How Much Money The Las Vegas Sports Book Made Super Bowl 2017
The Super Bowl of Sports Gambling
David Frohardt-Lane, a fiscal trader from Chicago and a participant in the SuperContest.
Credit... Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times-
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David Frohardt-Lane, a financial trader from Chicago and a participant in the SuperContest.
Credit... Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times
Vegas Runner strode into the sports book of the Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, a fatty diamond stud glittering in his left earlobe. Moving through the clangorous room as though it belonged to him, he reached a bar tabular array where his friend R. J. Bell was waiting and flashed a smile. "My human!" Vegas Runner bellowed.
It was mid-December, Week 15 of the National Football League flavor, and the two men needed to talk through that Sunday's matchups. Vegas Runner, 42, whose name is Gianni Karalis and who is known around town as Five. R., bantered and swaggered and generally looked the office of a reality-testify professional gambler — glinting eyes, a trim goatee and heavily gelatinous black hair. R. J., who is 43, was earnest and groomed. He wore black slacks and a dress shirt and spoke with the quick, stat-supported assurance of a quant who graduated at the top of his course in the finance department at Ohio State University.
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"Give me the games you're leaning toward, and I'll counterpunch," R. J. said.
"Washington-Atlanta," 5. R. said.
They looked up toward the front of the room, where a behemothic electronic board showed the Washington Redskins as six.5-point underdogs to the Atlanta Falcons. This seemed to make sense: The Redskins had a 3-ten record and had lost their last five games. The squad had merely benched its star quarterback, Robert Griffin III, and the firing of the head jitney, Mike Shanahan, was imminent. Nigh gamblers predicted a solid Redskins loss.
R. J. and 5. R. weren't so sure. The Falcons as well had a woeful 3-10 record. The benching of Griffin was assumed to exist devastating, merely his backup, Kirk Cousins, was highly capable. Plus R. J. had talked to a former Due north.F.L. quarterback who said that the possibility of new direction was frequently motivating for a squad. "It's like in the corporate environment when they sell the company, and the new guys with clipboards come in," R. J. said. "Y'all're not going to take a long lunch so, right?" After reviewing these and other factors, V. R. and R. J. decided that they should "fade the public" — go against prevailing opinion — and option the Redskins. "I love that," R. J. said. "Best bet of the week."
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V. R. and R. J., working together as TeamVR, were making their picks for the Las Vegas Hotel & Casino SuperContest, the world'southward pre-eminent football game-handicapping tournament. The rules were uncomplicated. Later on paying an entry fee of $1,500, each squad chose five football game games per calendar week and made picks confronting the signal spread. (If the Minnesota Vikings were listed at +ten.5 against the Dallas Cowboys, for instance, the Cowboys needed to win the game by 11 points or more than for gamblers who picked them to triumph.) Competitors got one point for every game they called right and a half-point for every tie. At the end of the regular season, the pinnacle finishers won a share of a $1.5 million payout. The purse was enticing, only so were the bragging rights that came with finishing high in the standings — the SuperContest is to sports bettors what the Earth Series of Poker is to carte sharks. Equally a sports handicapper named Ted Sevransky told me, "You are literally going upwardly against the best in the world."
V. R. and R. J. periodically looked upwards at the 31 cinema-scale screens displaying a brilliant collage of races and games. Dogs and horses sprinted around tracks, men and women ran up and down basketball courts, football players launched themselves into one another. It was virtually impossible to focus on any one game, but occasionally someone in the crowd would jump up auspicious or swearing in response to something that affected whether they would win coin or lose it. There were hundreds of gamblers in the room. Jersey-wearing fans lounged in long rows of leather piece of cake chairs; hunched-over men sat at wooden carrels, like those in a academy library, and scribbled out columns of figures. Breakfast was barely over, and the place was packed.
Four years ago, the SuperContest was a minor affair with a few hundred competitors, nigh of them serious gamblers in Vegas. This twelvemonth'southward field was made up of more than 1,000 entrants from around the country, a tiny fraction of the millions who spend a significant corporeality of time and coin betting on sports — not just in Vegas but in fantasy leagues and office pools, and from computers, tablets and phones. Past the opening commencement of the Super Bowl, sports books in Nevada are expected to crack $100 million in wagers, the most that has e'er been bet on a single game.
