Speaker 1: Pushkin. Welcome back to Against the Rules, Everybody. Michael lewis here.
Speaker 1: Last episode we heard from Billy Walters, one of the
Speaker 1: great old school sports gambling sharps. He's someone who made
Speaker 1: the poker tables and saloons of Vegas more interesting. Characters
Speaker 1: like Billy are harder to find in today's Vegas. But
Speaker 1: there's another type of figure who's still around, and that's
Speaker 1: who we're going to meet today, the bookies.
Speaker 2: I don't call us dinosaurs. I call his crocodiles, because
Speaker 2: dinosaurs are just saying we're crocodile. We've been around for
Speaker 2: eighty million years and we're still here.
Speaker 1: Chris Andrews met with me and my producer Lydia Jean
Speaker 1: Kott at the South Point Casino, where Chris runs the
Speaker 1: sports book from a dingy little office beside the place
Speaker 1: where all the sports gamblers gathered to make their Chris
Speaker 1: has been in Vegas for a long time, and so
Speaker 1: of his associates, Jimmy Vacaro and Vinie Maiolo. They came
Speaker 1: of age at a time when if you wanted to
Speaker 1: gamble or become a bookie, Vegas is where you went.
Speaker 1: All roads led to it and all lines emanated from it.
Speaker 1: Chris grew up in Pittsburgh, which was famous for generating
Speaker 1: Vegas bookies.
Speaker 2: I think the geography, the topography had a lot to
Speaker 2: do with it. There's a lot of like all the
Speaker 2: Three rivers, of course, but there's other ones. And it
Speaker 2: created all these little valleys and this little valley, our
Speaker 2: little valley. We've had a lot of Greeks. Greek, I'm Greek.
Speaker 2: There's the next valley had, you know, Germans next, and
Speaker 2: Irish and Italians, a lot of it, you know. And
Speaker 2: in each of these little pockets was like its own
Speaker 2: little community, you know.
Speaker 1: Create isolated population where you could make your own rules.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, and you just take care of the
Speaker 2: right guys and you're okay.
Speaker 1: Chris's colleague Jimmy Vacaro, also grew up near Pittsburgh. He
Speaker 1: started off as a blackjack dealer and had a hand
Speaker 1: and up wading sports books and a handful of Vegas casinos,
Speaker 1: including the MGM and the Golden Nugget. Matt Damon played
Speaker 1: his brother Sonny Vcaro in a movie called Air about
Speaker 1: how Sonny got Michael Jordan to sign with Nike. True story,
Speaker 1: Sonny's the one who got Jimmy started in gambling.
Speaker 3: You'd have these little stand up places where they sold
Speaker 3: the magazines and a candy bar, and if you went
Speaker 3: in the back, you could bet the horses, you could
Speaker 3: bet the games, whatever, and you could have a drink,
Speaker 3: you could sit down whatever. I used to go to
Speaker 3: a place called the Common News was in Braddock, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: Remember the movie The Sting. Yeah, yeah, like the movie
Speaker 3: this thing at that little place where the book mean,
Speaker 3: that's exactly what the Common News looked like, huh exactly.
Speaker 3: I was marveled. So anyway, so I used to go
Speaker 3: with my brother because I wasn't even eighteen years Sonny
Speaker 3: would go down, H'd bet fifteen hundred dollars whatever. Then
Speaker 3: when I got to be old enough, Joe Nigera who
Speaker 3: owned the Common News at the time, I remember I
Speaker 3: went in there with my friend and I want to
Speaker 3: make a bed on a baseball game then go to
Speaker 3: the pirate game. So I went inside and uh, I
Speaker 3: bet about three games. I bet him for all for
Speaker 3: like pretty good, like one hundred dollars each or two
Speaker 3: hundred US. It was like five hundred dollars, which was
Speaker 3: a lot of money. We're talking about nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 3: eighteen sixty six. And here's here's one of my great statements.
Speaker 3: I said, Joe, I said, I'm gonna be able to
Speaker 3: pay you like mandyr Tuesday. He said, Jimmy, these aren't
Speaker 3: green stamps. In otherwords, I couldn't bet with no credit.
Speaker 2: Get to bring cash.
Speaker 3: And then the next time I came now, I was
Speaker 3: at eighteen nineteen twenty something like that, and I was okay.
