I worked for a while at a convenience store, and th enumber of people that would come in, buy 10 $5 scratch tickets, go out to their car (or worse, scratch them on the counter!), come back in with about $20 in "winnings", convert those into more tickets, and then repeat the cycle until they hit a run that didn't win. Then they'd go to the ATM, take out another $50 and start over again, wasting about an hour in the process.
Same is true of Keno, where there's a drawing every 5 minutes or so and it's generally in bars, so you have drunks gambling it away.
Well, a sportsbook at some level has to guess the way the money will fall in order to get their 50/50 split. Most of them outsource the basic research to a few consultants (Las Vegas Sports Consultants is one) and then adjust based on the way their betting is going (allowing for the pack mentality that dominates the sportsbook industry, because line differences tend to be raped by gamblers and breed even more imbalance... if you liked the Rams giving 2.5, you'll love them giving only 2).
The main risk is in college sports, where there's no salary to be lost (and so few of the college players have a shot at a pro career that would be damaged by a point-shaving scandal).
No gambler in the world has enough money to pay Shaq to throw an NBA game.
Sports gambling is alluring because the more familiar you are with the sport, the better the odds are that you'll pick the winner (Who would you bet on? Notre Dame or South Dakota State?)
In theory, handicap betting eliminates some of that. Not knowing much about either school (I don't really follow college football... NFL is more my style), I'd conservatively say that the line in Notre Dame/SD St. would be something like Notre Dame giving 21 points. With a line like that, a rational observer may be tempted to take the points and run.
Of course, books are generally unwilling, except in extreme cases, to spot one team multiple touchdowns. Even the Bengals last year were never more than 13.5 point underdogs (the only multi-touchdown line I can recall from last year in the NFL was Philly giving 19.5 to Houston, and betting on Houston was the smart thing; that was one of many "the Texans aren't as bad as the betting public thinks" plays that I made last year).
And sports betting, especially of the online variety, doesn't have the problems that you list. There's no mob influence (at least at the major books... the mob may be involved in fly-by-night operations, but if you bet with a fly-by-night book, you deserve everything you get; choose your book like you'd choose your bank). And it's far from the likes of casinos or lotteries (especially scratch tickets) in terms of instant gratification; you wait at least a couple of hours between when you place a bet and when you know whether you won (and it's generally not until a couple of hours after that that your winnings are paid out to allow you to bet again).
In addition, unlike the casinos, the online books aren't pouring liquor down your throat to alter your judgement.
"Bookie" is the friendly nickname of sorts for "bookmaker", the term for the operation that takes and records the bets (along with setting the betting line).
Not trying to be a prick, but I'd love to see that. It wouldn't shock me, but it's the first I've heard of it. The story made the guy look clean, although that doesn't prove a general case.
Back in the days when it was a neighborhood operation, the mob would run protection from the police and when it was very heavily margin betting (ie borrowing money from the bookie to make the bets), the mob would be the collection agency (if they didn't shark the loan already).
In the last 15 years or so, thanks to telecom and the offshore books, the Mob is nowhere near as involved as they used to be (and most of the online books don't deal in extending credit; it's far too difficult to collect when you're two thousand miles away).
Number one reason sports betting is nog going to be legalized in the US:
It will kill the state lotteries.
Why? Look at the vig on sports betting versus lotteries (the vig is the amount the bettor can expect to lose and is the difference between the money returned by a winning bet and the actual probability of winning). For a typical Vegas-style bet on football against the spread or on an over-under, here's basically the way it works:
A line is set. For instance, tonight's preseason game between the Rams and Bucs has a line of "Rams - 2.5". A bet on the Rams means that, after deducting 2.5 points from their score, you are betting on them to win; a bet on the Bucs is a bet on them to win if 2.5 points is added to their score. Thus a bet on the Rams loses and a bet on the Bucs wins if the score is Rams 35, Bucs 33. Bets (assuming standard Vegas payouts, though many times the payout rates will be adjusted to encourage betting on one side or the other) are paid out on an 11-10 basis, i.e., you're betting 11 to gain 10.
The house will thus (if an equal amount of money is bet on both sides) make a $1 profit on every $22 bet (ie 4.5%).
Now, contrast this with a state lottery. In Massachusetts, 50% of the bet is the state tax on lotteries. An additional 10% of what's left is taken by the lottery as their share, for administrative expenses. Thus only 40% of the money bet on any given game will be returned to bettors in the form of winnings. These figures are not significantly different from state to state.
The end-result of this is that you only need to be right (or lucky) 53% of the time to make a profit betting on sports (when, picking totally randomly, you would be right 50% of the time), but you need to be right 2.5 times as often as random selections would be in order to reasonably expect to break even in a lottery.
One of the great appeals of sports betting is the better odds of making a profit doing it. Indeed, Oregon tried a few years ago to create a "sports lottery", which was sports betting but with payout rates similar to the lottery. No one bet with it.
