Thursday, September 02, 2004
Arizona Daily Wildcat - Consider the source: Poker great, but keep it a game - Thursday, September 2, 2004
Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
By Ryan Johnson
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Print this
You're on the button and you peek at your cards. You've got pocket rockets (i.e. two aces). A player in an early position two-bets, and you're trying to decide whether to slow play and raise the turn or to three-bet pre-flop.
After the first round of betting, players have a general idea (or at least a guess) of which players have the strong hands. Now it's time to deal some more cards. The strategies get more complex. A player bets a large stack. Does this player have a flush, or is he trying to "buy the pot" by scaring the other players away? You have four hearts, one of which is the ace. You remember all the previous moves this player made to try to get an idea of his playing style. You think he's bluffing. You call. Now the game becomes about probability. You have four hearts, including the ace, which means that if one more heart comes down, you win. With two cards to go, that means you have a 39 percent chance of getting a flush, plus you have your aces to fall back on if he bluffs, and there are enough chips in the pot to justify staying in.
The fifth heart hits. You've won the hand, and it brings an adrenaline rush. You high-five your friends.
This common scenario in the card game known as Texas Hold'em may sound like gibberish to the majority of people, but to the 41 percent of college students who play card games - according to a University of Minnesota study - it represents key strategic decisions.
Don't call poker a game of luck. This is an intense skill game that's also as fun as beer pong.
It is a game in which everything becomes a source of information. The way players react when they see their cards, their breathing patterns, but above all else, their eyes - unless, of course, they're wearing protective sunglasses.
Ryan Johnson
Columnist
How many sports can claim eyewear as a strategy?
That is why poker should be played in person. Playing online takes away so many elements and turns poker into something less than real poker, something akin to five-card draw machines.
Played in person, poker is a great game. It has simple rules that anyone can understand, but at the same time offers enough complexities to keep psychologists and statisticians forever studying it. Players can improve dramatically, but can never master it.
Poker players also want their game perceived as something more than just gambling. They shriek at those who put it in the same category as blackjack. And for the most part, it shouldn't be.
Hold'em is quickly becoming one of the most popular games among adults, a sort of grown man's Monopoly. But behind all the TV cameras and million-dollar payouts, is there a darker side? Unfortunately, the answer may be yes. Over five percent of college students become addicted to gambling, according to a Harvard Medical School Study.
Played the right way - meaning tournament-style - with friends, for small buy-ins and in a social setting, Hold'em makes for a fun and intellectually stimulating use of time.
But when it stops being a game and becomes gambling, poker rears its ugly head.
People are surprised at how fast it happens. For them, it may be that $5 buy-ins turn into $25 buy-ins, and then people are looking less to play with their friends and more to find high-stakes games. Now they're playing with people they've never met before for $100 buy-ins. Perhaps they try playing at a casino. And then perhaps they're there until 6 a.m., playing with the exact same 12 people who are there every day. At this point, it has become a problem.
The worst thing that can happen to a new poker player is to get on a winning streak. He wins $100 and says, "that could have been $1000." So he ups the stakes. He loses, and then probably loses some more. Pretty soon he's lost four digits. You can recognize these people fairly easily. They're the ones saying they did "OK," or were "up a little."
Played for high stakes, especially at casinos, poker turns from a game into something more than a game. Casinos actually take out the good parts of poker and replace them with money.
Pretty soon it's not much different than slots, an addictive draw that in the end sucks away all of your money.
What are players to do? Keep the skills and strategy to a maximum, but keep the betting to a minimum. Always play tournament-style, and avoid the casinos.
Bet with friends, bet with siblings. Heck, bet with parents.
But whatever you do, don't turn it into gambling.
Saying gambling is bad, and thus poker is bad is not a good position, but a line does need to be drawn. To condemn poker, it would be like condemning chess.
Tournament-style at my house. $5 buy-in. BYOB.
Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
By Ryan Johnson
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Print this
You're on the button and you peek at your cards. You've got pocket rockets (i.e. two aces). A player in an early position two-bets, and you're trying to decide whether to slow play and raise the turn or to three-bet pre-flop.