Speaker 3: I had a two hundred dollars credit line at a
Speaker 3: common news to me that was like a million dollars.
Speaker 3: I finally made it. Joe Nagara thinks, I'm okay, and
Speaker 3: then that just started everything.
Speaker 4: First someone went to the racetrack. I thought. I thought
Speaker 4: I was going to the zoom.
Speaker 1: That's Vinnie Miolo, the third in our trio of That
Speaker 1: Gets Bookies.
Speaker 4: My uncle Tony says, hey, you want to go see
Speaker 4: some animals, and I wanted to get out of the house.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking we're going to go up to the Bronx,
Speaker 4: you know, and go to the zoo. So we were
Speaker 4: out there and I'm looking around. I said, to come,
Speaker 4: the only animals here they're horses. He says, it's a
Speaker 4: very special zoo. And so I learned very early on
Speaker 4: that horse racing was ingrained in my family. And it
Speaker 4: was ingrained because my uncle Tony and several other relatives
Speaker 4: probably paid for several renovations on the backstretch at Belmont
Speaker 4: and Aqueduct. And at the same time, I'm going to
Speaker 4: Catholic school. The thing about Catholic school is that there's
Speaker 4: quite a bit of fundraising Bingo Vegas Knights raffles.
Speaker 1: How does the Catholic Church feel about gambling. Does it
Speaker 1: have a position.
Speaker 4: I think it's got a pretty solid position. I think
Speaker 4: it supports it when you consider every fundraiser is gambling related. So,
Speaker 4: you know, people say to me, Vinnie, you do this.
Speaker 4: You must have been a really good math student. I said, well,
Speaker 4: I was average in math, but I aced fundraising. So
Speaker 4: you know, in growing up, you know, in between the
Speaker 4: New York Post and the daily News, all the horse racing,
Speaker 4: you know, the cards for that day, the odds were
Speaker 4: always presented and talked about quite a bit. So it
Speaker 4: just kind of true in my mind. I knew that, Wow,
Speaker 4: this is this is this is intriguing too. It's intriguing,
Speaker 4: you know. I was around card games you know, with
Speaker 4: with relatives and friends. So it just was something that
Speaker 4: really attracted me and I gravitated to and I had
Speaker 4: a mind for it.
Speaker 1: When you thought about getting in the gambling business when
Speaker 1: you're fourteen, what did that mean? Like, are you going
Speaker 1: to be a professional?
Speaker 2: Better?
Speaker 4: Are you going to I learned very early that it
Speaker 4: was far better to be on the house side of
Speaker 4: the counter. I mean, look, there's a reason that hotels
Speaker 4: kept getting built, and you know, racetracks were still in
Speaker 4: business and things like that. So I told about the
Speaker 4: sixty nine World Series.
Speaker 1: I go to.
Speaker 4: School and in the playground and there's a big deal
Speaker 4: about the Orioles being a prohibited favorite. Sister Thomas, the principal,
Speaker 4: she you know, they're out the nuns who attended an
Speaker 4: a vitiate outside of Baltimore. Well, they're you know, talking
Speaker 4: about they're talking about how the Mets are going to
Speaker 4: get killed. So I said, you know, sister, you know,
Speaker 4: I think, you know, we could probably make a little
Speaker 4: deal here. She says, what do you mean. I said,
Speaker 4: I tell you what, if the Orioles win the World Series,
Speaker 4: I will stay for a month month's worth of fridays
Speaker 4: for detention and clean the blackboards, but you have to
Speaker 4: clap out the erasers and wash them and everything, which
Speaker 4: was like the worst thing because not only did you
Speaker 4: have to do it, but then you had to go
Speaker 4: home and listen to your mom who could never get
Speaker 4: the chalk out of your clothes. So I volunteer. She said, well,
Speaker 4: what happens, what if a miracle occurs in the Mets win?
Speaker 4: I said, well, I get free lunch for with free
Speaker 4: milk for for that month. She said, this sounds like
Speaker 4: a gambling I said, it's not a dance, it's a deal.
