Fact. Friends and colleagues of ours have been involved in organized professional sports betting for nearly two decades.
What are the syndicates?
They're just that: people who pool funds and resources to beat the bookies' lines on major and minor sporting events. The successful sports-betting syndicates employ a powerful computer that crunches an enormous amount of data to determine the pointspread or moneyline number at which a sporting event should go off, giving the books their best shot at balancing the bets between on side and the other. (Sports book want to take in an exact number of money on both sides of a bet. That way, they pay off the winning bets with the losing bets and keep the vig on all bets.) If the syndicate's number is different than the number that the oddsmakers put up, the pros exploit the difference, hammering the sports books with as much money as they're allowed to get down.
And that's the friction point between the professional sports bettors and the sports books. The raison d'être for sports-betting syndicates is the betting limit.
Say a sports book has a $1,000 limit on a bet. It's simply not worthwhile for a group of pros, who have millions of dollars and highly sophisticated and expensive technology at their disposal, to bet a piddly thousand here or a thousand there on a proposition where they have the edge. So they enlist other people (known as "movers" or "beards") to bet as much as they can of the syndicate's money. The problem is, it's not worth the syndicate's effort to organize 49 beards to get down $50,000. Also, if the books are getting hammered on a particular line, that line will move before all 49 beards are able to get down.
Meanwhile, the sports books don't like to get beaten, and many explicitly disallow syndicate action. The bookies are well aware of their vulnerabilities and hypersensitive to the big money and the smart money, even if it's not particularlry big, so the bettors have to go to extraordinary lengths to beat them.
Up until recently, the secrets of the cat-and-mouse game between the syndicates and the books were closely guarded, rife with rumor, innuendo, and legend (as your question indicates). However, a new book by Michael Konik (author of our Man With $100,000 Breasts and Telling Lies and Getting Paid) reveals the inner workings of the most mythical sports-betting syndicate of them all.
The Smart Money -- How the World's Best Sports Bettors Beat the Bookies out of Millions is one of the great gambling adventure stories ever written, a rip-roaring, adrenaline-pumping, anus-clenching rollercoaster ride that provides a detailed, accurate, and surprisingly sensitive look deep within the arcane world of high-stakes sports betting. We highly recommend it to anyone, like yourself, with an interest in the subject.