After the first round of betting, players have a general idea (or at least a guess) of which players have the strong hands. Now it's time to deal some more cards. The strategies get more complex. A player bets a large stack. Does this player have a flush, or is he trying to "buy the pot" by scaring the other players away? You have four hearts, one of which is the ace. You remember all the previous moves this player made to try to get an idea of his playing style. You think he's bluffing. You call. Now the game becomes about probability. You have four hearts, including the ace, which means that if one more heart comes down, you win. With two cards to go, that means you have a 39 percent chance of getting a flush, plus you have your aces to fall back on if he bluffs, and there are enough chips in the pot to justify staying in.
The fifth heart hits. You've won the hand, and it brings an adrenaline rush. You high-five your friends.
This common scenario in the card game known as Texas Hold'em may sound like gibberish to the majority of people, but to the 41 percent of college students who play card games - according to a University of Minnesota study - it represents key strategic decisions.
Don't call poker a game of luck. This is an intense skill game that's also as fun as beer pong.
It is a game in which everything becomes a source of information. The way players react when they see their cards, their breathing patterns, but above all else, their eyes - unless, of course, they're wearing protective sunglasses.
Ryan Johnson
Columnist
How many sports can claim eyewear as a strategy?
That is why poker should be played in person. Playing online takes away so many elements and turns poker into something less than real poker, something akin to five-card draw machines.
Played in person, poker is a great game. It has simple rules that anyone can understand, but at the same time offers enough complexities to keep psychologists and statisticians forever studying it. Players can improve dramatically, but can never master it.
Poker players also want their game perceived as something more than just gambling. They shriek at those who put it in the same category as blackjack. And for the most part, it shouldn't be.
Hold'em is quickly becoming one of the most popular games among adults, a sort of grown man's Monopoly. But behind all the TV cameras and million-dollar payouts, is there a darker side? Unfortunately, the answer may be yes. Over five percent of college students become addicted to gambling, according to a Harvard Medical School Study.
Played the right way - meaning tournament-style - with friends, for small buy-ins and in a social setting, Hold'em makes for a fun and intellectually stimulating use of time.
But when it stops being a game and becomes gambling, poker rears its ugly head.
People are surprised at how fast it happens. For them, it may be that $5 buy-ins turn into $25 buy-ins, and then people are looking less to play with their friends and more to find high-stakes games. Now they're playing with people they've never met before for $100 buy-ins. Perhaps they try playing at a casino. And then perhaps they're there until 6 a.m., playing with the exact same 12 people who are there every day. At this point, it has become a problem.
The worst thing that can happen to a new poker player is to get on a winning streak. He wins $100 and says, "that could have been $1000." So he ups the stakes. He loses, and then probably loses some more. Pretty soon he's lost four digits. You can recognize these people fairly easily. They're the ones saying they did "OK," or were "up a little."
Played for high stakes, especially at casinos, poker turns from a game into something more than a game. Casinos actually take out the good parts of poker and replace them with money.
Pretty soon it's not much different than slots, an addictive draw that in the end sucks away all of your money.
What are players to do? Keep the skills and strategy to a maximum, but keep the betting to a minimum. Always play tournament-style, and avoid the casinos.
Bet with friends, bet with siblings. Heck, bet with parents.
But whatever you do, don't turn it into gambling.
Saying gambling is bad, and thus poker is bad is not a good position, but a line does need to be drawn. To condemn poker, it would be like condemning chess.
Tournament-style at my house. $5 buy-in. BYOB.
The line danceThe line dance
By Carlos Frias
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 02, 2004
LAS VEGAS — Can you put a number on fun?
You can if you're in Vegas, baby, where every vice has a price. And if pro football is your bag, then the oddsmakers have got a couple of pretty little numbers for you.
First, there's nearly $1.9 billion, the amount that was wagered legally on sports in Nevada last year, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Bettors put $826 million on football alone.
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PRINT THIS
POPULAR PAGES Then there are the one or two digits next to your favorite NFL team in every day's newspaper during the season.
That's the line on the game.
It's a cryptic number that doesn't mean exactly what you might think.
The line is not a divination, a clairvoyant prediction of the exact number of points by which one team will defeat the other.
The line is a carrot. A temptation as alluring as the other sinful delights of Vegas, from the buffet at the Bellagio to the ding-ding-ding of a slot machine spitting out quarters.
