Summer of Sports '21 - A Primer on Sports Betting

BY DC CUEVA                        

■ @DC408DXTR  @ IG/YT/SC/TB/TK

Since 2007, it's been a near-annual tradition of mine to fly to a city that's both America's playground and one of the world's great tourist destinations. If you know me, then Las Vegas has become my favorite place to travel to... and just seeing the nearly 200 #DCVegas videos I've posted on my YouTube channel very much explains my love affair with Sin City. And when I next go there, I am looking at the chance to do something that I've never been able to do before, but one that's become a red-hot item.

Even though I've enjoyed each of my ten Vegas trips and with #11 likely to come this fall, something I've not done yet is take even one bet on a sports event at the many race & sports books in town... and I'll be down to bet on a horse race or a football game for the fun of it, just like so many others. The allure of betting on sports events have become a hot commodity lately as laws that barred this activity outside Nevada were struck down, and interest has boomed to go along with it as the U.S. now follows other countries in making sports betting a greater part of the sporting landscape here.

Up until recently, the major pro sports leagues long frowned upon Vegas as a city to not place a team in despite a 4-hour drive from Los Angeles and within a flight of that length from everywhere else in the country, but for one obvious reason. Of course, that would be Nevada's stance on legalized betting and long being the only state where full sports betting is legally accepted. And because most every hotel has a race & sportsbook in its casinos, except for exhibition games and the occasional "home" game hosted by a team from next door Las Vegas was off limits for major professional team sports.

But times have changed: the rapid growth of a market that's among the fastest-growing in the country, the millions who travel here each year that makes it among the world's most-popular attractions, and the changing stance in most of the country on gambling have seen a total 180 in Las Vegas' sporting fortunes. In the span of a few years, the NHL has become a smash hit thanks to the rapid success of the Golden Knights, followed by the Raiders moving from California to Southern Nevada... and there may be more to come to join big fights, golf, NASCAR, UNLV, rodeo and more on the Vegas sports slate.

Plus, there's those sports books which probably take the cake for becoming the best place anywhere in America to watch the big games, with a strong communal experience of watching ports with strangers that existed for a long time before the emergence of twitter brought that to social media. And if you happen to follow on Instagram boxing's 50-0 man, Floyd Mayweather sometimes took snaps of the bets the money man makes on a number of games when he wagers at the sports book.

So, what exactly is sports betting? It's the subject of the first installment of this 2021 Summer of Sports, as DCBLOG temporarily turns our attention from covering MTV Reality shows and the upcoming 37th season of the fifth major pro sport of The Challenge, to focus on matters in the sports world -- which has long been a strong passion of mine, and where this intersects with another in the Las Vegas culture.

In its Wikipedia definition, sports betting is defined as, "...the activity of predicting sports results and placing a wager on the outcome," and where anything from the major team sports to fight in combat sports and, of course, horse racing can be bet on, and where the majority of the cash that flows in are wagered in those areas. Sometimes, this can stretch to non-athletic events such as political elections, competitive reality TV programs and who wins those statuettes at the big awards shows. And it even stretches to non-gambling related, friendly wagers between politicians done out of pride for their cities.

   Those who bet on sports and on competition can place their wagers either in a legitimate, legal form through a Vegas bookmaker or online sportsbook, or underground illegally in a private Internet enterprise often to take advantage of loopholes that otherwise would not be allowed in a particular jurisdiction. Wherever the bets are made, the bettor must take their bets in an upfront manner in paying that outlet before giving his bet. But given the sometimes shady nature of this multi-billion dollar business, it has often seen infamous scandals from disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy admitting to rigging the 2002 playoffs, to the 1919 White Sox to match-fixing in cricket and tennis.

This has long been a way of life for those in Britain, Australia and elsewhere, but it's only now being a thing some thirty years since a law was passed by Congress that outlawed sports betting in the U.S. outside of not just Nevada. Delaware, Montana and Oregon were also grandfathered in along with the Silver State by way of pre-existing sports lottery games and frameworks that supported such endeavors - the ladder being the first back in 1988 four years before PASPA was put into the books.

   There was still negative feelings about sports betting to begin the 2010's, but when Governor Chris Christie signed a law to have New Jersey become the second state to make sports betting legal in 2012 the tide began to turn towards widespread legalization of sports betting. It was even more so when the flood of TV commercials in 2016 by DraftKings and FanDuel brought to the fore the new phenomenon of daily fantasy sports, introducing a new generation of fans to a multi-billion dollar industry as well as millions in prize money to go along with it.

   It was when daily fantasy was classified as a game of chance and not gambling a year later that set the stage for the decision that changed everything in American sports: the Pro & Amateur Sports Protection Act and the federal ban on sports betting being declared unconstitutional, and the high court favoring New Jersey and letting other states decide for themselves if they want to make it legal where they are. Ever since, nearly thirty states have made at least a certain aspect of betting on sports law of the land from sportsbooks to mobile betting, while bringing into motion plenty of interest from sponsors and media in focusing greater attention on this lucrative business.

You can't possibly talk about this one taboo subject without a mention of the Sport of Kings: horse racing is the only sport universally bet on across most of the U.S., including in states where gambling is strictly enforced unlike the free market in Nevada. While most Americans only watch horse racing in May & June for the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown, it's a year round sport that represents the lifeblood of the sports betting industry, and relies on the billions wagered at tracks and betting parlors nationwide to keep it going... even as the ponies kept on racing during the pandemic shut down.

