports bettors. This is kind of a chicken and egg type argument, and since neither position is backed up by anything other than anecdotal data, its hard to lend either much credence. Still, even though his larger themes aren’t particularly well thought out, Millman does better at explaining some of the details of sports wagering. The most important of these is “the line,” which he explains as not how much better one team is than another, but rather as a number that will attract maximum betting on both sides. A “weak” line is one that “wiseguys” (professional sports gamblers) think is drastically wrong and worth putting a lot of money on, which then causes the line to “move”. As in any industry or subculture, there’s plenty of insider slang for Millman to spread around and keep things somewhat lively.
Millman builds his investigation of Vegas sports betting around three men: a high-roller “wiseguy”, a wannabe newcomer to the scene from Indiana, and a young bookmaker on the fast track at The Stardust. Unfortunately, none of them come across as all that interesting individuals. The high-roller is kind of manic and obsessive, the wannabe is a pothead loser, and the bookmaker gets lost in the shuffle as Millman concentrates on his higher profile bosses who have a lot more stories to tell. And while Millman tries hard to show the adversarial relationship between bettors and bookmakers as a cunning battle of wits between men who are both obsessive and honorable, it never really comes across as anything more than pathetic. Millman’s tries hard to summon some reader sympathy for the “end of an era,” as sports betting moves online, but since none of the old-timers seems particularly happy, we’re left to wonder why we should be particularly bothered. All in all, a disappointing book.
Rating: 2 / 5