Thirteen

A Little Knowledge
Is Dangerous

Throughout the summer of 1999, I dedicate myself to opening additional offshore accounts that will accept large wagers. This last bit—the large part—is far easier dreamed of than accomplished. By now, every time someone from Southern California, no matter his name, tries to pass himself off as a big player, an action fiend with no regard for money, the world’s bookies instantly assume the newbie is an agent of the Brain Trust.

My task is made exponentially more difficult by an essay published by the Doc on The Sports Cure. He fingers me as a beard for Big Daddy Rick Matthews. Though his tirade is filled with factual errors (not to mention spelling errors), the circumstantial connection to the Man “in print” harms my relationships with several bookmaking shops. This is the second time I’ve been outed; the law of averages says that eventually the wrong people will stumble across the damning information. The people at World Sports Exchange, for example, deeply troubled by this revelation, tell me they no longer wish to book my action. They later relent, albeit at ridiculously low limits meant to purchase my opinion at wholesale prices. I do my best to institute damage control, but the longer I’m in this business, the more volatile my name becomes.

For this reason, Rick and I agree that from now on all of my betting will be under fictitious names, the aka identities that the banker Lucy Davino helped arrange. This way, when I set up a new account with a suspicious bookie, my real name will never be uttered. The man formerly known as Michael Konik is officially retired from sports betting.

Using this strategy, I manage to open eight fresh accounts for the upcoming football season, generating nearly $150,000 per game of potential outs.

I also recruit a stable of friends and business acquaintances to make wagers on my behalf. The chief criterion for becoming part of the 44 syndicate is trustworthiness, a rare quality that severely limits the pool of applicants. How many people do you know whom you would feel comfortable letting hold $100,000 or more of your money—at a bookmaking shop? The comrades I end up using are fellows who’ve previously expressed zero interest in gambling, guys who couldn’t tell you the difference between making your point on the dice table and taking the points on a football game. In fact, some of them actually have to be coached on how to make a bet. During preseason training, when I tell one dear boy hypothetically to take Texas Tech at +8 or better, he confesses that he’s not sure what’s better than +8.

“Plus eight and a half, or nine,” I explain.

He’s still not sure. “What about ten?”

Poker buddies; golf buddies; music buddies; theater buddies; former classmates—they all get pitched. “Hey, pards, howya’d like to make some money this football season,” I propose, just as I was once seduced. Only one fellow declines, and solely because his father, a reformed gambling addict, is mortally certain that there’s got to be a catch, an unexplained circumstance that will somehow rob the son of a financially secure future. The truth is, there isn’t any catch: My players are on a free-roll. Lose and it doesn’t cost them a penny. Win and they get 5 percent of the profits.

Although I’ve got people working with me out of several states, we call ourselves the Hollywood Boys, primarily because a few of us actually live in Hollywood, and subordinately because it sounds better than the Suburban Atlanta Boys. Each member of my crew earns 5 percent of the net profits on the games he bets. I keep 10 percent and the rest goes to the Brains. Each member understands that he’s to wager as instructed, that he’s being included for his dependability and competence, not his handicapping ability. Each fellow understands that when the point spreads are flying off the board I don’t have time to explain why we’re betting on certain teams at certain prices. We just are. To the young men waiting by their phones, hoping I’ll send action in their direction, I’m a regular Big Daddy.

The truth is, I’m more like a Medium Daddy. I’m forbidden to bet on the same games Rick bets on, to add a little something on top of what I’m already betting for the Brain Trust. But that doesn’t mean I’m prohibited from betting on games that Rick and Company have disregarded. If I have a strong opinion, I’m more than welcome to express it monetarily in the language of 11–10. The problem is, as Rick Matthews has warned repeatedly, strong opinions are what get people in trouble betting sports—or almost any gambling venture. The draconian laws of mathematics don’t care what your local newspaper columnist said about the Raiders. Billions of computer simulations don’t pay attention to what your Uncle Jed, the lifelong Giants fan, says about the rival Cowboys. And the linemakers, the ones who are paid to convey in numerals the power disparity between two football teams, certainly don’t care about the vivid dream you had about the Patriots and Ravens the other night—the one in which you could see the scoreboard down at the end of the stadium, with the final tally up in lights.

By now it’s ingrained in me: To beat sports, you need access to better numbers than everyone else. If I’ve learned anything from Rick Matthews—and, in fact, I’ve learned everything from him—the only way to get a better number than the bookmakers is to use a computer, a thinking machine that can have the vivid dreams for you.