The line calls to you from three-story high matrix boards in any of the fine casinos in Las Vegas, glowing in orange and lime green lights. It's sports theater-in-the-round, with dozens of televisions as high and far as the eye can see. And the line is the main attraction.
The line is there to tease your common sense, to tempt your loyalty. The line doesn't yell, it whispers to your subconscious: The Dolphins by 3 1/2 over the Bills? Why, my Dolphins are at least a touchdown better than Buffalo...
The line says, "Want to put a little money on that?"
Nostradamus called a good disaster, but he'd be lost on the Cowboys-Redskins over-under. Oddsmakers are sports junkies and numbers nerds who play the game on paper before the teams meet on the field.
They're not guessing who will win and by how much. They're trying to determine what line will encourage the most action on both sides of a game — what number might have Dolphins and Bills fans rushing to place a bet.
"My job isn't handicapping the game. My job is to handicap how the betting is going to go," said Bob Scucci, sports book manager at the Stardust Resort and Casino. "The more far off the bettors think the point spread is, the more they'll put on the game."
Whose line is it, anyway?
The line has many masters.
The numbers you see in the newspaper are only one set, usually those issued by the Stardust, traditionally the first of all Vegas casinos to post its NFL betting lines each week.
All the lines originate in Vegas, but each of the major casinos here may have a slightly different line.
Any of those lines can and are appropriated by illegal bookies across the country, where an estimated $30-to-100 billion is gambled illegally each year.
"The bottom line is we're trying to split the public, see if we can get you and your buddy (betting) on opposite sides," said Robert Walker, director of the MGM Mirage's sports book, where bettors can plunk down their money, watch the action play out on oversized screens, and agonize in cozy club chairs as cocktail waitresses keep the booze flowing.
The line Walker makes is shared by five other MGM properties: the MGM Grand, New York-New York, Treasure Island, the Bellagio and the Boardwalk.
That gives Walker, 43, a lot of clout in a town of big hitters. It's something he never imagined while working as a sports writer at the Tri-City Herald in his hometown of Pasco, Wash., covering his two younger brothers' baseball and basketball games in 1981 while he still was in college.
"I already had my dream job, but then I asked myself, 'Do I want to cover high school sports my entire life?' " Walker said.
Sports had been a refuge for a kid who bounced around schools — 17 since the fourth grade — as his father, Ed, a pipe fitter for nuclear plants, moved to follow the work.
Walker was rolling dice long before he hit the Vegas jackpot. After transferring to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas — changing his major four times, and finishing six years of college with no degree — Walker filed his last story for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and started writing tickets at the Santa Anita race and sports book.
Today he is one of the most influential oddsmakers in Vegas.
"It's like an adult Disneyland to me," he said.
Complete with characters, including the legendary Michael "Roxy'' Roxborough, who brought the oddsmaking industry from the back rooms to the boardrooms with his neat blond hair, pressed shirts, wire-rimmed glasses and a mathematical mind that replaced making numbers on gut feelings.
Now there are new Masters of the Line:
Walker, who sets the odds at six of Vegas' largest hotels. Scucci, 40, who sets the line for six hotels including the Stardust, where the first NFL line has appeared every Sunday for the past 29 years, moments after that week's games end. And Kenny White, 41, CEO of the firm Las Vegas Sports Consultants, whose line is used in anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of Nevada's 172 legal sports books.
Each man had a similar start: a sports background and an ability to decipher numbers faster than an MIT professor. They've all worked together, too, moving up from $50,000-a-year jobs as directors of small sports books to their six-figure careers at corporate-owned casinos.
Drawing the line
Making odds is a science. Making the line is an art born of experience.
White says he scored a 690 on the math section of the SAT in high school. On his first try. Without studying.
Numbers came easy to him, but it was his father who introduced him to sports betting.
White is a math whiz who has crunched statistics since he discovered them on the back of baseball cards. His father, now in his 70s, is a professional sports bettor, so astute at his trade that several Vegas casinos won't take his action.
White was born in New Jersey, grew up in Miami going to jai alai games and horse tracks, and moved with his family to Las Vegas after White's father was stiffed by a bookie. His father wanted to skip the illegal middle man and bet with the big boys. His mother took a job managing the cashiers at the old Dunes casino.
