The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers, and the Death of Their Las Vegas
Where to buy The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers, and the Death of Their Las Vegas books online?
Product Description
“One wild read” (Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated) about a unique city trying to find itself–and about three gamblers who win, lose, and risk everything during the college basketball season.
One gambler is a manic ex- cokehead with an Ivy League degree. The second is a college dropout trying to make a living at the only thing he loved at school–gambling. The third, one of Vegas’s most respected bookmakers, is worryingly close to burning out. The Odds follows the lives of these three professional gamblers through a college basketball season in a one-of-a-kind city struggling to reconcile its lawless past with its family tree-friendly makeover. With a wiseguy attitude and a faultless eye and ear for the sights and sounds of Vegas and its denizens, Chad Millman has made a portrait that the Wall Street Journal called “fascinating… regularly screamingly amusing.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal had just one word for the book: “Superb.”Amazon.com Review
For sports gamblers in Las Vegas, nobody cares who wins; it’s by how much that matters. In The Odds, Chad Millman follows three professional gamblers through a year of college basketball, where meticulous research, betting discipline, and instinct clash with addiction, and no one relaxes until they’ve lost it all.
The three colorful gamblers Millman expertly describes are a high-rolling career “wiseguy,” a slacker wannabe, and a bookmaker who sets the lines on games (for example, Iowa over Indiana by 4-1/2 points, meaning if you bet on Iowa, you win only if Iowa wins by five points or more). The thought behind the betting line is to lure bets (hopefully, losing ones) and make a profit for his casino from the action, but more importantly to stay yet to be of persons who pounce on a weak line like hungry wolves. Millman provides the answer to what makes these wiseguys tick: “While the casual bettor weighs common sense and financial realities with every bet, the wiseguy pushes persons aside… [his] battle isn’t with what makes sense; his battle is with anyone who gets in the way of building his bet a euphoric experience.”
Along with juicy details of what these gamblers do to feed their frenzy, Millman enriches us on gambling’s history and sobering statistics, on Vegas’s decline and the rise of offshore casinos, and on the effects of media coverage and politics on sports and gambling. While you won’t learn how to get rich off the next office pool, you will get an inside look at persons who make or lose money on some kid’s buzzer-beater or a garbage-time lay-up. –Michael Ferch
Buy Cheap The Odds: One Season, Three Gamblers, and the Death of Their Las Vegas Online
Related posts:
betting football is neither less nor more “euphoric” than winning at chess, ping-pong, or the stock market: euphoria is absolutely tangential to bringing home the bacon.
as a winning NFL and NCAA football bettor, i can say emphatically, books which emphasize the “inevitability” of losing at the game only promote the mentality of losing to an elevation akin to destiny, or worse, fate.
the fault is not in our stars but ourselves, that we lose thus or thus.
i have known additional winning players; i AM a winning player; you, but, are probably not a winner, and the leader of this book is CERTAINLY NOT a winning player.
tlt.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
As a name who likes to go to Vegas once or twice a year, primarily to bet on sports, I thought I’d like this book, but, in my view, it was dreadful. The characters the leader selected to study were not at all appealing, they were just scum — including the sports book managers. In fact, scum like this is why i avoid the Stardust like the plague. Scum like this is also why the NCAA wants Congress to ban betting on college sports, which will be a bring shame on for persons of us who aren’t scum and who just want to delight in betting on college hoops or pigskins every now and then. This book is a downer and time-waster — avoid it like you’d avoid the Stardust sports book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
i lived in vegas during this time and as a 23 year ancient sports gambler i can say the leader could have done a better job describing the atmosphere and lifestlyes a small better than he did because he makes it sound too dreary, it is a lot better than that. additional than that it was ok if u know nothing about betting in vegas.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The leader has selected exactly the incorrect subjects to profile in this poorly written book. None of the subjects, each of whom has ventured to Vegas to beat the pointspread, comes off as much more than a sick addict who is walking – tired stereotype alert! – life’s tightrope. Though most sports bettors know that beating the spread is less likely than apt a leading man in Hollywood (some bookies swear not a single customer in decades has done it) Millman fails to provide meaningful insight into the gamblers’ methods or approach, additional than to suggest that they simply throw darts or rely on feel or analzye the games any better than your average tavern fan. The result is a portrait of uninteresting men engaged in a sloppy attempt at something potentially fascinating. The one bettor who seems to have made huge money at his craft is also open as an undisciplined wild man – a situation that, in reality, never results in the kind of winning seasons Millman suggests of the man’s past. Did this man change his system? Did he alter his approach? Did his psychology change? Millman never tells us, and worse, we get the sense that he didn’t know enough to question the question. The result is a lingering feeling that the leader either was too bone idle to investigate and clarify the most vital and appealing parts of the gambler’s being, or worse, didn’t realize that this stuff mattered.
The writing in the book is dreadful. That is, unless you adore descriptions, in which case, there are mountains of them. Terrible ones, too. Skip this book, like you would skip a stone.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Indifferently written and poorly edited, this brief book about three sports gamblers in Las Vegas never really lives up to its potential. There are a few appealing details and insider tidbits here and there, but on the whole, the enterprise feels a bit rushed and incomplete. Millman tries to mix a broad overview of the history of sports gambling with the individual tales of three men over the course of the 1999-2000 football and basketball seasons, but ends up giving fleeting shrift to both.
We get a shallow history of how sports gambling’s shady roots, gradual go into the light in Vegas, its brilliant rise over the last several decades, and in recent years its near total transition to internet operations based in the Caribbean. Millman continually implies that the increase availability of televised sports-especially via ESPN-was the direct cause of increased sports gambling. But then he also continually implies that increased viewership and ratings have been due to increased interest in sports from casual sports bettors. This is kind of a chicken and egg type argument, and since neither position is backed up by anything additional than anecdotal data, its hard to lend either much credence. Still, even though his larger themes aren’t particularly well thought out, Millman does better at explaining some of the details of sports wagering. The most vital of these is “the line,” which he clarifies as not how much better one team is than another, but rather as a number that will attract maximum betting on both sides. A “weak” line is one that “wiseguys” (professional sports gamblers) reflect is drastically incorrect and worth putting a lot of money on, which then causes the line to “go”. As in any industry or subculture, there’s plenty of insider slang for Millman to spread around and keep things to some extent lively.
Millman builds his investigation of Vegas sports betting around three men: a high-roller “wiseguy”, a wannabe newcomer to the scene from Indiana, and a young bookmaker on the quick track at The Stardust. Sorry to say, none of them come across as all that appealing individuals. The high-roller is kind of manic and obsessive, the wannabe is a pothead loser, and the bookmaker gets lost in the shuffle as Millman concentrates on his privileged profile bosses who have a lot more tales to tell. And while Millman tries hard to show the adversarial relationship between bettors and bookmakers as a cunning battle of wits between men who are both obsessive and honorable, it never really comes across as anything more than pathetic. Millman’s tries hard to call together some reader sympathy for the “end of an era,” as sports betting moves online, but since none of the ancient-timers seems particularly pleased, we’re left to marvel why we should be particularly bothered. All in all, a disappointing book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5