At that place is no greater unifier in American culture than professional person football, which is followed past 68 per centum of men and 42 percent of women — Republicans and Democrats in equal numbers. Game telecasts deemed for nine of the 10 most-watched programs in 2013, and the previous three Super Bowls were the most-viewed tv set programs of all time in the United States.
The enormous amounts of attention now being paid to the prevalence of concussions among players and the tragic long-term health risks hasn't diminished football'southward popularity at all. The televised games are gladiatorial spectacles, overlain with obsessive strategic assay. You don't and then much watch a football game as mind to experts dissect it. Vital to its popularity is the fact that the game'southward complexity generates reams of statistics, which hard-cadre fans accept always devoured. But in a earth where everything — politics and practice, nutrition and recreational time — has been transformed past the notion that slavishly crunched metrics tin reveal deeper truths about our inclinations, lives and the future, every fan with a smartphone can now be an expert. "When I was a kid, following the statistics of your favorite team was a geeky thing," says Rick Burton, a professor of sports management at Syracuse University. "Today, an exponentially larger number of people — kids, teenagers, men, women, people in nursing homes — are of a sudden tracking all of these stats."
More than 33 meg Americans participate in the data-fetishizing hobby of fantasy sports, up from 18 1000000 in 2007. Though it is generally not considered gambling, the cadre activity is arguably the aforementioned: You fanatically absorb sports information from cable Television, sports radio, the Internet and anywhere else you can find it and make predictions, usually for coin. Winners of fantasy leagues can receive greenbacks payouts of hundreds or fifty-fifty thousands of dollars.
One in five American men polled past researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University (and nearly one in x women) said they bet on sports in 2012. In Nevada, where it is legal to bet via licensed bookmakers, the industry collected $3.iv billion in wagers in 2012, nearly twice equally much equally a decade ago. Around the country, vastly more than sports wagering is estimated to take identify illegally, through unlicensed bookies in person or, increasingly, online and through offshore websites, which by constabulary are not allowed to take bets from United States residents. (Experienced online gamblers, yet, claim that they take never heard of the constabulary actually existence enforced.) Sports economists say information technology's impossible to know how much money is spent on illegal gambling; the National Gambling Touch Written report Committee cited an estimate of somewhere betwixt $80 billion and $380 billion annually.
Sports betting is so widespread that several economists I spoke with suggested that gambling was fueling the ascension in North.F.L. viewership, rather than the other manner around. "Betting and fantasy sports are extremely important to the popularity of the North.F.L.," says Rodney Paul, a sports economist at Syracuse University. Todd Nesbit, an economist at Ohio State University, has found that fantasy-league participants watch 35 percent more than professional football on television each calendar week and nourish 57 pct more games in person per twelvemonth than nonparticipants. When money is at stake, every game — even preseason ones, tedious blowouts and humdrum matchups between nonmarquee teams — becomes must-come across Boob tube. "People will watch Peyton Manning versus Tom Brady, but why do you watch Jake Locker versus Andy Dalton if you're not from their cities?" says Colin Cowherd, an ESPN Radio host. "The N.F.L. never wants to mention this, merely ane of the reasons that ratings continue to skyrocket is because of fantasy football game and betting. Betting gives games juice."
Dennis Montoro, a 59-yr-old mechanical engineer living in Las Vegas, describes himself equally a difficult-working family homo and says that he and his wife have put three children through college. He'southward a fitness buff who has competed in multiple marathons and one triathlon and is also a fledgling author, having self-published a thriller about the mafia last yr. Montoro says he bets on football game — and has done then for about 40 years — not with the hope of paying the bills, simply simply for fun. On average, he makes five to 10 bets on football per calendar week, each typically for $300 to $500, simply some for up to $iii,000. Over the start couple of decades of his betting career, Montoro estimates, he lost effectually $100,000. "I went to the school of hard knocks, and at that place were enough of them," he said. But over the past two decades, he bet more judiciously and won all but $10,000 of that dorsum.
