If bettors think they’re above this football seminar, they likely need it

By Jeff Haney

Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The Vegas Insider football handicapping seminar, scheduled for this weekend at Red Rock Resort, appeals primarily to beginning and intermediate-level sports bettors.

This is an ideal target audience, considering those two groups encompass just about all of us.

Certainly an advanced, or professional, bettor would also find some value in the seminar’s panels of oddsmakers and top handicappers from Las Vegas and elsewhere. It’s just that truly advanced sports bettors are so few in number they’re hardly worth considering in creating a mainstream event such as the Vegas Insider seminar, designed to attract the betting public.

Of course, many if not all of us tend to overrate our gambling ability. (Maybe that confidence — or recklessness — is a necessary trait in a venture that typically entails risking 11 to win 10 and expecting to make money.)

I’ve always likened the phenomenon to the schoolhouse in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

Lem Banker, the dean of Las Vegas sports bettors, puts it even more colorfully.

“Every woman thinks she’s sensuous and that she makes a great spaghetti sauce,” Banker told me recently. “Just like every man thinks he’s the best football bettor. They can’t all be right.”

That classic quotation is just as relevant today as it was when Banker told Larry Merchant something quite similar for Merchant’s 1973 book, “The National Football Lottery.”

I’ve been fortunate to attend several previous Vegas Insider football handicapping seminars, both as an observer and as a panelist. The level of discussion remained high even as the subject matter ranged from basic to the more esoteric.

In one segment, a lineup of professional handicappers might analyze each of the NFL’s divisional races — paying attention to each team’s odds of winning, of course. In another segment, the topic might be the value of a half-game in NFL team regular-season victory wagering. (For example, what’s better: Under 8 1/2 victories, minus 140; or under 8 victories, even money? Show your work.)

Among the topics I’d expect to be addressed by the experts at this weekend’s seminar:

• Is a team’s “home field advantage” given too much weight in the betting line at times, especially in certain college football conferences?

• As a bettor, how do you deal with a team such as Illinois, which everybody and their bookie’s brother “knows” is going to be among the most improved teams in college football? Could there be an overreaction to such a team in the betting marketplace, making it profitable to bet against it in the early part of the season?

(To download a detailed agenda for this weekend’s seminar, which is free to attend, go online to vegasinsider.com/handicapping-seminar/2009/).

A highlight of last year’s seminar, also conducted at Red Rock, was a discussion of “power ratings” — numerical assessments of a team’s strength used for betting purposes.

Kenny White, lead oddsmaker at Las Vegas Sports Consultants, said his process of making power ratings starts with a team’s head coach and takes into account each player — size, weight, speed, talent — as well as some team intangibles.

“The better set of power ratings you have, the better your numbers (betting lines) are going to be, whether you’re an oddsmaker, bookmaker or handicapper,” White said.

Las Vegas handicapper Andy Iskoe tracks multiple sets of power ratings that accentuate various aspects of a team’s performance.

“Handicapping is both an art and a science,” Iskoe said. “The scientific part of the handicapping process comes in the development, the maintaining and the adjustment of power ratings. The key part is the artistic part, which is the interpretation, or the subjective judgments you make to the power ratings.”

The way he uses power ratings has changed through the years, Iskoe said. For example, 15 years ago, if Michigan opened as a 7-point favorite against visiting Utah, the line probably would be bet up to 10 based on support for the more prominent football program. Today, thanks to the preponderance of sports and betting information that’s so readily available, it’s just as likely the line would be bet down to 3.

The trick is to discern when the pendulum has swung too far: Perhaps 7 is the right number, and laying anything less than that with the favorite is the correct play.

“There’s so much more information out there that what used to be taken for granted is no longer taken for granted,” Iskoe said.