Lay the Favorite by Beth Raymer Read Free Book Online

money is knowing a good line when you see one. Value, not just who you think is going to win or lose, is the overriding consideration.
    To understand value, Dink first determined for himself what he thought the line should be. He had become just like the wiseguy gamblers who had beaten him for hundreds of thousands of dollars when he was a novice bookmaker. Dink researched as much as possible about teams and specific matchups, weighing the relevant factors in order to arrive at his best educated guess as to eachgame’s likely outcome. I had assumed that as a professional gambler Dink researched teams, weather, and statistics and made bets for himself based on that information, but it took me a while to understand what “shopping for the best value” entailed. Whether or not we thought a certain team was going to win didn’t matter. If the price was right, we bought it. When Dink said that we must always get the best of it, he meant that we must find a line that gave him an edge—a line that offered the most reward with the least risk. That, to me, didn’t seem like gambling. It seemed like we were bargain hunting for luck.
    First, Dink had determined for himself what the line had to be to make it worth betting on. Then he had to find a line that came closest to that magical number. Like a company’s stock price, lines for each game were in constant flux, changing according to the demands of the market. To know how the market valued a particular game, Dink, like all professional gamblers, turned to the Internet.
    Gone were the days of waiting in airports for out-of-town newspapers or searching for a bookmaker in the backstreets or bars. Starting in the mid-’90s, gamblers could suddenly go online and read reviews of offshore gambling businesses. They could open their
Daily Racing Forms
and see advertisements for gambling parlors based in the Dominican Republic. The first time Dink saw such an ad, he couldn’t believe it. Bookmakers? Advertising? At worst it was a police scam, he thought, and at best it was a swindle. Dink spoke to a lawyer. “Internet gambling is untested waters,” the lawyer explained. “But for now, it’s legal.” He told Dink to go for it.
    Dink tested the waters and the waters were great. He didn’t have to wait for bookies to open. He could bet any time of day. Oddly, it seemed to make gambling so much more socially acceptable. Everyone, young and old, was talking sports-betting shop. It was just as normal as day-trading.
    To keep track of the lines offered by sports books around the world, professional gamblers used Don Best Live Odds, an online service that for six hundred dollars a month gave a running tally ofthe lines each sports book offered for any day’s games. In fact, Don Best Live Odds did for gamblers and bookmakers what Bloomberg terminals did for hedge-fund managers and stockbrokers. Where Bloomberg streamed stock quotes and the latest financial data, Don Best displayed the latest injury reports and lineup changes. It broadcasted line adjustments from a dozen offshore offices and a handful of licensed sports books in Las Vegas in real time.
    As a Dink Inc. employee, I needed to learn how to read the lines on Don Best as they flashed across the office’s five monitors. Taking a closer look at the computer screen, I saw not just numbers and plus and minus signs; I saw fractions. I hadn’t passed a math class since junior high. A rush of incompetence washed over me. Feeling my face blush, I pulled my notebook close and added stripes to a toucan’s beak, completing my jungle scene.
    At a quarter to eight I arrived at Dink Inc. for my first shift, convinced I would make a fatal mistake with Dink’s money.
    Across from me, Robbie J worked on his rundown sheets—long pieces of paper with tiny blank boxes designed for listing the day’s matchups and the lines on each game. October brought preseason NBA, hockey, NFL, college football, and baseball playoffs. Fearing that it would