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Sports Betting
Best Books
Watching the game you’ve bet in a Las Vegas sports book enhances the overall experience. Sports books run promotions, sell hot dogs and beer, and generally do whatever it takes to make their venue as exciting as possible. It’s the next best thing to being at the stadium. Three casinos boast facilities referred to as ‘super books.’ They are The Mirage, Caesars Palace, and the Las Vegas Hilton. These are the places that attract the biggest action and offer the most amenities (multiple viewing screens, plenty of seats, speedy cocktail service). Several casinos offer ‘big books’ (a step below super). They include: Imperial Palace (the IP even has a drive-up betting window), Stardust, Circus Circus, Excalibur, Frontier, Golden Nugget, Horseshoe, Bally’s, Rio, Gold Coast, and Palace Station. The latter three have a distinctly local flavor. Everything considered, The Mirage is probably the best place to enjoy the action. The book is beautiful, there’s plenty of action and excitement, and hustling cocktail waitresses are not stingy about bringing free drinks to patrons sitting in the viewing area.
Big Payoffs
There’s No Such Thing as a Sure Thing The old adage was proven true once again when Buster Douglas upset Mike Tyson for boxing’s Heavyweight Championship in 1990. The Mirage was the only sports book to offer a betting line on the fight; the city’s other books considered it too great a mismatch to book action on it. The opening line made Tyson a 35-1 favorite; someone reportedly wagered $70,000 to win $2,000. This forced the line upward until it settled at 42-1. There were reports that someone bet $100,000 somewhere between 35 and 42 to 1, hoping for a return of less than $3,000. The largest bet on Douglas was reported to be $1,500 at 38-1 odds which, when Douglas won, returned a tidy $57,000 profit. The Mirage was rewarded with a big win for their willingness to post the line. The biggest winner, though, was Buster Douglas, who signed a two-fight deal with The Mirage for $60 million.
Texas-sized Parlay
The NFL football playoffs often produce interesting stories of betting bravado. One in 1991 involved the largest payoff ever made on a legal sports wager. A Texan used a series of parlays at Little Caesars sports book to turn an initial bet of $40,000 into $2.4 million. It was reported that the man then bet $700,000 of his winnings on a two-team parlay involving the two League Championship games. Unfortunately for the bettor, he bet Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of whom were defeated.Man Bites Dog
A sports future bet is an advance wager on the winner of a major professional sports championship like football’s Super Bowl or hockey’s Stanley Cup. These bets typically carry a very high house edge (25% or more) and require that you leave your money with the casino for many months while waiting for the bet to be resolved. Still, future betting is very popular. If you wager on a team that becomes a contender, your small future bet will provide an entire season of excitement-and on occasion, man (the bettors) bites dog (the casino). 1991’s baseball World Series was a classic example. The World Series matched two ‘worst to first’ teams, the Twins and the Braves. At the beginning of the 1991 baseball season, future odds on 1990’s last-place Twins winning this year’s title were 100-1. The odds against the Braves were a whopping 250-1 in many places. Both teams were bet heavily by the public. Since a winning $10 wager on the Twins would pay $1,000 and a winning $10 wager on the Braves would pay $2,500, Las Vegas sports books faced the pospect of losing big no matter who won the series. The Twins won, keeping damage to a minimum at most books. When the 1992 baseball World Series future odds were released, there were no teams listed at odds longer than 100-1.
Score One for the Little Guys-Almost
In late 1991, a group of eight baccarat dealers from the Las Vegas Hilton turned an initial $80 stake ($10 per person) into $103,000 by betting one football game per week, parlaying their winnings, and winning eleven consecutive bets. The dealers’ goal was to continue their parlay until they lost, or reached 15 straight wins. Had they been successful, the group would have cashed a $1.3 million profit. The odds against winning 15 straight are about 33,000-1. The odds against winning the remaining four games were only 15-1. Alas, they lost in week 12. The two dealers who made all the winning picks were female.
All-Star Bizzare
The 1993 NBA All-Star game resulted in some major confusion for sports books and bettors. Closing lines at several casinos had the West All-Stars favored +3, and the total score on 267. The nationally televised game appeared to end with the West winning by a score of 135-130 (the network concluded its telecast, and the Associated Press announced the score as a final). The West covered the spread, and the total fell two points under 267. This is where it got weird. Scottie Pippen of the East squad, who’d been fouled as the game time expired, was called out of the locker room to shoot, and make, two free throws, raising the official final score to 135-132. Both propositions should have ended in ties, and all money returned. But the sports books had already paid many tickets based on the earlier score. Some bettors got away with a win which should have pushed, while others threw away tickets that should have been refunded.