Speaker 4: I'm making a deal system. She says, okay, mister Miyuelo,
Speaker 4: you're on. So of course you know we go game
Speaker 4: one Orioles win game one four to one. I get
Speaker 4: to school the next day. I'm in the playground getting
Speaker 4: ready to go to class, and the principal she's out there, well,
Speaker 4: mister Miyula, looks like it's going to be a long
Speaker 4: fall for you, young man. She's just talking trash talking
Speaker 4: smack to maps. So I said, and I did the
Speaker 4: only thing I could. I said, would you like to
Speaker 4: press it? She says, what language? Where do you learn
Speaker 4: this vernacular? This is terrible sister, You're you're you're really coming.
Speaker 4: You know you're pressing me here. Well, Michael, needless to say,
Speaker 4: young Vinnie Mayulo drank a lot of milk and got
Speaker 4: a lot of free lunch and in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 4: but I still got detention for two months for gambling on.
Speaker 1: Campus after the break. How these three future bookies got
Speaker 1: their starts in Vegas and back at the South Point
Speaker 1: Casino in Las Vegas hearing about the world. That was
Speaker 1: after Vinniemiolo graduated with a degree in illicit gambling from
Speaker 1: Catholic School. Vegas is, of course where he wanted to go.
Speaker 1: Lucky for him, he had an uncle who played music
Speaker 1: in Vegas.
Speaker 4: So my uncle introduced me to Michael Gone, and I
Speaker 4: went Michael Gone and his partner, Frank Tody. They had
Speaker 4: a dealing school where you learned how to be a
Speaker 4: casino dealer. Because books were very not a lot of
Speaker 4: books at the time, you're a lot to learn.
Speaker 1: How hard is it to be a casino dealer?
Speaker 4: It depends on what you what you want to learn.
Speaker 4: If you learned I learned dice because it's the hardest game.
Speaker 4: So once you'll learn dice, you can learn all the games.
Speaker 4: But you can be dealing blackjack in if you've got
Speaker 4: a good mind and you know good hands, you can
Speaker 4: be dealing it in less than two weeks. Now it's
Speaker 4: easier because there's automatic shufflers on the roulette table. You
Speaker 4: need to just have that, you.
Speaker 1: Know, get a lower scale.
Speaker 4: It's there's a There was a lot. Frankly, there was
Speaker 4: a lot more art when I when I was doing it.
Speaker 4: So I got hired. You hired me as a as
Speaker 4: a as a dice dealer, and Michael Gone, I still
Speaker 4: say to this day he had the first cross training
Speaker 4: program in Las Vegas, and it didn't have manuals, It
Speaker 4: did not have meetings, it didn't have a whole lot
Speaker 4: of fanfare. It was this, make sure you're good at
Speaker 4: what I hired you for, then go learn what you want. Well,
Speaker 4: where was Vinnie hanging out on his brakes? You know,
Speaker 4: you worked an hour on and you got a to minute.
Speaker 4: I was in a book, hanging out with Jimmy. That's
Speaker 4: where I met Jimmy. So about I'm dealing for about
Speaker 4: three months and the pit boss gets a phone call
Speaker 4: and it's Michael Gone. He says, send Vinnie up. So
Speaker 4: I go upstairs and I'm thinking, oh man, this is
Speaker 4: not Loo.
Speaker 2: Could this be? I'm like this scamping.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking, God, what did I screw up?
Speaker 2: A pay up?
Speaker 4: What am I doing wrong? So he calls me. He says, Minny,
Speaker 4: how's your game? I said, well, sir, I think it's
Speaker 4: pretty good. I'm working every day I learned something, and
Speaker 4: every time I learned something, I go back to school
Speaker 4: after work and work on it and you know, put
Speaker 4: it to you know, keep trying to refine my game.
Speaker 4: He says, well, good, because you're going to go to
Speaker 4: the Barbary Coast. And the Barbary Coast opened in March
Speaker 4: of nineteen seventy nine. The building is still there. It's
Speaker 4: the Cromwell all right, from on the corner of Las
Speaker 4: Vegas Boulevard in Flamingo. And I was there and I'm
Speaker 4: working in the pit. But I'm also in the book
Speaker 4: Every every Break, and it's where Christy too, So Chris,
Speaker 4: Jimmy and I will or work together at the Barbary Coast.
Speaker 1: So that's Vinny's story of how he found his place
Speaker 1: in Vegas. For his part, Jimmy Vacaro came west from
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh around nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 3: I knew I had to create some money real quick.
Speaker 3: I knew everybody started with my brother yea, so now
Speaker 3: here I am. I'm in, And I said, I gotta
Speaker 3: think of some way to make some money, you know whatever.