When I went to high school, two of my classmates were so smart (and so socially maladjusted) that almost no one would talk to them. I liked them both. Though you couldn’t call us friends—we never did anything together, except feel vaguely disliked by our school’s various cliques—I would sometimes join one or both guys in the school cafeteria for lunch, sitting at their otherwise unoccupied table while the cool kids huddled at a superior spot near the vending machines. One of the geniuses, Ben, ended up working for the space program and, according to apocryphal rumors, was a lead engineer on the Challenger shuttle. The other, Andy, attended Caltech on a full scholarship, where he happily immersed himself in calculus and discussions of Fermat with other preternaturally gifted young men (and women), who found in numbers the kind of excitement and comfort most people discover in wet kisses and fried foods.

I never spoke to Ben after high school. Andy, however, called me once or twice a year for more than a decade. These were awkward conversations, filled with lengthy longueurs. We were never close to begin with; during high school I was just trying to be a kind person to a classmate who was accustomed to unrelenting cruelty. Andy had a speech impediment, as well as unstylish, 1970s porno star hair that refused to obey the comb. When I’d pick up the phone and hear his voice on the other end, I’d panic. What could I tell him? What common ground did we share? After several years of “Hi, how are you? Fine. And you?” calls, Andy finally admitted that he had a crush on me, and that he used to attend my wrestling matches for reasons other than a finely cultivated appreciation of single-leg takedowns.

After that revelation, which I handled as well as I could—which is to say rather clumsily—Andy seemed liberated to talk about what was really happening in his life, including the groundbreaking work he was doing on something called parallel processing—a concept I wouldn’t grasp until many years later. He was building artificial brains.

Sometime later, Andy fell in love with a nice young man and accepted a professorship at MIT, where he continued to tinker with the infinite possibilities that the digits 1 and 0 presented. In the summer of 1999, kismet brought Andy and my Hollywood Boys together. Mick, a musician pal and former bandmate, forsook the rewards of the underground indie rock scene in Los Angeles and matriculated at MIT, where he intended to pursue his doctorate in robotics. Andy—my high school “friend” Andy—was one of his professors.

“Very cool guy,” Mick the musician reported. “Very into Bach.”

I asked for Andy’s direct phone number and told my pal Mick to warn Algorithm Andy that Mr. Konik, his old classmate from Nicolet High, would be calling.

When I dial the professor’s number, I’m not sure what I’m going to tell him. I just know we need to talk. Andy answers after one ring. After the standard pleasantries, I ask, “Hey, Andy, do you know anything about football?”

“Um, other than a bunch of large men run around in tight pants and fall on each other? Not really,” he says.

I tell him what I do, how I bet on sports. And I tell Algorithm Andy that he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, and if he could help me figure out how to derive a slightly better line than the oddsmakers, he’s going to be a very rich man.

Andy says, “That doesn’t sound very difficult.”

“It doesn’t?” I say cautiously.

“No. It’s all rules-based. If we tell the program the rules, and keep adding rules, and throwing out the ones that don’t apply, and continue adding data, and refining the rules—you know, testing them in simulations—and we can compare them with a historical record (I assume you have all that) and then test your hypotheses (and, again, I assume you have plenty of assumptions, since you’ve been doing this for many, many years, right?) it’s rather easy to get a couple of computers working against each other to assign values to every aspect of the data we feed them. In other words, if you can tell me what to tell the machine, I can tell you what it thinks about what you know. Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” I reply.

“Really?”

“Well, not really. Well, not at all, actually. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. It just means I’m too stupid to understand why.”

Andy continues, “It’s actually very low-level stuff. A high school kid could program this. Sorry, I don’t mean to insult you. It’s just not a very complicated problem.”

“So why haven’t more people done this?” I wonder.

“I’m sure many people have,” Andy remarks. “But the trick is what we say the rules are. I guess that would be where you come in. You can help decide where to start, what seems like rule number one. You know, like: ‘The team wearing yellow shirts always wins.’ ”

“I get it.” I say, not completely getting it, but abuzz with possibilities.

We agree in principle to make a partnership. I’ll put up the money and the gambling expertise. Andy will put up the algorithm and the computing power. Neither of us will breathe a word of this project that dare not speak its name.

The next morning, I e-mail Algorithm Andy ten years of NFL point spreads results, culled from an Internet database. Then I send him three years of Brain Trust results based on those same point spreads. Two hours later I get a reply.

He tells me, “It’s a start.”

