To some extent that's true--or it used to be. There's no way the in-house bookies at big casinos can know the ins and outs of every team playing every game on the board. Especially during college basketball season, when there are hundreds of games a week, a specialized disciplined bettor who does his homework can jump on a weak spread in an obscure game and lock down favorable odds before the house has time to move the line.

The casinos call em "wiseguys"--appropriately enough, the same term used for mobsters--and they fear and respect them on the one hand, but can't resist taking their big bets on the other. One sign of that respect is that the maximum bet in most big sports books today is $3,000 on any one game, which is down from $20,000 and up in the eighties. The days when one big bet from "smart money" could alter the Vegas line are apparently over.

Actually Vegas sports books themselves may be all but over. Since the mid-nineties most sports betting has been done on the Internet, because it's the one thing on-line casinos can do faster and more efficiently than any other kind of gambling. Since betting on sports is legal in only one state--Nevada--the gamblers in the other 49 are forced to either use illegal bookies or, the much simpler alternative, open an account at a sports book based on a Caribbean island.

The year 1999 was the turning point in the balance of power, when the Vegas line became increasingly unimportant and the Caribbean line became all-powerful. And the flesh-and-blood story of that change is told very amusingly in Chad Millman's book "The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers and the Death of Their Las Vegas" (Da Capo Press, $15, 272 pp.).

Millman chronicles the change from the center of the sports betting universe, the Stardust Casino sports book, presided over by laconic workaholic Joe Lupo, whose family and marriage suffer as he struggles to keep the book profitable and fight the incursions of the Caribbean. Millman also follows the betting fortunes of Rodney Bosnich, a high school basketball star from small-town Indiana who moves to Vegas with his girlfriend because the only things that interest him are getting high and betting on basketball, and Alan Boston, an ice-in-his-veins wiseguy with an Ivy League education who thinks nothing of betting $50,000 on a single game and is so respected that he can actually force bookies to change the line. Part of the story is Boston's descent into a kind of functional madness in which "the next bet" is all he can focus on, a state in which a nervous freshman missing a meaningless free throw to make the score end on plus-13 instead of plus-14 can affect his bank account for the whole month.

For years the ratty-looking Stardust sports book was the Grand Central Terminal of sports betting, full of degenerates, tourists and bettors large and small attracted by its reputation as the place that always establishes the first Vegas line. (All the other casinos and offshore bookies would generally follow whatever the Stardust did.) The wiseguys were so anxious to attack the opening Stardust line that the casino had to establish a lottery to determine who would be taken first in line at the betting window. When "The Odds" opens in 1999, the Stardust is still in its heyday, with wiseguys betting the limit at the opening bell and causing the line to move immediately in one direction or the other.

A year later, as the underdog St. Louis Rams are winning the Super Bowl--and giving Lupo heart attacks because of all the 200- to-1 futures bets he sold before the season began--the Stardust has all but faded into history. Lupo busts his butt to make sure he has the first line in the world for all 32 games in the NCAA tournament's first round, but when he posts his numbers, only three or four small-time bettors show up. The Stardust lottery is no longer needed. The wiseguys are waiting to see the numbers from the Caribbean.

The real heart of the "The Odds," though, is Millman's exploration of the mind of the dedicated sports bettor. The lifestyle takes a combination of iron nerves--Bosnich's $200 bets are just as big in his world as Boston's $10,000 bets in his--and a sort of idiot-savant feel for sports psychology. The farther you descend into the skanky world of sports-book degenerates (most of whom come to the casino on Christmas Day because they have nowhere else to go), the more you see it destroying all awareness of the outside world.

To use just one fairly hysterical example, a man is shot dead in the Stardust sports book one morning, with everyone diving under chairs--all except for one guy, who leans over the pool of blood to try to get his bet down before the start of the next game.

Millman is not a flashy writer, so "The Odds" doesn't quite do for sports betting what A. Alvarez' classic "The Biggest Game in Town" did for poker. Still, it's the kind of book that's so vivid and immediate that it will either a) make you want to move to Vegas and spend the rest of your life betting on sports, or b) never make another sports bet.

It helps to be a misfit unequipped for anything else in life. Sane people definitely need not apply.

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© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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