Speaker 3: So to what you would consider a small time bookmaking
Speaker 3: what they booked a two hundred game, three hundred game.
Speaker 3: I called both of them back and I said, I'll
Speaker 3: be your openers. In other words, I'll call you with
Speaker 3: the with the with the bedding lines from the Churchill
Speaker 3: Downs and the other place whatever. And I charged them
Speaker 3: three hundred a week, and they all paid because they
Speaker 3: wanted to know what the pointspreaders were in Las Vegas
Speaker 3: on these games.
Speaker 2: Whatever.
Speaker 1: Where were these guys? You were sending the lines to Pittsburgh,
Speaker 1: So you're sending the lines from Vegas back to Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: And they were just getting early lines.
Speaker 3: They needed openers, right they What the hell was going on?
Speaker 1: And who in Vegas was set was setting?
Speaker 3: Churchill Downs was like the first place that was independent
Speaker 3: that was no twenty one tables, just race and sports book.
Speaker 3: That's what it was before you couldn't get on sports.
Speaker 3: I knew that the Gaune family it's a guy that
Speaker 3: owns this cassino. Now I knew that they were like
Speaker 3: spoken highly of. I mean, everybody's the Gawne family. Jackie
Speaker 3: Gone that this picture on the wall out here, it's
Speaker 3: right on the wall. So I said, you know, what
Speaker 3: do I got to lose if I just go down
Speaker 3: there and say I want a job? And his first
Speaker 3: cassino was a little place called the Royal in Cassino.
Speaker 3: It was just six twenty one tables, barboot and roulette, will,
Speaker 3: no sportsbook. I went to his office and I said
Speaker 3: to his secretary's name was Anne Coffin. I said, can
Speaker 3: I say, mister Gone places, who are you? I said,
Speaker 3: Jimmy Vacaro. She says okay. She walked up and went
Speaker 3: in the back where Michael's office was, and he was
Speaker 3: there for about three minutes, and all of a sudden
Speaker 3: he come out. Now this is hard to believe, it's
Speaker 3: just the truth.
Speaker 2: I says, who are you? I said?
Speaker 3: Jimmy Vacery says, what do you want? I said, well,
Speaker 3: I'd like to get a job. I said, but I
Speaker 3: want to go to the dealer school too.
Speaker 1: He said, what do you do?
Speaker 2: Where do you deal?
Speaker 3: I said, no, I said, I just got to town.
Speaker 3: He said, you just got the town a couple of
Speaker 3: days ago. I said yes, I said, and I want
Speaker 3: to get a job in the casino. If I lived
Speaker 3: there be a million. He went in his a little office.
Speaker 2: He took me with him.
Speaker 3: So he picked up the phone. He called, you know,
Speaker 3: the dealer school downtown, and he said, I got a kid.
Speaker 3: What's your name of guy said Jimmy Vacaro. He says,
Speaker 3: I got a kid named Vacaro here. He wants to
Speaker 3: go to dealer school. And he said, okay, you know.
Speaker 3: I said, how much is it, mister Gone? He said
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty dollars. I said, mister Gone, I
Speaker 3: don't have any money. He says, what I said, you
Speaker 3: can't you don't have any money. I said, no, sir,
Speaker 3: I don't have any money. He picked the phone back up.
Speaker 3: He called the dealer school downtown. He said, this kid
Speaker 3: named Jimmy, he's coming down. He doesn't have any money.
Speaker 3: He'll pay you when he gets the money. So I
Speaker 3: took about, you know, six weeks to pay him fifty
Speaker 3: fifty with whatever it was. And then within seventeen days
Speaker 3: he gave me a job dealing twenty one at this
Speaker 3: little casino. A year and a half later, we opened
Speaker 3: up the sports book at the rural end casino, which
Speaker 3: is always allowed if you did it correctly. And he
Speaker 3: threw me the keys. He says, go open the sports book, cup.
Speaker 1: But when you started the first sports book, where you
Speaker 1: this first sports book you create, what the kind of
Speaker 1: bets are you willing to take.
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe three or four thousand dollars on an NFL game.
Speaker 3: I was smart enough to understand, don't think you're smarter
Speaker 3: than these guys out there coming in now, and I brought.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what, I got a lot of credibility.
