By Darren Johnson
Campus News
After a Supreme Court decision, states other than Nevada may now consider allowing legal sports betting. New Jersey was the first state to act on this new allowance, opening what are known as “sports books” in June. So far Monmouth’s race track and the Borgata in Atlantic City have such books, and the Meadowlands will have one operational on July 15, according to reports.
I’ve been to Las Vegas several times, including very recently, and am very familiar with sports books, though I don’t see what the big deal is. Your odds of winning are about 50-50 per bet, but payout is about 45-55. So, in other words, in order to make a profit, you need to pick 6 out of 10 games correctly consistently.
And therein lies the attraction. Unlike, say, a slot machine, where the outcome is random, a person may feel he/she knows if a team is going to “cover the spread” or not. Perhaps. for example, the bettor has read that Eli Manning is fighting an injury, and it’s supposed to rain and snow with gale force winds on game day, and the Giants are only +2 and are to play a hot Steelers team, which performs well in bad weather. That bettor may think the Steelers are a safe bet, plunk down $100 and, if the Giants lose by more than 2 points, he wins an additional $90.
OK, so why not win $100? That $10 is what is known as a vig. It’s how the casino makes its money.
In the long run, the casinos are exceptionally good at creating odds; for example, the Giants getting +2 above. What they are hoping for is to get 50% of people betting on each side of a contest, and then making the profit off of the vig. Sometimes, though, betting can be lopsided. In New Jersey, for example, where there are a lot of Giants fans, they may overwhelmingly and irrationally vote for the home team, and if that team covers the spread, the sports book will actually lose money.
Sports books also make money off of parlays — betting on multiple teams all with one bet. The odds are a lot longer, but the payout is better if one wins. Propositions are weird bets that are more random in nature — betting if the game’s coin flip will be heads or tails, for example.
It can be fun — if the sports book is an attractive place to hang out. One time in Vegas, while I was waiting for my daughter to come out of a Hannah Montana concert at the MGM, I hung out in the sports book and bet the winning team in the NFC Championship Game. It happened to be the Giants over the Packers. Pretty much the money I won meant that the concert tickets I had bought ended up being “free.”
Ultimately, sports betting is about betting on human beings. You even can bet on lowly NCAA teams few people have ever heard of — 18-year-olds, in essence, who are too young to gamble themselves; though it would be nice if the players actually got paid for all of their hard work and sacrifice for our entertainment.
And sports betting has been pretty common on the Internet for the past two decades, so this is nothing new.
What may ultimately happen is, sports books will open with much fanfare, and then the hullabaloo will die down and these places will start to resemble the worn out and outdated looking OTBs we see in every other near-abandoned strip mall, with only a few addicts making their days there. Like how non-addicted gamblers may visit an OTB once or twice a year for the Preakness or Belmont — getting in, betting, turning up their noses, and quickly getting out, going home to watch the event on TV — these sports books will have similar results; people may visit before the Super Bowl and the NCAA Finals, buy up some wager tickets for fun, and go home to watch the games.
These sports books really are not going to be that big of a deal, nor will they be a big profit-maker for state tax coffers. There are only so many dollars to go around, and, really, sports betting has been commonly available via the web, anyway, all this time, and there are myriad other gambling options in the Northeast, including a slew of new casinos. How will having a big wall of TVs playing obscure games from all over the world and LED odds tickers make it that much different?
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