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In the SuperContest, Montoro teamed up with ii friends from Greensboro, N.C., Robert Burns and Ronald Levine, to course Squad Jarhead. Midway through the flavour, they ascended to beginning place. "I never bet with my center," Montoro said. "I am a Jets fan, but I will bet against them just as easily as I will with them."
Because simply the tiptop 34 finishers would win money, the participants in the SuperContest were pitted against ane another. But the true challenge, as in almost forms of gambling, was to beat the house — in this case, the Las Vegas Hotel's sports-book director, Jay Kornegay, and his squad of bookmakers. When I met Kornegay in the casino during the 15th week of the N.F.Fifty. season, he ushered me through a door marked "Staff But" and walked behind a row of tellers taking bets through their windows. On a typical Sunday during football season, the casino's sports volume might accept more than 8,000 wagers, Kornegay said; roughly 90 percent are for less than $200, 5 percent for $200 to $1,000 and five percent for more than than $one,000.
Kornegay and I stopped in a secluded surface area where two bookmakers sat facing computer monitors and a dozen goggle box screens apiece. Pecking furiously at their keyboards, the bookies updated the odds for hundreds of bachelor bets on football, basketball, hockey, golf, soccer and mixed martial arts. Football was by far the most popular sport, Kornegay said, accounting for 45 percent of the annual sports-volume "handle," or the total money wagered.
Leaving the two bookies, Kornegay led the way to his part, which had framed casino chips on one wall, more television monitors on another and breast-high stacks of paper on the desk-bound. Afterwards nosotros sat down, Kornegay explained that the classic business model for a bookmaker is to carefully evaluate the two teams in any given game and then set the betoken spread such that a bet for either team will appear to the public to have a nearly identical hazard of winning. That way, the bookie hopes to attract "balanced action" from bettors — roughly equal money for each team.
Once the game is over, the winning and losing bets finer cancel each other out. The bookmaker's profits primarily come up from collecting a commission of effectually 4.5 percent, which in the jargon-rich world of sports betting is known equally the juice, the vigorish or simply the vig. Truly balanced action is extremely elusive in practice, Kornegay said, but his chore is to juggle the odds on games so that the sports book is profitable over all.
Predicting which team might prevail in a football game game and by what margin is a task of enormous mathematical complication. The variables include numerical manifestations of individual athletic performances, coaching and the random bounces of a fumbled ellipsoidal brawl. "The guys here in Las Vegas who brand the lines — some of them should work on curing cancer," Dennis Montoro said. The SuperContest rules crave the casino to prepare the weekly point spreads and stick with them, but in standard wagering, the challenge facing sports books is eased by the fact that they tin continually adjust lines co-ordinate to incoming bets. For example, if likewise much money is pouring in on, say, the underdog Packers at +vii.v, Kornegay might shift the line to +7, thus reducing the team's advantage and encouraging more people to bet on Green Bay'due south opponent. A wager from someone who is known to be a well-informed bettor may too prompt a line movement, on the assumption that he has called a item team for a skilful reason.
"Betting odds are the best quantification of the future that there is," R. J. Bell told me. "They reflect the collective I.Q., the wisdom of crowds, the aggregation of all of the best opinions in the world." Point spreads so finer balance the odds, in fact, that gamblers similar Robert Burns joke that "a drunk monkey could pick games correct 50 percent of the time." Veteran sports gamblers are happy if they can do just slightly meliorate, hit 53.5 percentage or more of their bets, which is the threshold for beating the vig and existence profitable.
