Jeff Haney on the extremely profitable ‘gambling hedge fund,’ conceived by NBA owner and run by local sports bettor Fezzik

Friday, April 28, 2006 | 9:07 a.m.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who has never been shy about embracing radical new ideas, floated a doozy even by his standards about a year and a half ago.

Cuban suggested launching a "gambling hedge fund," by which wealthy investors would pool their money to form a bankroll devoted entirely to betting - not on securities or commodities, but on football games, blackjack and anything else with a perceived edge for the player.

Serious gamblers realized Cuban's project would quickly become so unwieldy that it would sink beneath its own weight.

Unless it was conducted on a much smaller scale, a skiff instead of a freighter.

This year, one of Las Vegas' leading sports bettors has taken Cuban's idea and run with it, showing publicly that a small, informal version of a gambling hedge fund can indeed be a resounding success.

"Cuban had the right idea, but it was on too large a scale," said one-name professional gambler Fezzik, who sometimes goes by Steve Fezzik, another nom de gambling, in media interviews. "We wanted to show how it's possible to win consistently at sports betting by getting the best available (point spread) numbers."

Fezzik's gambling index is officially known as - you guessed it - the "Fezzdaq."

Playing anywhere from a handful to a couple of dozen games a day, the Fezzdaq surged from an initial stake of $1,000 early this year to a high of more than $4,700 in March before sustaining a slump driven by a string of losing baseball wagers. The Fezzdaq stood at $3,165.43 at the start of "trading" Thursday.

"Actually, that probably is still way ahead of our expectation," Fezzik said.

I'll say. I don't know about you, but if I had invested $1,000 in a certificate of deposit at the beginning of the year, I might have run it all the way up to about $1,017 by now.

Fezzdaq selections and results are posted daily on the message board at the Web site fezziksplace.com. (A small portion of the fund is devoted to Fezzik's poker playing.)

While it does incorporate handicapping, or analyzing the games from a gambling angle, the index relies primarily on attacking betting lines that differ from those readily available in the marketplace.

Fezzik calls such numbers "rogue lines," and they are like manna from heaven for the Fezzdaq. For example, let's say the over/under in an NBA game is 191 points at every sports book in the world except for one outlying book in Undisclosed Location, Southern Nevada, which has it at 193. "Under 193" would probably be part of the Fezzdaq's portfolio.

In the course of hundreds - or better yet, thousands - of games, that's an extremely profitable strategy.

"It's very successful, turning $1,000 into (nearly) $3,200 in that amount of time," said Henderson resident Jeff Jones, a recreational sports bettor who put up the initial $1,000 investment and handles the accounting for the Fezzdaq.

"Basically, the strategy is to find numbers that are a point or a half-point better than widely available lines," and then hammer them, said Jones, who also serves as a self-styled watchdog for the wild-and-woolly world of sports handicapping services.

The Fezzdaq, which scours Nevada as well as offshore sports books for rogue lines, is currently using bets in the $60 to $80 range - which would hardly be enough to command Cuban's interest.

"He would be dealing in such high (dollar) volume," Jones said, "any rogue numbers would disappear (from the marketplace) so quickly that he wouldn't be able to get nearly enough money down to make it worthwhile."

In fact, the betting lines that the Fezzdaq hits often disappear pretty quickly anyway, as other rogue-line hunters snuff them out.

Fezzik acknowledged most of the selections lose their value once the desirable number gets snapped up, as the Fezzdaq isn't a showcase of pure handicapping. One of its purposes, Fezzik said, is to disprove an assertion put forth by other, so-called "donkey" gamblers who claim it's impossible to win every year betting sports.

How high can the Fezzdaq climb? Considering even the weakest, most obscure Nevada sports books will usually accept sports bets at $330 a pop, I could easily see the index tripling or quadrupling from its current level.

Fezzdaq $10,000, anyone?