This only child couldn't help but be influenced. White's father, wanting to bet the over-under (the total score of the two teams combined) on a Cubs baseball game, would call his son from a sports book and tell him to call Chicago information to find out which way the wind was blowing.
White would look at a map, see which way Wrigley Field faced and be able to tell if the wind was blowing in or out. He called his father back so he could place the bet.
White was 12.
His father, like many oddsmakers, devised a system to rank players in all sports — a sort of power ranking for each team.
One day White came across a baseball card of Al Hrabosky of the St. Louis Cardinals. He used his father's information and formula to rank Hrabosky. He was amazed to see his ranking was higher than Hall of Fame pitcher Rollie Fingers. Then he saw the "Mad Hungarian'' pitch.
"I crunched the numbers, saw the guy was a stud and then saw on TV that he really was a stud," said White, who played baseball at Florida Southern and at Miami-Dade Community College before playing in the San Diego Padres' organization. "That just made me such a believer. I knew that guy was great before I saw him play."
His father's formulas became the basis for the line-making White does today.
All of Vegas' oddsmakers have their own power rankings. Most guard their formulas like family secrets.
White has a binder 4 inches thick with information on every player in the NFL. He ranks players from 0 to 6, according to size, experience, speed, strength and intangibles — does the player have exceptionally large hands, long arms or a huge vertical leap?
Injuries are a huge factor. If Brett Favre is having trouble with his thumb again, it's easily a point off the Packers. If he's out for Sunday's game, the Packers go from favorites to big underdogs.
The NFL knows professional handicappers covet this information. It's why they make public all injury reports and release daily lists of players who don't participate in practice, according to NFL spokesman Greg Aiello.
"As it relates to gambling, the injury report eliminates inside information that can be exploited," Aiello said.
Oddsmakers also take note of bad raps, such as Ricky Williams being prone to fumble because of his relatively small hands.
White adds up the numbers for every starter to give each team a power ranking that he can compare against the power ranking of another team. So the Dolphins might be a 183.5 and the Bills a 180. On a neutral field, according to Walker's formula, the Dolphins should be a 3 1/2 -point favorite.
The analysis doesn't end there. White has decades worth of information on each team; if the Packers, Vikings or Broncos are at home (they have the best home-field edge, White said), it could easily make them go from 1-point underdogs to favorites.
White also accounts for a team's performance the previous week and spends three hours adjusting his rankings every weekend. During the week he scours the Internet, reading ESPN and individual newspaper Web sites to check on injuries and the progress of players, and he even has developed contacts among beat writers.
"Coming up with the line is the easy part," White said. "Keeping up with it is tough."
White compares his numbers to the numbers of his seven other oddsmakers on staff. He takes the median number (not the average) and sends it to his clients, the sports book managers at the casinos.
The sports books don't rest with White's number. They use their own in-house oddsmakers to run their own power rankings for comparison.
"You really want a difference of opinion," the Stardust's Scucci said. "Nobody's going to be right 100 percent of the time."
Get in line
Scucci has a poker face in public. Just try to guess what's going on beneath that slick black hair, behind those jet-black eyes.
But when games are going on, you can hear yells and bangs behind his closed door at the Stardust.
Dents in Scucci's office wall reflect the pressure on the Stardust sports book manager. One mark is from a hockey puck hurled by former manager Joe Lupo during the Falcons-Broncos Super Bowl. When the Falcons failed on a two-point conversion, the Broncos won by 15 points, 34-19. The Stardust's line was 14. Denver covered and the house lost big.
Scucci definitely is playing with higher stakes than he could have imagined when he graduated from the University of Southern California's broadcast journalism school in 1986. Reading sports news and covering games for television and radio stations on the West Coast did not prepare him for the scrutiny of the Stardust.
"I've had people come to Vegas for the first time and they were surprised to learn other casinos had sports books," Scucci said. "They thought the Stardust was the only one."
Early on, organized crime ruled the underworld of sports gambling, and in 1950 it led to the government imposing a 10 percent tax on race books. Most of these stand-alone businesses went under, and from 1950 to 1975, hotels were prohibited from operating sports books.