SuperContest players like Montoro who hoped to finish in the winners' circumvolve needed to perform at an even college level because they were competing against so many other people. "Nigh likely, yous will take to win over lx percent of the time," Kornegay said. To inexperienced gamblers, that sounds deceptively like shooting fish in a barrel. "People go, 'And then, you lot're telling me I can get into the money if I only option three out of five correctly?' " Kornegay said. "I tell them: 'Yeah, that'due south it. 3 out of five, for 17 weeks. Tin can you do that?' "
In the earth of sports gambling, in that location are ii types of people: squares and sharps. Squares brand bets based on hunches, hometown favoritism, emotion. Most everybody who bets is a foursquare — nigh 97 percent of sports bettors lose coin long-term. Sharps are those few who tin effigy out how to crush bookmakers. To them, games aren't athletic contests so much as complex probability generators. "Forget jerseys and pompoms and who is going to lift the Lombardi Trophy," V. R. told me. "You don't bet teams. You bet numbers."
The prototypical Vegas precipitous is someone like Steve Fezzik, who has made a living as a full-time sports gambler for about a decade. A 50-year-old former insurance actuary, Fezzik won the SuperContest dorsum to back, in 2008 and 2009. This season, he was foundering in the middle of the standings but was sticking with the approach that served him so well in the past: crunching histrion and team statistics and taking in dozens of hours of football per week. "I'll watch every game I can until I pass out," he said.
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Fezzik is known as a grinder, pregnant he doesn't adventure his "nut" — his bankroll — on huge wagers just instead places bets of around $500 (and occasionally as much as $2,000) up to a hundred times a week. He might take $75,000 wagered in a given week, simply his bottom-line risk is less because, like a trader practicing arbitrage, he often has money on both sides of the aforementioned game.
A gambler who splashes large money effectually is a "whale," someone like Dave Oancea, a SuperContest competitor who goes by the proper noun Vegas Dave. Oancea, who is 37, says he drives a Ferrari and bets up to $100,000 per calendar week; after spending more than $i million for canteen service at nightclubs over a couple of years, he was honored by a local trade group equally the 2013 Las Vegas Socialite of the Twelvemonth. When I met up with Oancea at the Las Vegas Hotel in mid-Dec, he had simply returned from a trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. "Information technology was my birthday, and I flew x waitresses down there with me to celebrate," he said. He tweeted pictures of himself amongst lapping surf, buxom women in bikinis and a bottle of vodka the size of a small child. "Information technology was crazy," he said.
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Like Fezzik, Oancea watches football game until his eyeballs autumn out. He doesn't get every bit deep into statistical analysis but collects as much anecdotal information equally he can nearly teams. He also has rules of thumb, including non betting confronting a premier quarterback similar Aaron Rodgers, no affair what his numbers might bespeak. And once he reaches a decision, he sticks with it. "I don't like to second-guess myself," he said.
Lately, he'd been on a curlicue. Early in the 2012-13 Northward.F.L. season, he picked the Baltimore Ravens to win the Super Basin, an $8,000 long-shot bet that resulted in a $200,000 payout. Toward the end of terminal baseball flavour, he bet $30,000 on the Boston Carmine Sox to have the World Series and won $340,000. Two-thirds of the style through the SuperContest, meanwhile, he was tied for third. "I wake every forenoon like a kid on Christmas," Oancea said. "I can't wait to get upward and become bet on games."
In Week 14 of the contest, a financial trader in Chicago named David Frohardt-Lane dislodged Montoro's team to catch showtime place. Frohardt-Lane, who is 36, became interested in sports betting when he analyzed data on N.F.L. games for a college class. Afterward graduating from Carleton College with a bachelor'south degree in math and so earning a master's in statistics from the Academy of Chicago, he got a "mindless" job in 2002 analyzing loan risks for a banking concern. He spent virtually all of his spare time developing elaborate reckoner simulations for predicting game outcomes, primarily for baseball but also for football, and used his analytics as a footing for betting.
"My quantum year was 2003," Frohardt-Lane said. With a starting bankroll of a little over $10,000, he fabricated bets using offshore websites of $100 to $200 apiece on 50 baseball game games and a few football game games per calendar week. By the end of the year, his average bets were in the $1,000-to-$two,000 range, and his backing had swelled to nearly $100,000.