Speaker 3: Big reason I got credibility is everybody knew the Gone
Speaker 3: family and that was Michael's little casino, and I guess
Speaker 3: their thought process.
Speaker 2: So all the old wise guys was.
Speaker 3: If Michael Gone hired the kid, he must know a
Speaker 3: little bit right, And that's what happened.
Speaker 1: I spoke with Jimmy's fellow bookie, Chris Andrews, in front
Speaker 1: of all these busy and noisy monitors at South Point.
Speaker 1: Chris got a start at the Stardust Casino back in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine. At the time, it was Vegas's biggest
Speaker 1: sports book.
Speaker 2: So I started the Stardust.
Speaker 1: So give me a few give me a sense of
Speaker 1: how that would have felt if I had walked into
Speaker 1: that place, then how it would feel different. And they're
Speaker 1: walking into here now.
Speaker 2: Well, boy, in some ways, probably the characters. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of similarities and character wise. The difference is in
Speaker 2: like the the actual like betting menu and experience. Like
Speaker 2: back then, we booked you know the game, the points spread, Yep,
Speaker 2: that was about it.
Speaker 1: Was anybody was there money lines too? No?
Speaker 2: Almost never money lines? And then I remember I wanted
Speaker 2: to build Dark's del Mar Sports book. And I remember
Speaker 2: this is probably before I moved out here permanently. What's
Speaker 2: that thirty five on the board? I remember it's next
Speaker 2: to the Steelers. What's that thirty five? Well, that's the
Speaker 2: over and under points score in the game. You can
Speaker 2: bet on that. Are you serious? When did this? And he,
Speaker 2: as far as I know, he's the one that came
Speaker 2: up with that. You know, maybe somebody would tell you
Speaker 2: something different, But this was like late seventies, so.
Speaker 1: There are so between then and now. The one thing
Speaker 1: that changes is in the number of things you can
Speaker 1: bet on and it's exploded.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, how do you do I didn't even
Speaker 2: know what the exponential value would be. But monstrous.
Speaker 1: But also how you can beat because it used to
Speaker 1: be just point spread. It was just points spread, and
Speaker 1: who invents the money line?
Speaker 2: Well, actually the money line had been around before the
Speaker 2: point spread. It kind of gotten like maybe forgotten a
Speaker 2: little bit for a while. When with the advent of
Speaker 2: the point spread that came back into play. Probably i'd say, like,
Speaker 2: you know, real, you know, early eighties or mid eighties,
Speaker 2: something like that. So then and at the time, so
Speaker 2: teasers were a big you know, so you had point
Speaker 2: spread with the.
Speaker 1: Teasers right then the total started you know what explained
Speaker 1: teaserback because we'd be nice to have your explanation.
Speaker 2: Okay, teaser bit, you had six and a half or
Speaker 2: seven points to your advantage, and there's some other teasers.
Speaker 2: The six pointer is the most common, right, So a
Speaker 2: six point teaser was even money. So if your team
Speaker 2: was minus seven, you had them in a six point teaser.
Speaker 2: Now they're minus one, right, essentially asking them to win
Speaker 2: the game, you know. Or if there were plus seven,
Speaker 2: you could tease it up to thirteen. You know, now
Speaker 2: you're getting almost two four touchdowns.
Speaker 1: You're just changing the odds and the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then from there we just started figuring out,
Speaker 2: you know, and you know it's my cousin heart Man
Speaker 2: Terris who came up with the William the refrigerator, Perry
Speaker 2: scoring a touchdown and then nineteen eighty five Super Bowl was.
Speaker 1: That that was a novel.
Speaker 2: That was he was the first one and it was
Speaker 2: one of those and you know he'd tell you the story.
Speaker 2: Where was he when he goes at Caesar's Palace? I
Speaker 2: think he put it up, you know, twenty to one
Speaker 2: or something like that. Anyway, they lost like a quarter
Speaker 2: of a million dollars. Perry another Super Bowl rerecord, the
Speaker 2: first refrigerator to score.
Speaker 3: The biggest push in the first forty years of forty
Speaker 3: nine years that I've been involved is when is when
Speaker 3: Perry scored the touchdown.
Speaker 1: That's Jimmy Vacaro again. Both he and Chris were present
Speaker 1: at the birth of the prop bed in sports.