There's a major difference in the way that deregulation has been done in the electrical industry versus the telecom industry, which makes the ILEC/CLEC debacles unlikely.
The ILEC/CLEC thing is a retail deregulation, while the power dereg has, for the most part, been on the wholesale (and bulk retail, which is basically the same business) end. The way dereg has worked, you still get a bill from at least a de facto if not de jure monopoly; however, they buy the electricity from other providers. This is more like how ISPs buy bandwidth from a variety of Tier One ISPs and retail it to their customers than the ILEC/CLEC model.
I liked Sierra/Dynamix's entry: the Front Page Sports: Football Pro series. It was much better from a fantasy league standpoint (actual fantasy league, not this rotisserie bullshit); indeed, even though they haven't made it in years, I actually belong to an FPS league, The Fantasy World League, which is populated largely by former World League and NFL Europe players.
IIRC, Madden (well, his company, Goal Line) makes around $10 in royalties for every copy sold new ($5 for the classic editions which retail for $20).
He makes about $3 million a year from ABC for MNF (plus the expenses of the Madden Cruiser); not bad for less than 100 hours of work a year (He does 18.33 broadcasts per year (17 regular season games, 1 playoff, and every third Super Bowl) with a normal length of 3 hours.
Endorsements aren't as lucrative as they were (when he was on CBS, he was one of the top endorsers out there), but probably good for about a million a year.
Royalties from EA probably come to another $5 million a year.
Yeah, they lost power out at Six Flags for a bit. Downtown Springfield was ok, though (I called my dad at his office fine).
On a related note, one of my dad's projects is to get Groening's approval to build a museum dedicated to the Simpsons (to go with the Dr. Seuss museum and the Basketball Hall of Fame).
At least the Sox pulled it off in extra innings to split the series with the A's.
This year's team just seems to do something to stop the bleeding before it gets too bad... of course, then after a couple of excellent weeks, they'll go into another dive.
I tell you, I'd almost rather be a Cubs fan... at least with the Cubs, you don't have an expectation of them coming close to the prize.
Slashdot Mirror
Audis are horrible looking... give me a new Cadillac any day.
Art & Science: what better way to describe GNOME?
If I was in California, I'd vote for her. Decent policies and better looking than the other candidates.
What's not to like?
Excellent work, gazbo. I commend you!
Never seen scratch tickets, eh?
I worked for a while at a convenience store, and th enumber of people that would come in, buy 10 $5 scratch tickets, go out to their car (or worse, scratch them on the counter!), come back in with about $20 in "winnings", convert those into more tickets, and then repeat the cycle until they hit a run that didn't win. Then they'd go to the ATM, take out another $50 and start over again, wasting about an hour in the process.
Same is true of Keno, where there's a drawing every 5 minutes or so and it's generally in bars, so you have drunks gambling it away.
Well, a sportsbook at some level has to guess the way the money will fall in order to get their 50/50 split. Most of them outsource the basic research to a few consultants (Las Vegas Sports Consultants is one) and then adjust based on the way their betting is going (allowing for the pack mentality that dominates the sportsbook industry, because line differences tend to be raped by gamblers and breed even more imbalance... if you liked the Rams giving 2.5, you'll love them giving only 2).
The main risk is in college sports, where there's no salary to be lost (and so few of the college players have a shot at a pro career that would be damaged by a point-shaving scandal).
No gambler in the world has enough money to pay Shaq to throw an NBA game.
If you want free booze, you can go to Vegas and bet at Caesar's...
P.S., I certainly hope you're promoting bookiejoint in this story... ;o)
In theory, handicap betting eliminates some of that. Not knowing much about either school (I don't really follow college football... NFL is more my style), I'd conservatively say that the line in Notre Dame/SD St. would be something like Notre Dame giving 21 points. With a line like that, a rational observer may be tempted to take the points and run.
Of course, books are generally unwilling, except in extreme cases, to spot one team multiple touchdowns. Even the Bengals last year were never more than 13.5 point underdogs (the only multi-touchdown line I can recall from last year in the NFL was Philly giving 19.5 to Houston, and betting on Houston was the smart thing; that was one of many "the Texans aren't as bad as the betting public thinks" plays that I made last year).
Guaranteed 3% of a few hundred thousand each day, 7x365? I'll gladly take that, thank you very much.
It certainly seems legal.
And sports betting, especially of the online variety, doesn't have the problems that you list. There's no mob influence (at least at the major books... the mob may be involved in fly-by-night operations, but if you bet with a fly-by-night book, you deserve everything you get; choose your book like you'd choose your bank). And it's far from the likes of casinos or lotteries (especially scratch tickets) in terms of instant gratification; you wait at least a couple of hours between when you place a bet and when you know whether you won (and it's generally not until a couple of hours after that that your winnings are paid out to allow you to bet again).