Emboldened, Frohardt-Lane was set to quit his job in 2004 and gamble full fourth dimension. Instead, a friend persuaded him to accept a job in high-speed electronic trading. Betting has been relegated to hobby condition ever since. Only sports wagering and fiscal trading have a lot in common, Frohardt-Lane said. The teams are commodities. The line is the price. Simply like an investor, the gambler must approximate whether that price is correct based on future expectations. "Some traders can make money past figuring out the soybeans are undervalued or overvalued," Frohardt-Lane said. "The bettor'due south skills are figuring out how skillful the teams are."
His analysis of the October. 20 matchup between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets typified his process. First, he fed dozens of statistics into his calculator model, like the average yards per passing and rushing play for each team and fumbles and turnovers per game. The computer then generated a "power rating" indicating that the Patriots were improve than the Jets, but not by much. His final step was to manually tweak the number to include other variables, like the fact that the Patriots were missing three defensive starters to injuries.
Frohardt-Lane then checked the SuperContest odds, which listed the Jets as underdogs at +4. This didn't necessarily hateful that Kornegay thought the terminal score would be Patriots over Jets past, say, 24-twenty. Instead, +4 was just the number that the bookies, following their archetype strategy, thought would divide the bettors such that half picked the Patriots and half grabbed the Jets. Frohardt-Lane idea the number was slightly more generous to the Jets than it needed to be, considering the public would otherwise lean toward the Patriots, who have won 3 Super Bowls nether the future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady. The spread, in other words, reflected the bookies' cess of the public perception nigh the ii teams but not necessarily the reality of their potential to win.
This distinction is fundamental. When the collective perception of the point spread diverged from the expected reality equally calculated past Frohardt-Lane, he had a potential winning bet. Just equally an investor might load up on Pfizer stock that he idea was underpriced at, say, $31 per share, Frohardt-Lane "bought" the Jets at +4 — and subsequently netted himself a SuperContest point when they won 30-27.
Two decades before he became Vegas Runner, Gianni Karalis was the child of recent Greek immigrants, lobbing a football betwixt the rowhouses of South Philadelphia. He lived close to where the Eagles, Phillies, 76ers and Flyers played, and although he fantasized about becoming a professional athlete, he said he "let that dream become as a kid, really young." South Philly was too the middle of the city'southward underground gambling manufacture, where lacing up cleats wasn't the simply way to make money in sports. "Instead of wanting to exist Joe Montana, I started wanting to be more like the bookie in our neighborhood," 5. R. said.
He started betting on football in fifth course. "By the time I was 18, I had a total-blown book and was taking bets from everyone in the neighborhood," he said. In his 20s, he affiliated himself with a major betting syndicate whose masterminds — nicknamed Bull, Seal, Tiger, Rooster, Baba the Blackness Sheep and the Philly Godfather — were known equally the Animals and were "some of the sharpest minds on the planet," he said.
Like other syndicates, the Animals wagered hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on individual games. The group employed computer algorithms and teams of handicappers — rooms full of Fezziks and Frohardt-Lanes — to come up with the best picks. The syndicates also cultivated networks of well-placed sources. A stadium groundskeeper, for instance, might let them know that the turf was soggy and that the score would probably exist low. A locker-room janitor could leak information on which supposedly healthy running back was limping. Insider knowledge could trump dry statistical analysis. "If concluding night the starting quarterback establish out that his wife was sleeping with the eye, he is non going to perform like the numbers are maxim," V. R. said. In extreme cases, syndicates got leverage over particular players who had problems with drugs or gambling and might be inclined to share information or even influence game outcomes. Baba, for instance, whose existent name is James Battista, was a primary recipient of tips from Tim Donaghy, a decadent N.B.A. referee.
The challenge was that a syndicate member like Baba couldn't simply stroll into a casino sports book and place a million-dollar bet, considering bookmakers typically have far lower limits and decline to accept activeness from known sharps. But Battista figured out how to make behemoth wagers. "Baba could get down more money than anyone else in the world," Five. R. said. To do so, syndicates employed handfuls of movers, who in turn distributed bets among dozens of anonymous runners.