 

Throughout September, while I wait for Algo Andy to crack the code, I let the faint possibility of handicapping mastery independent of the Brains go to my addled head. Because I can single-handedly move the line around the world, I start to fancy myself a sports-gambling luminary. This can be dangerous, I know. Nonetheless, directing my mini-syndicate of Hollywood Boys with the same crisp, formal tone Rick Matthews uses with me, I bet about $25,000 worth of games for my own account. Some of my selections are based on handicapping, which I already know is nearly impossible without a computer. Others are based on my finely developed sense of what the Brains (and the competing syndicates) are likely to do later in the week. Spookily, about two-thirds of my games do turn out to be Brain Trust or Ferdinand & Blair specials. Thus, I (and my Boys) get the absolute best number from the bookies, which makes it seem to them, I’m sure, that the new players flooding their shops are really well connected.

All of a sudden I convince myself I’m a sharpie. I bet way too many games and end up on the wrong side on a few of them. But since I’ve made my buys at a good number, I can always come back and purchase the other side at an attractive price, giving myself an opportunity to middle some games. For example, I play Wisconsin –19 vs. Minnesota, knowing this is the kind of number the syndicates will likely jump all over. And when they in fact make Wisconsin a buy later in the week, the point spread goes to –23. I then purchase Minnesota +23, enjoying a 3-point middle chance as well as two additional free-roll points (19 and 23) for a total of five key numbers. If a middle such as this comes in once out of nineteen times, it’s profitable.

More than anything else, though, riding the coattails of the master is what gets the cash. If, while waiting for Andy’s toils in Boston, I can avoid gambling too much on my own wits and, instead, merely maximize my investments on Big Daddy stock, I should do just fine. The urge to be someone, however, is hard to ignore. Earning money from sports betting is nice. Earning money from your own ingeniousness is nirvana; it brings a sense of accomplishment that just getting paid doesn’t. After only two years of working with the Brain Trust, merely stacking up the cash bores me. I have the dangerous impulse to do something grander and more satisfying. I have the impulse to be the smart money.

After one full week of aggressive freelancing, I—and my syndicate of 5 percent colleagues—go 19–12 and win $29,000. These highly unscientific results lead me to believe that I’m on to something. My suspicions are further confirmed when the next week I win another $10,000.

Eventually, though, my so-called handicapping crumbles in the face of multiple trials and I lose $17,000, including several thousand on games in which I’ve selected the wrong side of a Brain Trust game. I’ve learned my lesson—sort of. No matter how wise a guy I fancy myself, Big Rick is right: it’s folly for me to play on my own opinion. Better to maximize my investment when I have solid information from the Brain Trust.

Or Algo Andy.

After several weeks of six-hour late-night phone calls, dismal false starts, and the kind of comical misunderstandings that usually occur in door-slamming British bedroom farces (he thinks, for instance, that a safety is when a team refuses a penalty), we finally have a program to predict the final score of NFL football games. It’s full of bugs and prone to mistakes—I mean, there’s no way Cleveland, the worst team in the league, is a 24-point underdog to any squad, even the Super Bowl champion Rams—but it seems to sort of kind of possibly work. Andy cautions that the program has a low “efficiency ratio,” or something like that, and that he can’t make any performance promises other than “It will get better the more it learns.”

“Is it safe to bet on?” I ask Andy, hoping he’ll allay my doubts with one blithe pronouncement.

“You’re the gambling expert, my dear,” he reminds me. “If it were me, I wouldn’t put too much faith in our little baby until she matures a little.”

“Like a fine wine,” I propose.

“Or a teenage boy,” Andy retorts.

“So just tell me this: If it were your money at risk, would you bet on football games based on our new program?”

“Hmmm.” I hear Algo Andy click-clacking on a computer keyboard. I imagine him scrolling through long strings of numbers, integers flying across his screen, until he sees what he needs to see—whatever that may be. “If you compare the historical point-spread numbers with the ones our baby spits up, they’re pretty close. I mean, if you were to bet on every game you might get—let’s see—oh, like, call it a fifty-two percent success rate against the point spread, which I’ve been led to believe isn’t enough of an advantage.”

“Right. But we’re not going to bet every game.”

Andy titters. “Oh, right. Well then,” he says, flamboyantly, “let the fun begin!”