Speaker 3: As soon as he scored the touchdown, we all licked
Speaker 3: our wounds. Caesar's lost to most. I think they lost
Speaker 3: one hundred and forty five. I did real good. I
Speaker 3: only lost about fifty thousand, So I thought, I thought
Speaker 3: I did really good. So what had happened right after that?
Speaker 3: So the next day, this is about every book in town,
Speaker 3: your phone line, the light of from every big city
Speaker 3: in the country. They heard about Perry scoring a touchdown,
Speaker 3: so that it just promoted like if we do more
Speaker 3: of those type of things.
Speaker 2: So that's what they just got a price of better.
Speaker 2: I mean, they lost a fortune. I'm saying a quarter million,
Speaker 2: probably more than that. And Terry Lanny was the president
Speaker 2: of Caesar's this time, comes into the office called Terry Lanny.
Speaker 2: Jesus calls Terry Lanney. Yes, sir, he figures, I'm getting fired.
Speaker 2: That's the best thing you've ever done. We have had
Speaker 2: so much publicity over that. That was whatever we lost,
Speaker 2: it was well worth it. Well like shit, Okay. Now
Speaker 2: he went from filling his boxes on pack and everything,
Speaker 2: and you know, and then we started doing more props,
Speaker 2: and the props grew.
Speaker 1: So this is it's interesting, like it's it has become
Speaker 1: it's become the center of the market, these prop bets.
Speaker 2: We wrote more on the props than we did on
Speaker 2: the on the game.
Speaker 1: In the game, and but it it wasn't obvious to
Speaker 1: the casinos that this was going to be that popular.
Speaker 1: What do you think is going on? Why do people
Speaker 1: like the prop bets?
Speaker 2: Now? I can't even keep track of who these guys
Speaker 2: are playing for from you know, So it's like you
Speaker 2: attach yourself not to a player rather than more so
Speaker 2: than a team. And I think that that's certainly a
Speaker 2: part of it. So these things come from somewhere, right, you.
Speaker 1: Know, and someone thinks to do it and then the
Speaker 1: market responds to it. Yeah, if someone came up and
Speaker 1: wanted a line on something that there was no line
Speaker 1: on like that, like wind totals, season wind totals, would you.
Speaker 2: All do it?
Speaker 3: Depending how long, how far, how much you want to bet? Well,
Speaker 3: here's the answer to that on everything the nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: nine Super Bowl with the Steelers and the Cowboys, Big,
Speaker 3: big game, monster game. But here's how many times you
Speaker 3: could bet to Gaby Ready, you can bet the side,
Speaker 3: you bet the total, or you bet the halftime. Three
Speaker 3: different ways to bet on the Super Bowl. Now, everybody
Speaker 3: averages at least two hundred and fifty props on each game.
Speaker 2: On the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1: Game, We're going to take a short break when we return,
Speaker 1: I asked Chris Andrews and Jimmy Vacaro about limits, when
Speaker 1: and how they might limit the bets of edge players.
Speaker 1: I'm back in Vegas with bookies Chris Andrews and Jimmy Vacaro.
Speaker 1: When was the first time, if ever, you rejected a
Speaker 1: bet because of who was making the bet.
Speaker 2: Well, I've rejected bets on limits, right. Guys will come
Speaker 2: in and say I want this or that. But you know,
Speaker 2: for I said, well that's more than we take, right,
Speaker 2: But rejecting a bet that's on the board never really really.
Speaker 2: I mean, like I said, for sure, I would cut
Speaker 2: guys and guys, Oh, you shouldn't have limits, that's really.
Speaker 2: So if Elon Musk comes in, he says, I blew
Speaker 2: forty billion on the Twitter, I'm going to get it
Speaker 2: back on the Dodger game tonight, and I'm supposed to
Speaker 2: take that bet.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: No, it's not gonna happen, right, So you have to
Speaker 2: have some limits.
Speaker 1: But you the in the old days that when you
Speaker 1: first started out, if a guy came in and he
Speaker 1: was known to be smart, yeah, did you just the
Speaker 1: limits on him because he was smart? We're smart? We're
Speaker 1: a smart bet is treated in any way worse.
Speaker 2: Well, here's the rule I've always had when I post
Speaker 2: like the limits, that's for anybody that walks in right now.
Speaker 2: I can go higher than the limits on certain guys,
Speaker 2: but I don't lower them because you're who you are.
