The Smart Money, by Michael Konik, is a sports betting memoir by one of my favorite gambling writers.
In the years 1997-2001, Konik worked for a group of gamblers he calls the “Brain Trust,” run by a man he calls “Big Daddy Rick Matthews” in the book. Konik makes it clear that these names are fictitious, but the group is real. These are guys who figure out sports betting so well that the sports books in Vegas cut them off, as do offshore betting houses, and are forced to use “ghosts” to get their bets down for them. Konik was one of these ghosts, and eventually he formed his own team to bet the books.
The financial ups and downs of a sports bettor are well known to every video poker player — except in this book Konik talks about daily fluctuations of a quarter of a million dollars or more — but the experience isn’t the same. In video poker, there are thousands of separate events each day (where each event costs from $1.25 to $500 or more), you lose most of the events, but winning events can pay 800-for-1 or more. Your wins at video poker are much larger than your losses. In sports betting, you win most of the time, but you are usually laying 11-for-10, which means your wins are slightly smaller than your losses.
In sports betting, you have relatively few bets going at one time — almost always less than 10 games bet in a single day. It’s common for some of the games to come down to the last few possessions, and not at all that rare for something unusual (and essentially unpredictable) to end up deciding whether you win or lose really large sums of money. The emotions associated with these variations are very large.
I found the things that Big Daddy would tell Konik during the losing streaks to be almost identical to what I tell Shirley when I’m going through a dry spell: “These things happen. You just gotta have faith that they’ll get better eventually.” And, “It’s all one big long game, with hundreds of little results adding up to one big victory.” Not surprisingly, Konik wouldn’t find them any more reassuring than Shirley does when the losing streak is going on, although when the eventual turnarounds happens (as it always does when you have the advantage on every bet — although it is always possible to lose everything before this turnaround happens if your bet size is too large a percentage of your bankroll), it all seems to make sense.
Konik ended up betting a lot off shore — an experience I haven’t shared. If you win too much, there’s a risk that you won’t even be paid. The regulators in Costa Rica, for example, are not nearly the same as they are in Nevada. At the same time, if you’re betting by telephone and have voice synthesizers and a variety of cell phone numbers, it is possible to change your name and disguise your identity far more easily than it is in person at casinos.
Konik gets run out of a lot of places, simply because he picks too many winners. I’m very familiar with that experience. The way sports books run you off, though, is different from the way it happens in video poker. In sports books, the first step is to usually limit the stakes you can play for. Instead of betting $50,000 per game, which might represent your normal limits, you are limited to $2,000. This would be the equivalent of casinos telling me I could come in and play, but only on single-line quarter games. I suppose it could happen, but it hasn’t yet. If it did, like Konik I’d stop playing and take my business elsewhere.
In sports betting, you can feed off of someone else’s expertise far more easily than you can in video poker. If you know that a smart bettor likes the Colts laying 3 points (never mind what that means exactly if you don’t know), you can go and bet that same game at the same price and get a good deal. In video poker, if you know I’m playing a particular game at the South Point you’re a long way from being able to capitalize on it. Learning a strategy takes a while, using that strategy correctly takes considerable skill, and even knowing WHY I’m playing today instead of yesterday might be important. In sports betting, a good bet is a good bet. If the smart bettor bet big enough, of course, then the line might have moved to -3½ or -4. The bet isn’t as good at that price — and possibly you’re not even the favorite anymore. Sometimes a half-point means everything.
In the book, Konik regularly faced a problem that most good video poker players experience all the time — namely running out of places to play. Whether it was the casino kicking him out, reducing the limits he could play at, or simply not offering good lines, you have to have places to bet in order to stay in business. Konik continually found additional places to play, or discovered additional ruses to keep him in the game.
In video poker, you need to learn additional games, scout in out-of-town locations, and sometimes go up or down in stakes to keep playing. But it can be done if you want to badly enough and are competent enough to keep changing your approach.
The reason Konik finally gave up sports betting is because he wanted more out of life than just money — and dealing with bookies. It’s hard to fault him for this. I haven’t come near to reaching this point in my gambling career — but it very well might be somewhere down the road. Konik was able to quit and move forward with his life very successfully. I hope I can do the same when that time comes for me.
On Thursday February 24, Michael Konik will be my guest on “Gambling With an Edge,” co-hosted with Frank Kneeland, from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 1230 am in Las Vegas, or www.KLAV1230.com from anywhere in the world. Also, joining us will be Beth Raymer, author of Lay the Favorite, a book I reviewed www.casinogaming.com/columnists/dancer/2010/1123.html Join us!
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