I fairly beg him to keep feeding information to our fledgling program—which we informally call “Baby”—and to e-mail me the predicted final scores of the upcoming week’s NFL games. We’ve consciously avoided the college matchups, since, Algo Andy claims, the amount of data to be processed would overtax his personal system, and he doesn’t feel comfortable using MIT equipment for betting on inter-collegiate athletics. “And, Andy,” I caution him, “please, not a word about this to anyone. We could be sitting on a gold mine. Granted, there might not be anything but granite at the bottom of the shaft, but there’s a chance, however slim, that we’ll hit the jackpot.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too high, Michael. This isn’t a very large sample. Let’s not get seduced by the fallacy of small numbers.”

Feeling momentarily very much like Rick Matthews, I say, “Andy, my friend, it’s the big numbers I’m interested in.”

 

In my third season of football betting, for the first time in my sports-gambling career, I experience anxiety. Not nervousness. Not excitement. Anxiety. It’s the night before Baby’s late-September debut, and I can’t sleep.

My pulse is racing as if I’m cranked up on amphetamines. My mind won’t shut off: it’s filled with thoughts of betting lines and point spreads.

My dog looks at me like I’m insane. She can tell something’s wrong.

While Vivian sleeps soundly, her mind uncluttered with sports-gambling concerns, I envision touchdowns and field goals, fumbles and interceptions. At 3:00 a.m., I do something I never do: I get out of bed, lace up my shoes, and go for a three-mile run in the almost deserted streets around my Hollywood home. The hound goes with me, perplexed but happy. After a post-run shower and check of the betting lines on my computer—nothing’s changed at 4:00 in the morning—I sleep for three hours and awake less than refreshed, with a twelve-hour workday ahead of me.

Were I a superstitious lad, I might look upon my anxiety attack in the wee small hours as some sort of harbinger, a Shakespearean foreshadowing of impending doom.

The day will live in infamy.

The Brain Trust goes 2–8, losing more than $250,000. At our low point, before a couple of late winners come in to soften the blow, we’re down close to $400,000. And since I’ve boldly chosen to follow Baby’s infantile gurglings, I lose an additional $20,000 of my own syndicate’s bankroll. I fleetingly attribute this bloodbath to karmic retribution, my cosmic punishment for disobeying Big Daddy’s warnings, for mistakenly believing that I could do something I haven’t been anointed to do.

But then I come to my senses. These fluctuations happen. They’re cruel and bizarre and extraordinarily painful, but anyone who gambles for a living knows that sooner or later one of these vicious streaks will hit you like a three-hundred-pound lineman going for a quarterback’s knees. If you have the bankroll and the fortitude to ride it out you survive. If you don’t you quit gambling.

Algo Andy suggests I give him a week or two to do some “tweaking,” as he puts it. “Obviously, these things aren’t perfect predictors,” he notes. “But I’m sure we can make Baby more effective. I’ve got some ideas, which I could explain to you, but you’d have to be pretty well versed in some advanced concepts to get where I’m going on this. Are you up for it?”

“No, I’m really not, Andy,” I admit. “Just do your thing and let me know when it’s safe to use Baby again. In the meantime, I’m going to try to disinfect and bandage the gaping wounds in my bankroll.”

I have a brief talk with Big Daddy during the carnage. He sounds tired and worn, and genuinely rueful. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” he tells me. “If someone would have suggested to me I’d have to work this hard to lay a man eleven to ten…” He chuckles bitterly. “I’ll tell you what, pardsy-wardsy…” For a moment I think he’s going to tell me he’s through with all the nonsense, the elaborately choreographed charade he must dance every week, all to lose $1 million or more.

Instead, he says, “I love it. It’s my favorite thing in the world, 44. The cat-and-mouse. It’s all a big game. And I truly enjoy it.”

He can’t possibly enjoy blowing second-home-on-
the-water money on football games. It’s the winning, I’m sure, that inspires him to keep going, the knowledge that he and his partners can beat a game that no one is supposed to be able to beat. Big Daddy can handle the fluctuations. Brother Herbie can handle them. I think even I can handle them. None of us are happy—indeed, a nice group crying session would be rather cathartic at the moment. But we’ll survive. And besides, it’s great advertising. Any bookie who doesn’t want my action now is either crazy or a genius. This kind of catastrophic loss should buy me many weeks of life.

Still, it’s hard to think cheerily when you’ve just hemorrhaged $57,000 of your own money on sports gambling. So I drown my sorrows in a glass (or two) of Scotch whiskey and hope the night will pass quickly.

 

I have a very bad week. And it has nothing to do with bookmakers.

On Thursday, shortly before a college football game on which I lose another $60,000, Vivian walks into my office and announces that she’s moving out and moving on. “We’re through,” she says robotically, as though all her emotions have been extinguished. I knew we were having problems, but I never expected this.

