Do You Know a Bookie?

In a casino a wager on a sporting event is actually a pretty doggone cheap form of entertainment. You pick a game, wager $10 or $20, then sit back and root for your money. If it's Thursday or Friday of the first week of March Madness, you'd be surprised how much more fun that 8/9 game is when you've got $20 riding on the spread.

The house's edge is hefty (a little over 4.5%), but you get two or three hours worth of entertainment out of it and your loss is strictly limited.

 

Any game is that much more fun when you've got (insert dollar amount here) riding on the spread.

And never trust Toledo football.

 

Before I got married and started in the newspaper business, I worked in New Orleans on the periphery of the oil industry, and the parley cards were everywhere. I got to where I'd throw away $5 or $10 every week during football season just for the fun of it.

Once I moved to Mississippi and became a sports writer, that sort of faded away, although real early in my career I'd occasionally eat lunch at this greasy spoon downtown (great chili dogs), and I'd see a few old guys coming in a doing business with the owner behind the counter.

Not long after that, they got busted and my boss asked me if I'd ever placed any bets, because he knew I sometimes ate lunch there. I said, "man, I work for a newspaper and I've got a brand-new baby at home; I can't afford to be betting on football games." I still feel that way.

 

Bingo. If you go in thinking of it as entertainment for the night, you'll be just fine.
If you go in thinking of it as a part time job, you won't.

 

That's my approach to gambling in general. I love gambling, although I do almost none these days.
Some day, I'll return to it.

But it's an entertainment cost.

 

Which is why the casinos hate it and outsource to the William Hills and Cantors of the world. It's a necessary evil, but they would prefer nickel slots for the real estate.

I haven't bet with a bookie in 15 years and, with one exception (the guys who ran the local deli when I was in law school) I always bet through someone. I never wanted them to know anything about me and I got spooked when the first bookie that I used met an untimely demise, allegedly at the hand of his employer.