Only the hard-core bettors stuck around, existing in cramped, dimly lit, cigar smoke-filled rooms on the fringe of Las Vegas entertainment.
In 1975, the government lifted the ban on hotel sports books and new legislation dropped the tax. The business of sports gambling boomed.
Leading the way is the Stardust, where bettors line up each Sunday to wage on the following week's games. "Ninety percent of them" are professional bettors, or "wise guys," Scucci said. "The other 10 percent are really good."
Being the first line makes Scucci strive for dead-on numbers. At about the start of the 4 p.m. (EST) games, Scucci and his assistant, Doug Castaneda, hole themselves up in Scucci's office and compare their numbers to White's.
"For me, this is exciting," said Scucci, whose family moved here in 1978. Both his parents worked in Vegas sports books. "The oddsmaking. Having action on every game. Every game means something."
Oddsmakers at each hotel can change the line depending on how much money is bet on a particular team. If all the bettors are taking the Dolphins to beat the Bills by 3 1/2, it's a sign to raise the line. Nirvana is reaching the point where there is equal betting on both teams, but that rarely happens.
"Every day there is going to be a weakness in the lines," Scucci said. "The professional bettor will find something to exploit. We try to reduce that as much as possible."
Casinos make up for losses in the sheer volume of bets they take and a commission called the "vigor."
Football bets are taken at 11-10 odds, meaning a bettor has to put down $11 to win $10. So, during the course of a year, even if the casino loses as many games as it wins, it sustains itself on that 1 percent vigor.
For a bettor to beat the house during the course of a year, Scucci said, they have to win 54 percent of their games. At 53 percent, they break even. And if they pick half the games right, "at 50 percent, you still lose for the year."
By Carlos Frias
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 02, 2004
LAS VEGAS — Can you put a number on fun?
You can if you're in Vegas, baby, where every vice has a price. And if pro football is your bag, then the oddsmakers have got a couple of pretty little numbers for you.
First, there's nearly $1.9 billion, the amount that was wagered legally on sports in Nevada last year, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Bettors put $826 million on football alone.
EMAIL THIS
PRINT THIS
POPULAR PAGES Then there are the one or two digits next to your favorite NFL team in every day's newspaper during the season.
That's the line on the game.
It's a cryptic number that doesn't mean exactly what you might think.
The line is not a divination, a clairvoyant prediction of the exact number of points by which one team will defeat the other.
The line is a carrot. A temptation as alluring as the other sinful delights of Vegas, from the buffet at the Bellagio to the ding-ding-ding of a slot machine spitting out quarters.
The line calls to you from three-story high matrix boards in any of the fine casinos in Las Vegas, glowing in orange and lime green lights. It's sports theater-in-the-round, with dozens of televisions as high and far as the eye can see. And the line is the main attraction.
The line is there to tease your common sense, to tempt your loyalty. The line doesn't yell, it whispers to your subconscious: The Dolphins by 3 1/2 over the Bills? Why, my Dolphins are at least a touchdown better than Buffalo...
The line says, "Want to put a little money on that?"
Nostradamus called a good disaster, but he'd be lost on the Cowboys-Redskins over-under. Oddsmakers are sports junkies and numbers nerds who play the game on paper before the teams meet on the field.
They're not guessing who will win and by how much. They're trying to determine what line will encourage the most action on both sides of a game — what number might have Dolphins and Bills fans rushing to place a bet.
"My job isn't handicapping the game. My job is to handicap how the betting is going to go," said Bob Scucci, sports book manager at the Stardust Resort and Casino. "The more far off the bettors think the point spread is, the more they'll put on the game."
Whose line is it, anyway?
The line has many masters.
The numbers you see in the newspaper are only one set, usually those issued by the Stardust, traditionally the first of all Vegas casinos to post its NFL betting lines each week.
All the lines originate in Vegas, but each of the major casinos here may have a slightly different line.
Any of those lines can and are appropriated by illegal bookies across the country, where an estimated $30-to-100 billion is gambled illegally each year.
"The bottom line is we're trying to split the public, see if we can get you and your buddy (betting) on opposite sides," said Robert Walker, director of the MGM Mirage's sports book, where bettors can plunk down their money, watch the action play out on oversized screens, and agonize in cozy club chairs as cocktail waitresses keep the booze flowing.