“Hold on,” I say, turning away from the odds screen on my computer. “Let’s talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about anymore. The well has already been poisoned,” she says, cryptically. “We can’t grow together. I’m sorry.” She kisses me on my forehead and walks away.

The phone rings. I don’t answer it. It rings again, several times in succession. I pick it up to make it stop. It’s Brother Herbie. “Where you been, Doc? I got an updated order for you.”

I tell him I can’t work just now. “Sorry,” I say, and hang up.

Ten minutes later, just before the game kicks, a taxi pulls up in front of our house. Vivian gets in it and says, “Good-bye, Michael.”

For the next two lost days I’m despondent. I have no interest in gambling—or much else, for that matter. I feel frighteningly bleak. By Saturday, I can execute my betting responsibilities, although my heart (and every other corporeal part of me) isn’t in it. The Brain Trust launches into an 8–0 tear before finally booking a loser. Is this, as my father claimed for many years, the phenomenon of “lucky in cards, unlucky in love”?

After a late, prolonged run of bad picks, the Brains finish the day 9–6. But most of our winners are smaller positions and most of our losers are bigger ones. Most improbably, one of our favorites, Baylor, about to plunge into the end zone to cover the spread with seconds left on the clock, fumbles at the one-yard line and allows the underdog, UNLV, to scamper ninety-nine yards the other way for a game-winning (and spread-beating) touchdown. What looked to be a get even from last week returns a modest $17,500 profit.

Despite the gloom, I have faith that one day I’ll be reborn. Somewhere in Boston, one of the smartest men in America is ably tinkering with a computer program that could turn Mr. 44 and his Hollywood Boys into a betting syndicate worthy of Big Daddy’s respect.

 

The bookies have long believed that the NFL lines are more or less unassailable. All the information about the teams is public knowledge. Bettors, the bookies assume, can’t have more knowledge about the celebrated mercenaries than the blabbering TV commentators, or statistic services, or newspaper columnists. So the well-capitalized shops have little fear in extending $30,000 to $50,000 limits per game.

On the basis of our results over the past couple of weekends they have nothing to worry about. We get slaughtered. Nearly every pick is a loser, a big loser. I forfeit another $245,000.

So much for the theory about cards and love.

Early Monday morning, Big Daddy calls to check on some figures with me. For a moment the fierce leader of the world’s biggest sports-betting syndicate sounds like a sweet old man.

“Tough weekend,” I offer.

“These things happen,” Rick remarks. “You just gotta have faith that they’ll get better eventually.”

I recall Big Daddy’s words several nights later, when I’m staring at the ceiling, wondering where my former lover is, replaying all that has gone wrong. I feel hopeless. This I’m sure would alarm Rick, who, if he knew my dismal state of affairs, might see me as a threat to the security of the many hundreds of thousands of dollars under my stewardship. Indeed, knowing that I’m partnerless in the world, he might want me to close my accounts and send him back what’s left. Because were I to die tomorrow, how would he get his money?

I soldier on, pretending to care about how many points the Utah Utes are giving New Mexico State. But I don’t pretend very well. My malaise is obvious as hair plugs. Both Brother Herbie and Big Daddy can tell something is wrong with me.

“Are you all right, 44?” Big Daddy asks.

I tell him the truth: No, not really.

He offers a few words of comfort to me—talking this way, I can tell, is difficult for him—and makes me promise him I’m really okay. And then we get back to business, monitoring the point spreads, allocating our funds. We wager hardly anything for the rest of the day. But it may be one of the most memorable Saturdays of my Brain Trust career.

During a quiet moment, while the afternoon games are well under way, Big Daddy calls me. “I’m just checking on you, pards. I want you to know I care about you and that you’re my friend. I’m here for you.”

I tell Rick Matthews I’m genuinely touched. We chat idly for a few minutes. Big Daddy shares with me some of his homespun wisdom. And then, signing off, he says, “I love you, pards.”

I’m dumbstruck. And, for the briefest moment, a tiny bit happy.

One of my newest accounts, a place called Betmaker.com, shuts down my action after exactly four bets—four bets that result in a net loss of $4,500. When I call to make a wager, the boss, a man who claims his name is Ralph, gets on the line and says, no offense intended, that I’m not the kind of player he wants in his shop. “You’re too smart,” he says. “I don’t want to take bets from the smart money.” He makes no mention of Big Daddy or syndicates or moving funds for unseen nefarious forces. I’m just not a desirable customer. End of discussion. Money on the wire tomorrow morning. Thanks for your interest.

