there's one person responsible for the betting lines during the 2005 NFL season that kicks off tonight, it's the 41-year-old Scucci. Around 5:30 p.m. PT every Sunday, Scucci is the first legalized bookmaker to post the "Las Vegas Line" ? point spreads for the next week's NFL games followed by legal and illegal bookies around the country.
Those opening lines spread at Internet speed to other major sports books in Nevada; online "offshore" books in the Caribbean, Canada and Europe; TV and newspapers and finally amateur bettors playing football pools.
Millions of bettors "hammer out," or adjust, those starting point spreads. But it's Scucci who analyzes the collective wisdom of oddsmakers such as Las Vegas Sports Consultants (LVSC) and puts the first numbers up to bet.
It's Scucci whose benchmark lines help determine winners and losers from the estimated $40 million in football betting every fall weekend in Nevada and another $2 billion to $5 billion in illegal football betting around the country. It's Scucci who helps set the tone for the High Holy Day of sports betting: Super Bowl Sunday, when an estimated $5 billion to $7 billion in legal and illegal wagers changes hands. (Related item: Chat with Danny Sheridan, Thursday 3 p.m. ET)
"We know it carries a great deal of responsibility. It's not something we take lightly," says Scucci at the 47-year old hotel that inspired the Robert De Niro film Casino.
So goes the parallel world of sports betting in Sin City, where "wise guys" or professional bettors battle "bookies" for supremacy. And everybody makes money off "squares," the derogatory term for amateur bettors Vegas types use only privately for fear of offending customers. In this parallel universe, real-life victories and losses on the football field mean nothing.
It's all about the betting lines, those talismanic, seductive numbers that are ubiquitous in the sports world. Most newspapers print them (including USA TODAY, which publishes lines supplied by sports analyst Danny Sheridan). Thousands of hands labor to create them. But line-making is as much an art as a science. An industry in itself.
An oddsmaker's objective with a betting line is not to mystically predict winners or losers or final scores. It's to "divide the public," says Kenny White, the 42-year old co-owner of LVSC. That is, to make bettors greedy enough or angry enough to bet.
"It's not rocket science, and it's not voodoo. But it's a little of both," says Michael "Roxy" Roxborough, the 54-year old handicapper who founded LVSC in 1982 before selling it in '99 and retiring to Thailand.
Sports betting is illegal in the USA except for two states: Nevada; and Oregon, where consumers bet on sports through a state-run lottery. But everybody seems to be doing it: celebrities, Wall Streeters, college kids, housewives.
Sports wagering is a "corrosive" vice that leads to addiction, corruption and bankruptcy, charges Tom Grey, executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. "It's a Molotov cocktail: money, greed and gambling."
Roughly seven out of 10 U.S. adults gamble at least once a year, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Roughly 6 million to 8 million qualify as problem gamblers, says the council's director, Keith Whyte. Sports betting addicts account for almost half the callers to 888-LASTBET, says Arnie Wexler, a recovering compulsive gambler who runs the help line.
Sports betting has become a "silent addiction" for many college and even high school kids, warns Wexler. An NCAA study of 21,000 students two years ago found 35% of male college students and 10% of female students had bet on sports the previous year.
Roughly 21% of 11th-graders reported they had gambled on sports in the previous year, according to Gambling with Delaware's Kids, a study by the University of Delaware's Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies in 2003.
Dangerous or not, plenty of consumers who live by the credo of Paul Newman's pool hustler in The Color of Money: "Money won is twice as sweet as money earned."
Birth of a betting line