The line Walker makes is shared by five other MGM properties: the MGM Grand, New York-New York, Treasure Island, the Bellagio and the Boardwalk.
That gives Walker, 43, a lot of clout in a town of big hitters. It's something he never imagined while working as a sports writer at the Tri-City Herald in his hometown of Pasco, Wash., covering his two younger brothers' baseball and basketball games in 1981 while he still was in college.
"I already had my dream job, but then I asked myself, 'Do I want to cover high school sports my entire life?' " Walker said.
Sports had been a refuge for a kid who bounced around schools — 17 since the fourth grade — as his father, Ed, a pipe fitter for nuclear plants, moved to follow the work.
Walker was rolling dice long before he hit the Vegas jackpot. After transferring to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas — changing his major four times, and finishing six years of college with no degree — Walker filed his last story for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and started writing tickets at the Santa Anita race and sports book.
Today he is one of the most influential oddsmakers in Vegas.
"It's like an adult Disneyland to me," he said.
Complete with characters, including the legendary Michael "Roxy'' Roxborough, who brought the oddsmaking industry from the back rooms to the boardrooms with his neat blond hair, pressed shirts, wire-rimmed glasses and a mathematical mind that replaced making numbers on gut feelings.
Now there are new Masters of the Line:
Walker, who sets the odds at six of Vegas' largest hotels. Scucci, 40, who sets the line for six hotels including the Stardust, where the first NFL line has appeared every Sunday for the past 29 years, moments after that week's games end. And Kenny White, 41, CEO of the firm Las Vegas Sports Consultants, whose line is used in anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of Nevada's 172 legal sports books.
Each man had a similar start: a sports background and an ability to decipher numbers faster than an MIT professor. They've all worked together, too, moving up from $50,000-a-year jobs as directors of small sports books to their six-figure careers at corporate-owned casinos.
Drawing the line
Making odds is a science. Making the line is an art born of experience.
White says he scored a 690 on the math section of the SAT in high school. On his first try. Without studying.
Numbers came easy to him, but it was his father who introduced him to sports betting.
White is a math whiz who has crunched statistics since he discovered them on the back of baseball cards. His father, now in his 70s, is a professional sports bettor, so astute at his trade that several Vegas casinos won't take his action.
White was born in New Jersey, grew up in Miami going to jai alai games and horse tracks, and moved with his family to Las Vegas after White's father was stiffed by a bookie. His father wanted to skip the illegal middle man and bet with the big boys. His mother took a job managing the cashiers at the old Dunes casino.
This only child couldn't help but be influenced. White's father, wanting to bet the over-under (the total score of the two teams combined) on a Cubs baseball game, would call his son from a sports book and tell him to call Chicago information to find out which way the wind was blowing.
White would look at a map, see which way Wrigley Field faced and be able to tell if the wind was blowing in or out. He called his father back so he could place the bet.
White was 12.
His father, like many oddsmakers, devised a system to rank players in all sports — a sort of power ranking for each team.
One day White came across a baseball card of Al Hrabosky of the St. Louis Cardinals. He used his father's information and formula to rank Hrabosky. He was amazed to see his ranking was higher than Hall of Fame pitcher Rollie Fingers. Then he saw the "Mad Hungarian'' pitch.
"I crunched the numbers, saw the guy was a stud and then saw on TV that he really was a stud," said White, who played baseball at Florida Southern and at Miami-Dade Community College before playing in the San Diego Padres' organization. "That just made me such a believer. I knew that guy was great before I saw him play."
His father's formulas became the basis for the line-making White does today.
All of Vegas' oddsmakers have their own power rankings. Most guard their formulas like family secrets.
White has a binder 4 inches thick with information on every player in the NFL. He ranks players from 0 to 6, according to size, experience, speed, strength and intangibles — does the player have exceptionally large hands, long arms or a huge vertical leap?
Injuries are a huge factor. If Brett Favre is having trouble with his thumb again, it's easily a point off the Packers. If he's out for Sunday's game, the Packers go from favorites to big underdogs.
The NFL knows professional handicappers covet this information. It's why they make public all injury reports and release daily lists of players who don't participate in practice, according to NFL spokesman Greg Aiello.