Big Daddy, who has the persistence of a badger, refuses to quit or slow down, or even stand in place. He orders me to check out another Costa Rican joint he’s heard about, called SBG Global, that takes very large wagers. “See what they’re all about, pards, and maybe we’ll be able to give ’em some business.”

So I go through my usual due diligence, employing a phony name and voice, asking for references and credit history so that I might “get comfortable” with sending $100,000 or more to some heretofore anonymous enterprise somewhere in Central America. At SBG Global, the boss man gives me the name and number of his sales rep from Sprint so that I might see what a big (and sturdy) operation he runs. He offers me every assurance he can think of short of telling me his real name and providing the direct number to his bank manager. I’ve come to understand that there’s really no way to gain complete confidence in these matters. You have to make a gut call, send the dough, and hope it isn’t stolen.

This is what I tell Big Daddy. And I tell him my gut call is that the money will be okay. But I can’t 100 percent guarantee it.

“All right, then, 44, we’ll just have to start them out small, I don’t know, send them what? A couple hundred thousand?” he asks.

“Let’s try one hundred for now,” I suggest. “And if and when we get more comfortable we’ll pump it up.”

“Fine. Let’s see what ol’ Mister Global is all about.”

Even with new outs the results are old. We have yet another miserable, losing weekend. We blow only another $60,000 or so—which is equivalent to maybe two bets—but the losses are mounting to a point where I’m troubled, and I say so to Brother Herbie.

“This ain’t nothin’ to worry about. I’ll tell you when you should start worrying. And we’re not even close to that time!” He assures me that the hole we’re in will be easy to dig out of: we just have to persevere.

I can’t help recalling that at this point last season, rolling through October, I was up nearly $500,000, about the exact amount I’m down this year. And what makes matters even less palatable is that every weekend starts out looking so very promising, with enormous, early profits. Then we seem to give all those profits back, plus more. I don’t bother watching the games; it’s too disturbing. Instead, I try unsuccessfully to read and write. My concentration’s shot.

At the end of the day I check the final results and do my accounting. Not only do the losses always seem to add up to more than the wins, our handicapping percentage is below 50 percent, worse than what a monkey could accomplish flipping a coin. This is not the form of the world’s greatest sports bettor. Even I, who admittedly know next to nothing, am managing slightly better than 50 percent in my personal accounts, where, without Baby’s artificial intelligence to guide me, I frequently pursue investments on the basis of that most dangerous of motivations: my own unassisted opinion.

Algo Andy tells me Baby still isn’t ready to return to work. “Don’t worry, Michael, I’ll figure this one out. I said this isn’t rocket science—but it sort of is in a way.” He laughs uncontrollably and wishes me good night.

 

I’m driving in a rental car from the Napa Valley Country Club, where I’ve spent the day doing research for an upcoming golf article, to the Oakland airport, where I hope to arrive in time to place a slew of wagers before the Thursday night college football games. The bookies at SBG Global have given me a lovely welcome gift that’s even better than the 15 percent sign-up bonus added to my account: They’re willing to let me bet $50,000 on a college side and an astounding $25,000 on a college total.

Before I can negotiate the late-afternoon traffic tangle around San Francisco, my cell phone rings. It’s Big Daddy. He’s got the hungry, predatory sound in his voice he gets when someone offers him big limits, as though he were a salivating wolf and the prospect of a five-dime bet on a football game were an injured lamb. Thus I’m experiencing something I never envisioned doing: driving a Pontiac Grand Am in bumper-to-bumper northern California traffic while placing more than $100,000 worth of bets on the Syracuse Orangemen (–10 points).

This should do wonders for my image with the fellows at SBG Global. Only a hopelessly addicted maniac tosses off six figures worth of football bets a few hours before game time, from his car.

When I arrive at the airport, the craziness continues. With my cell phone in one hand and two pay phones juggled in the other. I place a rope of disparate bets for Big Daddy with almost every one of my accounts. A casual onlooker might mistake me for a harried business traveler attempting to keep up with the new sales projections back at the home office. But I’m merely a hard-core sports gambler, trying to keep up with the insatiable betting appetites of my friend and colleague, Rick Matthews.

 

My tenure with the allegedly high-limit gambling shop of SBG Global lasts exactly five bets. Management there decides to shut me down after noticing that on three out of three bets placed on college football Saturday I managed to get a good number. Since the line didn’t move against me—as it did on the Thursday night Syracuse game, when I took a bad number—I must therefore be part of a well-connected and powerful betting syndicate.