In addition, unlike the casinos, the online books aren't pouring liquor down your throat to alter your judgement.
"Bookie" is the friendly nickname of sorts for "bookmaker", the term for the operation that takes and records the bets (along with setting the betting line).
"Don't make book if you cannot cover bets."
Back in the days when it was a neighborhood operation, the mob would run protection from the police and when it was very heavily margin betting (ie borrowing money from the bookie to make the bets), the mob would be the collection agency (if they didn't shark the loan already).
In the last 15 years or so, thanks to telecom and the offshore books, the Mob is nowhere near as involved as they used to be (and most of the online books don't deal in extending credit; it's far too difficult to collect when you're two thousand miles away).
Number one reason sports betting is nog going to be legalized in the US:
It will kill the state lotteries.
Why? Look at the vig on sports betting versus lotteries (the vig is the amount the bettor can expect to lose and is the difference between the money returned by a winning bet and the actual probability of winning). For a typical Vegas-style bet on football against the spread or on an over-under, here's basically the way it works:
The house will thus (if an equal amount of money is bet on both sides) make a $1 profit on every $22 bet (ie 4.5%).
Now, contrast this with a state lottery. In Massachusetts, 50% of the bet is the state tax on lotteries. An additional 10% of what's left is taken by the lottery as their share, for administrative expenses. Thus only 40% of the money bet on any given game will be returned to bettors in the form of winnings. These figures are not significantly different from state to state.
The end-result of this is that you only need to be right (or lucky) 53% of the time to make a profit betting on sports (when, picking totally randomly, you would be right 50% of the time), but you need to be right 2.5 times as often as random selections would be in order to reasonably expect to break even in a lottery.
One of the great appeals of sports betting is the better odds of making a profit doing it. Indeed, Oregon tried a few years ago to create a "sports lottery", which was sports betting but with payout rates similar to the lottery. No one bet with it.
Unfortunately, the technology is developed for Carling, which is utter piss.
Actually the reason why no software house will produce bug-free products is that, beyond trivial things that are provably correct, it's impossible.
Jesus Christ, you're an idiot. Read the fucking article (not the links, the Slashdot article). It's right there in the first line.
I'd mod you down (I have the points), but I think it'd be better to point this out to any other mods so they can mod this bozo's post to -1.
There's a major difference in the way that deregulation has been done in the electrical industry versus the telecom industry, which makes the ILEC/CLEC debacles unlikely.
The ILEC/CLEC thing is a retail deregulation, while the power dereg has, for the most part, been on the wholesale (and bulk retail, which is basically the same business) end. The way dereg has worked, you still get a bill from at least a de facto if not de jure monopoly; however, they buy the electricity from other providers. This is more like how ISPs buy bandwidth from a variety of Tier One ISPs and retail it to their customers than the ILEC/CLEC model.
I liked Sierra/Dynamix's entry: the Front Page Sports: Football Pro series. It was much better from a fantasy league standpoint (actual fantasy league, not this rotisserie bullshit); indeed, even though they haven't made it in years, I actually belong to an FPS league, The Fantasy World League, which is populated largely by former World League and NFL Europe players.
IIRC, Madden (well, his company, Goal Line) makes around $10 in royalties for every copy sold new ($5 for the classic editions which retail for $20).
He makes about $3 million a year from ABC for MNF (plus the expenses of the Madden Cruiser); not bad for less than 100 hours of work a year (He does 18.33 broadcasts per year (17 regular season games, 1 playoff, and every third Super Bowl) with a normal length of 3 hours.
Endorsements aren't as lucrative as they were (when he was on CBS, he was one of the top endorsers out there), but probably good for about a million a year.
Royalties from EA probably come to another $5 million a year.
At least you're a New Yorker with sense; you moved to Boston, which is like New York only better in every possible way.
;o)
Yeah, they lost power out at Six Flags for a bit. Downtown Springfield was ok, though (I called my dad at his office fine).
On a related note, one of my dad's projects is to get Groening's approval to build a museum dedicated to the Simpsons (to go with the Dr. Seuss museum and the Basketball Hall of Fame).
At least the Sox pulled it off in extra innings to split the series with the A's.
This year's team just seems to do something to stop the bleeding before it gets too bad... of course, then after a couple of excellent weeks, they'll go into another dive.
I tell you, I'd almost rather be a Cubs fan... at least with the Cubs, you don't have an expectation of them coming close to the prize.
What has Toronto won?
The Leafs have been pitiful for decades. The Raptors haven't done shit. Who cares enough about the Argonauts to care if they win the Grey Cup?
The only other thing I can think of is when the Blue Jays won the World Series, but I didn't think Toronto was that into baseball...
Argh... proofread before posting...
Make the last bit: the residents say, "We think wind power is a great idea, but this wind farm will ruin the views of the water."