"As it relates to gambling, the injury report eliminates inside information that can be exploited," Aiello said.
Oddsmakers also take note of bad raps, such as Ricky Williams being prone to fumble because of his relatively small hands.
White adds up the numbers for every starter to give each team a power ranking that he can compare against the power ranking of another team. So the Dolphins might be a 183.5 and the Bills a 180. On a neutral field, according to Walker's formula, the Dolphins should be a 3 1/2 -point favorite.
The analysis doesn't end there. White has decades worth of information on each team; if the Packers, Vikings or Broncos are at home (they have the best home-field edge, White said), it could easily make them go from 1-point underdogs to favorites.
White also accounts for a team's performance the previous week and spends three hours adjusting his rankings every weekend. During the week he scours the Internet, reading ESPN and individual newspaper Web sites to check on injuries and the progress of players, and he even has developed contacts among beat writers.
"Coming up with the line is the easy part," White said. "Keeping up with it is tough."
White compares his numbers to the numbers of his seven other oddsmakers on staff. He takes the median number (not the average) and sends it to his clients, the sports book managers at the casinos.
The sports books don't rest with White's number. They use their own in-house oddsmakers to run their own power rankings for comparison.
"You really want a difference of opinion," the Stardust's Scucci said. "Nobody's going to be right 100 percent of the time."
Get in line
Scucci has a poker face in public. Just try to guess what's going on beneath that slick black hair, behind those jet-black eyes.
But when games are going on, you can hear yells and bangs behind his closed door at the Stardust.
Dents in Scucci's office wall reflect the pressure on the Stardust sports book manager. One mark is from a hockey puck hurled by former manager Joe Lupo during the Falcons-Broncos Super Bowl. When the Falcons failed on a two-point conversion, the Broncos won by 15 points, 34-19. The Stardust's line was 14. Denver covered and the house lost big.
Scucci definitely is playing with higher stakes than he could have imagined when he graduated from the University of Southern California's broadcast journalism school in 1986. Reading sports news and covering games for television and radio stations on the West Coast did not prepare him for the scrutiny of the Stardust.
"I've had people come to Vegas for the first time and they were surprised to learn other casinos had sports books," Scucci said. "They thought the Stardust was the only one."
Early on, organized crime ruled the underworld of sports gambling, and in 1950 it led to the government imposing a 10 percent tax on race books. Most of these stand-alone businesses went under, and from 1950 to 1975, hotels were prohibited from operating sports books.
Only the hard-core bettors stuck around, existing in cramped, dimly lit, cigar smoke-filled rooms on the fringe of Las Vegas entertainment.
In 1975, the government lifted the ban on hotel sports books and new legislation dropped the tax. The business of sports gambling boomed.
Leading the way is the Stardust, where bettors line up each Sunday to wage on the following week's games. "Ninety percent of them" are professional bettors, or "wise guys," Scucci said. "The other 10 percent are really good."
Being the first line makes Scucci strive for dead-on numbers. At about the start of the 4 p.m. (EST) games, Scucci and his assistant, Doug Castaneda, hole themselves up in Scucci's office and compare their numbers to White's.
"For me, this is exciting," said Scucci, whose family moved here in 1978. Both his parents worked in Vegas sports books. "The oddsmaking. Having action on every game. Every game means something."
Oddsmakers at each hotel can change the line depending on how much money is bet on a particular team. If all the bettors are taking the Dolphins to beat the Bills by 3 1/2, it's a sign to raise the line. Nirvana is reaching the point where there is equal betting on both teams, but that rarely happens.
"Every day there is going to be a weakness in the lines," Scucci said. "The professional bettor will find something to exploit. We try to reduce that as much as possible."
Casinos make up for losses in the sheer volume of bets they take and a commission called the "vigor."
Football bets are taken at 11-10 odds, meaning a bettor has to put down $11 to win $10. So, during the course of a year, even if the casino loses as many games as it wins, it sustains itself on that 1 percent vigor.
For a bettor to beat the house during the course of a year, Scucci said, they have to win 54 percent of their games. At 53 percent, they break even. And if they pick half the games right, "at 50 percent, you still lose for the year."