Which is true, of course. Never mind that during my brief relationship with the Global folks I haven’t won a penny. In fact, I’ve lost $7,500. But they see in my consistent refusal to take a poor point spread the potential to earn a profit over the long run, and that just won’t do.

I’m glad that at least someone foresees me winning.

Throughout the dark days of my breakup with Viv, Big Daddy has proved a perceptive and kind friend. He’ll interrupt our bet making to ask, “Are you okay, pal? Are you really all right?” Over the past few weeks, during which we’ve lost more than half a million dollars, I’ve grown eager to hear which homespun term of endearment he’ll use next. I’m alternately “slap-daddy,” “pardsy-wardsy,” “young friend,” and my favorite, “daddy rabbit.” Big Rick frequently solicits my advice about the particulars of getting our money down; more heartening, he frequently follows it. Even as we lose our shirts, Big Daddy confides in me more and more.

Still, he’s no Brother Herbie, who tends to speak frankly and (I would suppose in Big Daddy’s eyes) loosely about what’s going on in the world of sports betting: which syndicate is betting on what; how much is getting wagered on which teams; insider gossip. So it’s with some regret that I listen to him tell me that my old pal Little Mikey Brown from Caesars Palace is getting a reputation in sophisticated sports-betting circles as a shady character.

A few months ago, during baseball season, the onetime boxer left the Palace to assume a managerial position at the MGM Grand. I always assumed that Mikey Brown moved to MGM because he didn’t want to work for the suffocating Hilton administration, which bought Caesars earlier in the year. Now Brother Herbie tells me that Mikey’s move may have been because the suits at Caesars had gotten wind of the former fighter’s antics.

According to Herbie, Little Mikey is doing at MGM Grand what he did at Caesars: letting a group of professional gamblers bet into badly off lines on Sunday night. “Let’s say the line is three everywhere else,” Herbie explains. “Mikey Brown will put up the number as one and a half and let his boys lay it. Later in the week they’ll take three and a half from somewhere else.”

I don’t know if it’s true. And I almost don’t want to know. I’m just sorry to realize that everyone in this dirty business—including me, I suppose—is constantly looking for an angle to beat the game, even if that angle isn’t completely honest. In a perfect world, the bookies would put up a line, the bettors would bet into it, the good handicappers would win and the bad ones would lose, and everyone would go home feeling as though he got a fair deal.

But that would be too easy.

When I brief Brother Herbie on some of my upcoming travel plans, including weekly visits for couples counseling with a completely uninterested Vivian and individual counseling to deal with my dismally ineffectual couples counseling, he offers me his unsolicited advice.

“I’ve never done the therapy thing,” Herbie says in his gentle backwoods drawl. “But I’ve always found that a really expensive gift seems to do wonders for a relationship.”

Just when I’m convinced that the only thing that matters is the absent affection in my life, in one splendid day of college football wagering we erase $330,000 of our $470,000 seasonal deficit. I can see faintly what I’ve been seeking for the past six weeks: many very big wins. All our important games, the ones where the Brain Trust has $75,000 or more on the line, come home on the happy side, and though money isn’t everything, when it’s all you have, it’s something.

 

Returning from a story assignment in the Channel Islands, minutes after touching down at LAX after a twelve-hour flight from London, I call Brother Herbie to see if we’re doing any business. (I spent the interminable hours at 37,000 feet poring over statistical charts and early-in-the-week line moves. My point-spread divining rod managed to find nine games that were “off.”) He tells me it can wait until tomorrow morning, Saturday, and that I should get a good night’s rest.

On the taxicab ride home, I call my Hollywood Boys and, in true sicko fashion, bet a string of games. Am I becoming an action junkie, or do I really know something?

Rick Matthews indubitably is on to something. For the second Saturday in a row we win more than $300,000, eliminating the season’s deficit and settling nicely into a six-figure profit. Meanwhile, my personal accounts continue to produce dividends. Indeed, my handicapping percentage, I note with some pride, is measurably better than Big Daddy’s at this point in the campaign. Of course, some of his positions are opposites, phony signals meant to throw meddling bookmakers off the scent of a hot play. Still, I’m up more than $40,000 on my own.

But there’s that little problem with winning: When I call to get the Sunday morning NFL lines, two of my most reliable outs, WWTS and William Hill, the august London outfit, inform me my account has been terminated. They give the usual reasons—smart money plays, etc. But the truth is this: While I sent them cash every week for five weeks to cover my mounting losses, they didn’t care what games I bet on. Now that I’ve put together two winning weeks in a row, they care.