Speaker 2: I don't lower them because but I'll raise them if
Speaker 2: I take the guy's a dead square right right?
Speaker 1: So what is a typical limit online? And a prop better?
Speaker 2: And it talks a couple thousand?
Speaker 1: What about just a game? An NFL game?
Speaker 2: NFL game, I think most guys take a hundred?
Speaker 1: Which the is that? Where that be the biggest?
Speaker 2: Oh I've had. I've taken a couple of million dollar bets.
Speaker 1: You have, Yeah, on NFL games, the Super Bowls, a
Speaker 1: super Bowl? Okay, gotcha?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 3: The biggest bet I took was Carlikahon. He got two
Speaker 3: point four million dollars on a money line bet. And
Speaker 3: he's a panty ass. I had some big decisions.
Speaker 2: But you took the bet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how did it work out?
Speaker 2: He won? But we won.
Speaker 3: I actually ended up needing his side because when I
Speaker 3: changed the line. It was a year. When San Diego
Speaker 3: is in the Super Bowl, It's only a four hour
Speaker 3: drive from San diego to here.
Speaker 1: How much of like football betting? For example? Are people
Speaker 1: just betting on the teams they love?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, most people. Most people were betting their uniform.
Speaker 3: They want to see their team win, and they got
Speaker 3: bigger and bigger and bigger. We just accommodated everybody.
Speaker 1: How's the legalization around the country changed your business?
Speaker 2: It hasn't affected me so much here as fortunately I
Speaker 2: work for an old school guy Michael gone right. But
Speaker 2: I think it's affected the business in a in a
Speaker 2: broader scale. I think a lot of these guys came
Speaker 2: in from Europe. They were very corporate British corporate workstreams.
Speaker 2: This is the legal, this is the marketing, this is
Speaker 2: the HR, this is blah blah blah. I was head
Speaker 2: of the bookmaking workstream. They call their bookmakers traders. We
Speaker 2: all hate that word. There are traders, were bookmakers. What's
Speaker 2: this trader stuff? But that's like infiltrated the whole language.
Speaker 1: If I'm actually gambling, uh, and I go into William
Speaker 1: Hill or one of.
Speaker 2: These are you winning? Are you winning player?
Speaker 1: I'm a winning player. I'm an edge plan.
Speaker 2: You're going to be out?
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: They can't wait to throw out. They can't wait the
Speaker 2: throw out now that the term sack them, sack them,
Speaker 2: that's what they sack them. Said, why don't we just
Speaker 2: let them at the limits.
Speaker 1: And then move the market?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I said, wait, why don't they respond? What what's under?
Speaker 1: Is it that they are uncomfortable?
Speaker 2: That's the way they've always done it over there, and
Speaker 2: they don't want to adapt to American wagering, so they
Speaker 2: do things the way we do some things differently, So
Speaker 2: we are not going to be throwing people out. We
Speaker 2: want as much traffic as we can now. Of course,
Speaker 2: we have to manage our money properly, right and that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. So it's not just freewheeling.
Speaker 1: Why is the European gambler put up with this? Like,
Speaker 1: why didn't someone emerge to compete with this model?
Speaker 2: Michael go to England and start interviewing their players, right,
Speaker 2: because I know a few of them, you know, and
Speaker 2: I don't know why they do, but they're always trying
Speaker 2: to circumvent everything. Yeah, you know, always, you know you
Speaker 2: might you know next week, you know, your your wife
Speaker 2: or your cousin or your your brother in laws, and
Speaker 2: you know they're using phony names and all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, always trying to circumvent it. But as soon
Speaker 2: as you win a couple of bets, they're thrown out too.
Speaker 2: You know, you got to start all over again.
Speaker 1: Give me an example of something that would have been
Speaker 1: kind of common get behavior forty years ago.
Speaker 2: And then well, parlays, like with the total if you
Speaker 2: bet a big favorite, but a big favorite, like just
Speaker 2: figure out the math. Don't don't buy stupid half points
Speaker 2: when you don't need to, don't don't, you know, parlays,
Speaker 2: you know, be careful like parlays and teasers and all.
Speaker 1: That, and and but then also there's been this infusion
Speaker 1: of bookmakers who whose business model is kind of different
Speaker 1: from your business model. It's like, let's just take dumb beats.
Speaker 2: The Brits, Oh yeah, oh those guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's like fan duels and DraftKings, doesn't just.