In 1996, the Animals sent Five. R. to Las Vegas to become their runner (hence his nickname) at the Stardust Resort. Every morning, V. R. would option up paper numberless full of cash and casino chips from a syndicate contact and then spend all day in the Stardust waiting for betting orders to come up in over his two-manner radio. "A play would come into my earpiece: 'Dallas minus 3,' " V. R. said, referring to a desired bespeak spread. "If the book had that number, I would run up and bet it." In what were known as steam plays, Five. R. and the other runners would bet simultaneously so that sports books didn't have time to conform their lines during the coordinated assault on a point spread that the syndicates thought was favorable. "If the sports books didn't have a precipitous line, we would bury them," V. R. said.
Syndicates are still active today, and in the past few years, V. R. graduated to the role of mover. For the most part, he and his assistants no longer need to station themselves at casinos — "you lot tin bet so much easier online with bookies across the country," he said.
I visited V. R. one Sun morning while he was working from a high-rise flat. It was airy, with an expansive view of the city through flooring-to-ceiling windows, and had an L-shaped white sofa parked in forepart of a huge Tv set. V. R. sat at a glass table, his four cellphones pinging constantly with text messages from syndicate sources. In less than an hour, he placed more than $30,000 in bets from his laptop. Using software that scrambled the estimator'due south I.P. address, he said, he could trick the bookies into thinking that many people were betting rather than merely one. Sometimes he fifty-fifty used reckoner programs to fire off 30 or more bets at the same fourth dimension. 5. R. sounded enthusiastic and downright gleeful, like a school kid bragging nearly stealing the answers to a test. "I tin't imagine doing anything else than this," he said.
With his syndicate background, Five. R. would seem to accept little in mutual with his SuperContest partner, R. J. Bell, who grew upwards in Shadyside, Ohio, a coal-mining community of about 4,000. R. J. admired Michael J. Fox's Alex P. Keaton on "Family unit Ties," not the neighborhood toughs; while V. R. never attended college, R. J. graduated summa cum laude. Like V. R., though, R. J. got hooked on sports gambling early, betting through a friend of his male parent. "From the historic period of 14 until today, I've pretty much bet every single day," he said.
After graduating from Ohio Country, R. J. was accepted into Harvard Law Schoolhouse. But he had a strong independent streak — Ayn Rand was a favorite author — and couldn't imagine fitting into the bureaucratic culture of a law business firm. He decided to forgo constabulary school and move to Las Vegas instead, "to my mother's cracking chagrin," he said. He was able to eke out a living for a few years equally a full-time sports bettor and blackjack role player, but he decided he could exist more successful every bit an entrepreneur. In 2005, he started Pregame.com, which provides sports-betting communication and sells pick recommendations to the public — roughly $twenty for a day'south selections and $400 for a full season's worth. (Five. R. and Fezzik are among the contributors to the site.) R. J. at present does weekly ESPN radio and goggle box segments on sports gambling, and in 2012 Pregame was valued at $5 1000000.
When 5. R. and R. J. sabbatum downwardly together at the Las Vegas Hotel to discuss their selections for Calendar week 15, R. J. pulled out a sheaf of papers containing his enquiry and said things like, "Since 1990, whatever Due north.F.L. underdog that lost by 30 or more than points the last game beats the spread 61 percent of the time the next game." V. R., meanwhile, leaned dorsum in his chair, puffed an electronic cigarette and trumpeted his street smarts. "I'one thousand from Philly" was the launching point for many of his arguments. He gave credence to who in his syndicate networks had bet on a game as much every bit why, knowing that the big-money "wiseguys" always had skilful reasons. "Rooster and the Philly Godfather bet Washington," V. R. said.