The closure of WWTS hurts especially. This was my largest out, taking $30,000 on a college side. I don’t know how I’ll replace WWTS—except to send in a “different” player, with a fresh name, address, bank account, and voice. When I report the bad news to Big Daddy, he takes it calmly. “You’re just too tough, I guess,” he says, chuckling darkly.

I’m a sports-betting hero only when cloaked in the super-powerful cape of the Brain Trust. When I return to my desk at The Daily Gambler, bespectacled and anonymous, I’m a pretend hero. What’s worse, I’m channeling my emotional problems into odds analysis. I’m so lonely and heartsick, I find myself turning to gambling to fill the hole in my life. I can see how a gambling addict, despairing about things other than money, can easily narcotize himself with the adrenaline infusion of an uncertain bet.

But freshly earned money doesn’t help me sleep any better. I still miss my girlfriend terribly. Cold hundred-dollar bills can’t press warm breasts against you or kiss your lips.

 

Herbie gives me two conflicting orders: one at one shop for over on the Thursday night college game and one at another shop for under. When I question this strategy, he advises me to make like Eli Whitney with his cotton gin. “Sit chilly and don’t ask too many questions, and everything will be all right.”

“I don’t get the Eli Whitney reference,” I confess.

I’m mystified. But I’m also inspired. Surely I can do better than this. Surely opportunities exist that don’t require the permission (and expertise) of the Brain Trust. Instead of brooding over my solitude, waiting for Rick Matthews or Brother Herbie to lead me into action, I ought to discover my own secrets, my own closely guarded keys to the sports-betting vault.

Algo Andy assures me that everything is progressing nicely and that he’s noticing some interesting trends. But unless I want to gamble for the sake of gambling, he wouldn’t recommend following Baby’s advice just yet. “She’s having growing pains,” he says.

It’s almost the weekend and Big Daddy has yet to instruct me on a single bet. (Apparently he’s waiting to make his move early Saturday morning.) I look at my ledger book and note that I’ve already got $35,000 in action on the weekend, all based on my own handicapping, without a computer to show me the way to salvation. Have I gone insane? Has lovesickness rendered me an utter buffoon? Or—and this is my devout hope—am I starting to get the hang of this whole racket?

Based on my dismal results on this college football Saturday, I don’t know a damn thing about sports betting. I go 3–7 and bleed away nearly $15,000. Furthermore, Big Daddy has me execute exactly five bets: one an opposite; two on totals; and the other two on Ivy League games, where the limit is $2,000. Are the lines too tough? Have the outs become too unreliable? Has Big Daddy gotten wind of my freelancing? I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but I am sure I don’t want to have to hang around my house all day, every day, if there’s no reason to be here. I’d much rather be hiking with Ella in the Hollywood Hills, chatting up starlets, and pretending I haven’t a care in the world. It’s a boring and unprofitable Sunday, and I become more disconsolate when I talk to Viv, who’s supposed to be meeting me later in the evening to attend a mutual friend’s wedding. She sounds, as always these days, cold and distant, speaking to me as if I’m a foreign clerk booking her sports bets.

We barely talk at the nuptials. Vivian is icy—if a woman so ridiculously hot, radiating lasciviousness through her dark green dress, can be called that. Feeling like a stranger with the closest person in my life sends me reeling back to Mistress Gambling.

The next week I blow close to $30,000 on college football. Some of the games are Brain Trust specials—which continue to lose. Most of them, though, are my homegrown stinkers.

Something weird has happened to me. I’m no longer scared of money. I spend it freely and, when everything is working correctly, I earn it easily. Maybe it’s only the recklessness born of heartbreak, but I’m convinced that Big Daddy has had a powerful influence on me. No longer do I have “piss running through my veins,” as do many of the bookies Big Daddy derides. Now, I’ve discovered, I’ve got heart. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

If I were to lose another $30,000 on NFL games this November Sunday, maybe I’d smarten up and quit my solo enterprises. Maybe I’d learn an expensive lesson. Regrettably, the only enlightenment I glean is that I’m pretty damn good at selecting professional football sides. I win back more than $15,000 of Saturday’s losses—and my confidence, if not my entire bankroll, returns. This, I realize, may not be the best result for long-term financial wellness. But I’m not complaining about going 4–1 and taking down the dough.

I’m only sorry I didn’t bet more.