Another Vegas gaming myth

By Jeff Haney

Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

I literally was right around Barstow on the edge of the desert, so my first thought was some sort of Hunter Thompson-style alternate reality had set in.

Driving back to Las Vegas from L.A. last month on a dark interstate, the part where you start to see billboards for that Mad Greek place, I was between CDs on the audio book I was playing (Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up”) and so forced to listen to some high-desert classic rock station for a moment.

What sounded like a nationally syndicated sports report came on, and I decided to pay attention.

One of the lead stories chronicled an amazing, even surreal, turn of events. Remember the Steelers-Chargers game that ended with a controversial call by the referee, allowing San Diego rather than Pittsburgh to cover the point spread?

According to the news report, the play in question, the Steelers’ return of a fumbled lateral by the Chargers, caused a swing in the betting action that cost “Vegas” — evidently meaning Las Vegas sports books — $66 million.

Huh? The report left me so disconcerted I accidentally listened to most of the ensuing song (Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream”) before popping in the next book CD.

This I knew: Anyone who would report a swing of $66 million in Las Vegas — out of a total of $100 million supposedly wagered, no less — on a single regular-season NFL game would have to be as irresponsible as a man in the depths of an ether binge.

Forget for a moment whether this imaginary swing would have benefited the house or the gamblers. Those numbers were way off, period ... yet they were being repeated, I would later discover, in various national media venues.

The state Gaming Control Board, you see, tells us that $1.17 billion was legally wagered on football in Nevada throughout all of last year. This year’s figure will probably be down slightly, but let’s err on the side of caution and stick with that number. Just under $100 million is wagered on the Super Bowl, so that leaves slightly more than $1 billion bet on the rest of the football season — college and NFL combined.

If you figure there’s roughly 18 solid weeks of football betting before the Super Bowl, that means about $60 million is wagered each week, on average. Again, college and pro. Altogether. In all of Nevada, not just Las Vegas.

So why were media outlets, including the strange disembodied voice in my rental car, reporting that a routine regular-season Steelers-Chargers game was drawing as much betting action as the Super Bowl?

It probably came from an unofficial estimate (quite possibly a good one, but an estimate nonetheless) put forth that $100 million was wagered on the game throughout the country (or maybe the world), an amount that would encompass the nation’s vast network of illegal bookmakers and perhaps foreign bet shops.

In Las Vegas — or “Vegas,” because that must sound cooler or more sensational or whatever — no one knows for sure how much was bet on the game. It was probably somewhere between $1.5 million and $10 million, meaning any swing in the profit or loss of Nevada casinos caused by the unusual ending would have been paltry — anywhere from less than $1 million to perhaps a few million dollars.

The episode illustrated a couple of points. One, the quality of national-media reports involving “Vegas,” or especially “the Vegas bookies,” often ranges from merely misleading to wildly inaccurate. And two, although Americans have a big appetite for betting sports, the huge majority of the action — most estimates say 98 percent to 99 percent of it — takes place outside of Nevada, the only state in which gamblers can legally bet sports.

So it is not a major surprise that officials in Delaware and New Jersey have been advocating bringing some form of legal sports betting to their states. The Delaware state lottery director, Wayne Lemons, told the Associated Press last week that legalized sports betting there “has a good chance” in the state’s General Assembly. A sports lottery, if not full-fledged sports betting, could be set up by summer, he said. In New Jersey, a state Senate panel is urging Congress to eradicate a federal ban on sports betting with the eventual goal of bringing it to Atlantic City.

Much has changed in the sports betting business since the last time Delaware offered a football-betting lottery, in 1976. That effort was a dismal flop, according to Arne Lang’s 1992 book “Sports Betting 101,” losing $371,000 on gross revenues of $725,000.

Slipshod oddsmaking contributed to the failure, but again, it’s a new age in sports betting, one driven by technological advances and readily available, timely information on betting lines and odds. If Delaware and New Jersey are successful in legalizing sports betting, it’s a good bet they’ll be far more sophisticated this time around.

Then, depending on how you look at it, the “Vegas bookies” will have either some competition in the realm of legal sports betting, or some new kindred spirits.

Jeff Haney can be reached at 259-4041 or at [email protected].