The matchup betwixt the Cincinnati Bengals and the Pittsburgh Steelers showcased Five. R.'s brand of insider information. The syndicates, 5. R. said, wanted to bet on the Steelers. The general public, meanwhile, favored the Bengals, who would be playing in Pittsburgh and were known as a good road team. Earlier in the week, sports books had the Steelers listed every bit very slight underdogs, at +one.v, only the syndicates wanted a ameliorate number. "So what they did was send out some smaller bets by known runners on Cincinnati," V. R. said. "The books saw that money come up in, and they were like, 'Oh, no, the wiseguys are on us, and the public is, too?' "
Hoping to balance out the Cincinnati bets past attracting more action on the Pittsburgh side, the books increased their numbers to Steelers +three. This, of course, was the more than favorable number the syndicates wanted all forth. Rushing in with a steam play, the syndicates "took every +3 that they could find," Five. R. said. 5. R. and R. J. might have benefited from the syndicates' trickery; the Las Vegas Hotel put the Steelers at +3 for the SuperContest. "I think we've got a play right at that place," R. J. told V. R. (That Sun, the Steelers won outright, and the pair earned another contest bespeak.)
5. R. and R. J. had striking on lx percent of their picks and so far in the contest, which put them in a tie for the seventh-best score. 5. R. said that after ii decades of toiling away in syndicate anonymity, he wanted the recognition of winning — a highly public endorsement of his expertise — more than he wanted the prize coin. "All the piece of work that I accept done, all of the years that I have put into this racket — I've paid my dues," he said. "I just want to bring a win back to Philly."
On Dec. 29, the terminal Sun of the Northward.F.L.'s regular season, hundreds of fans assembled in the L.V.H. Theater for the hotel'due south gratis Football Central political party — sponsored by Miller Light and Bust Out Bail Bonds. The 1,700-seat venue, which hosted Elvis and Liberace for extended runs in the 1970s, was showing the games on screens that were even bigger than those at the sports book, including a 65-foot loftier-definition display.
Robert Marlow, a 55-year-old existent estate amanuensis from Southern California, and his son Jason, 26, who works in online education, sat in the middle of the theater. Forth with ane of Jason's friends who wasn't able to come to the hotel, they formed the team All You Tin Eat. Jason watched generally in tense silence, while his father was loud and emotional. When the Minnesota Vikings uncorked a long run against the Detroit Lions with two and a half minutes left to play, Robert jumped to his feet, pumped his fist into the air and yelled, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, aye, Yeah!"
Dennis Montoro was sitting in the same row as the Marlows. He and his partners picked the Packers when the team announced late in the week that the injured Aaron Rodgers was now cleared to play — great news that wasn't reflected in the SuperContest point spread, which listed Green Bay as +four.5 underdogs to the Chicago Bears. In the fourth quarter, though, the Packers were abaft by 8 points. "Today is the day I die a thousand deaths," Montoro said quietly. Just and then the Packers mounted a improvement, capped by a long touchdown pass from Rodgers that won the game with less than a minute to get.
As the day'due south games wound down, the SuperContest gamblers counted upwardly their points. In the terminal standings, Fezzik, the two-time champion, did not escape the heart of the pack and finished with a win record of just nether fifty pct. TeamVR chosen nearly 59 percentage of its games correctly, an enviable rate for professional gamblers merely one that put the pair just outside the tournament prize money. "I expected to accept more than 900 people beneath me in the standings," V. R. said. "Merely the truth is, I'thou angry to have 50 people above me. You don't get to this level unless you think you're amend than anybody else." Oancea, the loftier roller, finished a half-point below TeamVR And two teams with amateur gamblers — Jarhead (Montoro, Burns and Levine) and All Yous Can Eat — finished with hit win records of 64 pct, tying for 6th identify and each winning $56,870.
The success of people who aren't archetype Vegas sharps didn't surprise Jay Kornegay. Sports betting has changed greatly from when people like Vegas Runner were starting out. Much of the carefully acquired intelligence of betting syndicates — last-infinitesimal weather forecasts, histrion-injury reports — is now available to anyone with Internet admission. The statistical parsing performed by analysts working in the unmarked offices of the Animals is at present a mainstay of sports-talk radio and ESPN. And seemingly every gambler with any bona fides works as a tout, selling picks to squares. The true sharps and syndicates still have an edge over everyone else, but it isn't as big as it once was. "Coincidental bettors are more than sophisticated than ever earlier," Kornegay said. "And they're getting better each and every year."