Speaker 2: Take just take the dummies.
Speaker 1: That's all we want, right, And it's a diff it's
Speaker 1: kind of a different business, yeah, right, is it more?
Speaker 1: Is it a more profitable business?
Speaker 2: So far? Yeah? But as a matter of fact, I
Speaker 2: was just talking to somebody the other day, little different subject,
Speaker 2: asking me essentially the same question, and I think a
Speaker 2: lot of these places. They think this is just like
Speaker 2: the golden goose. I think they're going to kill the
Speaker 2: golden goose at some point, you know, And I think
Speaker 2: there will be a shakeout in the industry. And what's it.
Speaker 2: The nature abhors a vacuum. You know, it's going to
Speaker 2: fill avoid and I think right now, I think we're
Speaker 2: on the right side of it. Somebody told me, what
Speaker 2: thing is your business model is not sustainable. If I've
Speaker 2: been doing this for six decades, you know, if it's
Speaker 2: not sustainable, once it's going to come home to roost.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be it's gonna sound like a dumb question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you finish the year with the profit of X. Okay,
Speaker 1: what percentage of those profits are coming from? You're on
Speaker 1: the right side of the risk that you took risk
Speaker 1: on games versus just being middleman.
Speaker 2: Probably most of it comes from being the middleman most,
Speaker 2: but there's you know, when you look at like your
Speaker 2: your board, particularly in football, you want to be on
Speaker 2: the right side of games. If you see the wise
Speaker 2: guys on one side, you want to go in with
Speaker 2: their their their side. If you can't you see the
Speaker 2: public on one side. Yeah, you generally don't want to
Speaker 2: be on that side.
Speaker 1: You see that line up that way often. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: smart money one. Oh god, yeah that's really interesting.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Comes really clear. Oh it doesn't come to clear every game, No, okay,
Speaker 1: there sometimes there's arguments within the smart money.
Speaker 2: I always say it depends on the number, right, you
Speaker 2: know if a game opened six then went to seven, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the smart guy's laid six, and then the other smart
Speaker 2: guys took seven. Right, So I'll say, who are the
Speaker 2: wise guys on one? I don't know what's the number.
Speaker 1: I love talking to these old bookies, and here's one
Speaker 1: thing I took away from it. The old school bookie
Speaker 1: isn't someone who does predictive analytics to set the odds.
Speaker 1: He watches the gamblers as much as he watches the
Speaker 1: games themselves. The smart gamblers just tell them where to
Speaker 1: set the lines. It's a different way of thinking. Or,
Speaker 1: as Vinnie Mayolo puts.
Speaker 4: It, people call us old school.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well I take that as a compliment because the fact
Speaker 4: that here we are, you know, combined one hundred and fifty,
Speaker 4: so we're in this business doing this for all this time.
Speaker 4: If we didn't make adjustments, then we would be gone.
Speaker 1: Where do you think it's going? Where you think sports
Speaker 1: do you think it's a sports game? Is going to
Speaker 1: look like in thirty.
Speaker 3: Years, there'll be no human beings running it.
Speaker 2: It'll be all computerized.
Speaker 3: It's getting there now. I would say in five years,
Speaker 3: what you'll get is like you'll go to a sports book,
Speaker 3: you'll make your bet, but there might be three human
Speaker 3: beings because you need someone like, you know whatever. But
Speaker 3: the other thing is everything else will be you bet
Speaker 3: it on a kiosk or have a phone account.
Speaker 1: Right, it's all done by.
Speaker 3: I think there's gonna be another big, big rush if
Speaker 3: the world don't end by the next couple of years.
Speaker 3: Is that okay? Kids seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old
Speaker 3: right now? So let's say we give him three to
Speaker 3: five years where he's liable, noise to go make a
Speaker 3: bet without any no parents behind them. So there's a
Speaker 3: whole new wave coming. It's an all new ballgame, right.
Speaker 3: I think it's gonna be crazy.
Speaker 1: Thank you again, Jimmy Vaccaro, Chris Andrews, and Vinnie Mayolo
Speaker 1: for talking with me. You can find these guys any
Speaker 1: given day, still laying odds and booking Bets at South
Speaker 1: Point in Vegas. Against the Rules is written and hosted
Speaker 1: by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott,
Speaker 1: Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariella Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. Against the Rules is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
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