   But despite recent scandals that have rocked the sport despite two Triple Crown winners, there's something unique about horse racing in the sports betting universe: it's much more complex than just betting on a team sport. Whenever anyone watches it on TV or at the track, it's always been the most difficult sport to bet on considering the many houses who are entered an any particular day's race card. And even when they glance over at a bible of the sport in the Daily Racing Form, they still perhaps have no idea of who to bet on unless there is a clear favorite in the field whose odds are in the single digits.

   When they do make that wager, it's done through parimutuel betting, where the money being gambled by the fans are pooled, shared proportionally among the winners after a deduction from that total is made. This method is also used in greyhound racing and in jai alai, among others at tracks and off-track facilities, as they make different kinds of wagers -- the most easy of which is to for a certain horse to "Win," "Place" or "Show" -- finishing 1st, 2nd or 3rd respectively. Others go for an "across the board" bet for all three positions, an "exacta" for the top two horses, a "trifecta" for the top three, and a "superfecta" for places 1-4. And if a long shot upsets the field in a stakes race, a big payday awaits -- and often sportsbooks will bear the brunt of a record loss for a mighty shock result.

While the horses are the ones who keep the sports books & its own industry going week and year-long, of course it's football that sparks the greatest passion among the bettors. Billions are wagered in Vegas sportsbooks on the outcomes to NFL and college football games each weekend in the autumn and right up until the Super Bowl when the town gets flooded by out of towners long before the arrival of the Raiders last year. And with Vegas being its newest city, it has even relaxed to a degree the usually conservative stance on gambling on the games by both the league and commissioner Roger Goddell.

   Compared to the horses, wagering on football is fairly simple: bets on games on the gridiron -- and for most other team sports for that matter -- are done with the most-commonly used method of a money-line bet. The team that's favored will pay lower odds than that of the underdog, which gives it incentive for bettors to go for those not favored to win... which is why whenever an upset takes place in March it's always a sensation in the sportsbooks. Another method is betting on the spread, the margin of points assigned by bookies which is used to put the two combatants on an equal footing by giving the favorite the "take" and the underdog the "give".

   But many take the easy route and make a "straight wager": simply put, it's just that -- a bet on who you'd want to win, but it comes at a price in most cases where the bettor would lay 11 to win 10, and this is also used in basketball. Others decide to just play it safe and "buy a half-point" in just laying six to win five... and these wagers apply not only to football but also to basketball as well. If someone bets $50 and his team wins, he'd win $105 - the 50 + the 55 for the W. A handful even choose to wager on the total number of points scored in a game, and it's known as an "over and under." And in Al Michaels' favorite aspect of this, a "cover" is when a team meets the margin of victory projected -- the spread.

   In a few years' span, Las Vegas has welcomed pro football and hockey teams to the Valley, and if they are lucky enough baseball might not be that far away. And during the usually lean part of the sporting year of the summertime, the ladder takes center stage... and they differ a bit from their counterparts in using just a straight wager for betting purposes. But when it comes to the action on the ice, it's a little bit more complicated: while there is a money line that's used to make a straight wager, a "puck line" is used where, if one would want to bet on the Golden Knights winning over the Sharks then he would have to lay money odds along the money line and deduct a goal or two from San Jose's total goal output.

And then, there are those special kinds of bets that really get the sports books and bettors going: football fans have become that much more serious about the autumn pastime of playing fantasy ball with friends, and baseball fans are paying more emphasis on analytics and the art of advanced statistics known as sabermetrics. It's with this in mind that proposition bets -- popularly known as prop bets -- have been a thing of late for anyone who bets on games passionately and casuals new to this rapidly-growing section of the American sports culture.

   "Special propositions" are unique side wagers where an outcome to a particular aspect of the game can be determined by certain stipulated situations. There are common ones such as who will score the most points in an NBA game, or which running back has the better rushing game in a marquee NFL matchup. And there are those "out of left field" prop bets such as which drink color gets dumped on the head coach in the Gatorade shower, and in table games of which cards are in a World Series of Poker flop.

   Perhaps the most well-known of prop bets are known as futures: every Vegas sportsbook publishes and updates on a daily basis their odds on which teams have the upper hand on who wins the next season's championship in their sport. These wagers begin almost immediately after the final gun in the Super Bowl, and when titles are decided in the NBA Finals, World Series, the Stanley Cup, the college title games and every major championship there is in the sports world.

   And there's even more on offer at the betting board: parlays are bets that combine multiple teams or props into a single wager, and where if one player bets that the four underdog teams he wants to upset top seeds in the Tournament he may be in for a massive payday. Teasers are similar bets involving two or more teams where the spread is modified to benefit bettors by an established number of points per game. And for those who are losing in the locker room or if a game is getting hot, half-time bets are made with new point-spreads and odds for the 2nd half.

   Like any other event and discipline, sports betting has a lingo all its own: "action" means a wager of any kind, "chalk" is an alternative saying for the favorite, and a "pick 'em" is the definition for a toss-up. The "morning line" is the first odds of who's favored in a race, "hedging" is when one bets for the opposite team or side wager to try & reduce the size of his original bet, and that's just a few... a glance at the Vegas Sports Information Network's dictionary will more than do on this unique vocabulary.

Whenever I go to Vegas, a tradition of mine has been to walk to the sports book and collect the many sheets offered by them, including the odds of the games of the day & week, prop bets and futures predictions to put into my collection. It's a complicated world of betting on sports, but now more & more Americans are getting the gist of what it's like to wager on the biggest events and the most popular leagues, and how it's become a huge business in such a short time. And it's only a matter of time before this truly becomes as much a part of the sports culture as everything else.

- I AM DC

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