Some i,500 miles from the Las Vegas Hotel, David Frohardt-Lane was attending his blood brother-in-law's wedding in Chicago and couldn't picket the last games. As the ceremony and reception progressed, he repeatedly checked his cellphone for score updates. His contest standing was precarious. The previous calendar week, the third-identify competitor, listed every bit Ebn Ozn, pulled off a perfect 5-0 and muscled into offset place, a one-half-point alee of Frohardt-Lane.
In one case the wedding wound down, Frohardt-Lane and a large group of friends and relatives rushed to the nearest bar. It had a couple of small televisions showing the hometown Bears game. When that ended, the network cut to the San Francisco 49ers-Arizona Cardinals matchup. Frohardt-Lane had picked the 49ers; Ebn Ozn had the Cardinals at +i. Whoever was right would win the unabridged SuperContest. The game was tied 20-20, and there were only 29 seconds left to play.
The Cardinals kicked off. LaMichael James fielded the ball for the 49ers and ran it back 41 yards — then appeared to fumble when he was tackled. "I had this feeling in the pit of my tum that this game could be lost in the next minute," Frohardt-Lane said. When the officials ruled that James was down before the ball came loose, Frohardt-Lane's emotions swung over again. "Instead of being an unexpected opportunity to lose, information technology was an unexpected opportunity to win," he said.
The 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, then completed two long passes, bringing the ball to the Cardinals' 22-thou line. With two seconds left on the clock, Phil Dawson lined up to kicking a forty-m field goal, which was in "extremely makable range," Frohardt-Lane said. Only it wasn't a lock. Every bit Frohardt-Lane knew, Dawson had missed 26 percent of his field goals in the twoscore-to-49-1000 range in his career. Frohardt-Lane felt calm nonetheless. He sensed what was going to happen before Dawson'south foot even struck the ball. "He drilled it," Frohardt-Lane said. "It was never in doubt. Information technology was virtually the greatest thing I've always seen." The 49ers prevailed 23-20, and Frohardt-Lane won $557,850.
When I spoke with him past telephone several days later, Frohardt-Lane ducked every opportunity to brag. To win the SuperContest, you needed to be more lucky than expert, he kept saying. He reckoned that his computer-aided system would never exist more than than about 53 percent to 55 percent accurate over the long term, so he had been extremely fortunate to nail 68 percentage of his selections during the contest. He planned to give half of his prize money to charity. I asked him if annihilation in his life had changed since winning. He told me that within minutes of the 49ers' victory, his phone overflowed with text letters. Football bettors all over the land wanted to exist his best friend. Past the end of the day, he had hundreds of new Twitter followers. Several hundred more piled on in the next few weeks, and Frohardt-Lane fielded emails and telephone calls from journalists and advice-seeking gamblers. The N.F.L. postseason was underway, and the members of his burgeoning flock wanted to know which teams they should pick.
The Super Bowl was a tough call, he told me. "This is the best matchup we have had in a long time," he said. "Denver has past far the highest-scoring crime, and Seattle has the best defense force in terms of points immune per game." His reckoner model calculated Denver equally a very slight favorite at -1, just that was before Frohardt-Lane made his fine-tuned adjustments. Denver had lost several defensive starters to injuries. The game would almost likely have identify in cold weather, which tended to be harder on a laissez passer-heavy team similar the Broncos. And while Denver had a league-leading throwing game, Seattle's defense was better suited than any other in the league to keep it in check, Frohardt-Lane said. Subsequently the adjustments, he believed that Seattle should be the true favorite at -1.5. "If the Vegas line is Denver -ii, I recall that Seattle is the smartest side to bet on."
That was what Frohardt-Lane's head told him, at any rate. But as a football fan, i who had always rooted for Peyton Manning, his heart was with the Broncos. He planned to make only a few Super Basin wagers with friends and idea he could excuse himself for ignoring his contest-winning analytics just this once. "After the season that I've had," he said, "I have earned the right to just pick the team that I like."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/magazine/the-super-bowl-of-sports-gambling.html
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