Pro sports betting is a game of inches, too

In a 1988 installment of the CBS News program "48 Hours" that explored the Las Vegas scene, Dan Rather interviewed Michael "Roxy" Roxborough, the influential sports oddsmaker.

Rather asked Roxy about the old-time stereotypical sports gambler - you know, the character with a fur coat, a big cigar and a Cadillac.

Amused, Roxy assured Rather that those guys do still come to Las Vegas. Thing is, they usually last about a week before the town chews them up and spits them out.

A tableau reminiscent of that classic exchange played out this weekend in a well-appointed conference room at a Strip resort, where a small group of sports bettors had gathered for a private meeting to network and exchange information on their trade.

One guest speaker, going by the pseudonym "Mr. X," runs a major sports betting syndicate that wagers large sums of money through offshore sports books as well as in Las Vegas.

Yet he didn't fit the image of a big-time gambler, at least not the way Rather envisioned it. Mr. X is 30-ish, looks a little like Joe the Plumber, and was dressed for the occasion in what might be charitably described as sports-bar chic.

He was asked how much he had spent on his T-shirt, a standard issue team-logo job.

"No idea. Fifteen bucks maybe."

How about the jeans?

"No idea. Thirty bucks, 40 bucks?"

Those sandals? He picked them up in Thailand three years ago for $3.50.

And what kind of pinkie ring does he have?

"Nope, no rings."

Asked about the size of a typical wager his group places on a football game, Mr. X hesitated. There are a lot of variables, he began to explain, because each bet is based on a percentage of allotted bankroll, and that bankroll is constantly fluctuating, and ...

Hang on. Could you buy a new car with it?

No hesitation there. A slight chuckle, even. "Yeah. Oh, yeah."

Even so, most of the successful professional gamblers he knows maintain a low profile, Mr. X said. The investors in his syndicate, for example, all drive "lousy" cars.

"Staying under the radar is very important," he said. "If you're constantly running out and spending all the money you're making, it's probably very uncorrelated with being able to grow your bankroll. Making money gambling is a very exponential thing.

"Let's say you have a $50,000 bankroll and let's say you could go out and make $200,000 this year. Obviously, that's fantastic. People would say you're going to be a millionaire in no time.

"Well, if I decided I was going to take a bunch of that money and buy blow, cars, women, whatever, at the end of the year I might only have $50,000 again. And I can't make more money the next year. Once you've accumulated a lot, you can build on that. That's what you're looking for."

Touts who claim they can consistently pick winners at a rate of 58 percent, 60 percent or even higher do not merit serious consideration from someone like Mr. X. (See sidebar.)

In the real world of gambling, where he exists, a benchmark of 53 percent is more like it. Granted, his team makes some bets against lines with a reduced vigorish, laying $1.05 or $1.02 to win $1, rather than the traditional $1.10 to win $1, which serves to increase his profit margin. But still: 53 percent.

Overall, Mr. X said, his syndicate "holds," or wins, about 1 percent of the amount of money it puts into action. To put that in perspective, if you bet $1,000 a week for 17 weeks of a football season and had as much success as this group of high-level professional gamblers, you could expect to pocket a grand total of $170. This sports betting stuff truly is a game of inches.

Sure, 1 percent of a big fleet of new cars can be quite a nice score. But even that rate of return requires an enormous amount of work, according to Mr. X. His team completes much of the "heavy lifting" in analyzing the forthcoming football season by June, then relies on statistical models throughout the season itself.

Typically during football season, Tuesday is a big day for placing early wagers. But the action kicks into high gear Thursday through Sunday, when Mr. X sleeps about five hours a day and works the other 19 hours.

"Thursday and Friday, we're betting all day every day," Mr. X said. "That's when we start doing a lot of ‘halves' (first-half lines), which start coming up (on betting boards). Last year we were betting a lot of college totals on Fridays because there's so much other stuff you can be doing Saturday morning. On Saturdays, you can really get money down, particularly if you have a network."

If there's one lesson Mr. X has taken from his career in betting sports, it's that just when he thinks he has seen it all, he sees something new.

"I've been a professional gambler for eight years now, which is not a lot of time to a lot of people, but it feels like a lot of time to me," he said. "The longer I go, the more big losing streaks and big winning streaks I see. It's like the longer I play, the longer the ‘long run' seems.

"They say you can never lose 25 games in a row. That's like once in a lifetime. Well, it happens. Now what?"

While Mr. X posts some of his selections on a new Internet message board called Roughing the Punter (roughingthepunter.com), he cautions that he places his bets before writing about them.

"My money is in the market already," he said.

With that, Mr. X was off to pound in some wagers on the latest NASCAR race. Yes, NASCAR. The work never ends.

"It's fun," he said. "If it wasn't fun I wouldn't do it."