<!-- BEGIN HEADLINE SWF FILE -->http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=schwarz_alan&id=1892582<SCRIPT language=Javascript type=text/javascript><!-- if (browser == ie && os == mac) { document.write('
A sight for sore eyes
'); } else { var SOB=new flashObj(); SOB.ID = "espnHeadline"; SOB.flashFile = "http://static.espn.go.com/swf/storypageheadline.swf?h=A%20sight%20for%20sore%20eyes"; SOB.DenyIEdl = "TRUE"; SOB.bgcolor = "#FFFFFF"; SOB.width = "430"; SOB.height = "45"; SOB.FlashVer = 5; SOB.cabVersion = "5,0,0,0"; SOB.altTxt = "<span style=\"font-family: Verdana; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 25px;\">
A sight for sore eyes<\/span>"; document.write(SOB.render()); } //--></SCRIPT><NOSCRIPT>A sight for sore eyes
</NOSCRIPT><!-- END HEADLINE SWF FILE -->
By Alan Schwarz
Special to ESPN.com
<!-- template inline -->I like to think I'm a pretty well-versed baseball guy. I understand strategy, I understand clubhouse politics. I understand statistics and hard-core scouting. Heck, I even understood Tony Phillips about half the time.
Imagine my horror, then, when upon striding into the Stardust sports book in Las Vegas before game time on Tuesday I was met with a cascade of conversation I could barely comprehend.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5 rowSpan=2><SPACER height="1" width="5" type="block"></TD><TD width=275>
</TD></TR><TR><TD width=275>[font=verdana, arial, geneva]Betting on baseball can be exciting for some, but downright confusing for others.[/font]</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
"I'm not paying the juice on that dog."
"I'm sorry, but Padilla ain't no minus-168."
"Get over on the runline if Oakland-Seattle drops to 8.5."
The unintelligible banter was as thick as the smoke. I wasn't interested in betting at all -- I was eyeing the poker tables, so I could wing what Wanda Sykes taught me on Celebrity Poker Challenge -- but became too intrigued to not stick around and learn how this bustling corner of the baseball world works, particularly with our version of the Super Bowl fast approaching.
Everyone knows how to bet football -- pick a team against the point spread -- and, using everything from Bayesian regression models to the color of the teams' helmets, has a system for making picks. Basketball is similar, point-spreadwise, and like football finds its lines (both for college and the pros) published in most daily newspapers. But baseball is a completely different and more complicated world, operating in ways I, for one, never knew.
To even consider betting on baseball is, of course, as dangerous as putting your head in a tiger's mouth. (Something Siegfried's pal Roy learned all about last year down the strip at the Mirage.) While football flaunts its "any-given-Sunday" parity, baseball is actually far more random. As any fan knows, a first-place team can easily lose to a last-place club if the latter has a good pitcher going. And beyond that, even if all logic suggests one team is the resounding favorite, it can still lose 9-3. That's baseball.
It's for this reason that at the Stardust, like most books, the teams' overall records don't even appear on the giant odds board above all the televisions. They're all but irrelevant. Here's an example from Tuesday night:
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=580 border=0><!--<th colspan=5 style="background-color:#000000;">Place table heading here</th>--><TBODY><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=112>MARINERS </TD><TD width=112>Meche </TD><TD width=112>+240 </TD><TD width=112>8.5 </TD><TD width=112>-110 </TD></TR><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=112>A'S </TD><TD width=112>Hudson </TD><TD width=112>-280 </TD><TD width=112> </TD><TD width=112>-110 </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->
Ted Sevransky looked up at this and not only understood the gobbledygook; he saw a $1,000 bill hanging unguarded, begging to be plucked like a pinecone. A 37-year-old professional gambler, Sevransky bets about two games per day, usually $1,000 apiece, understanding the betting numbers as well, or more, as he does home-road ERAs.
Baseball doesn't use point spreads -- you don't take a team and give 1.5 runs, for example -- but offers two primary options: betting on who wins outright, and how many total runs are scored in the game. The three-digit numbers beside each pitcher represent the odds the casino is offering. To bet on Oakland, you have to put up $280 for every $100 you want to win, i.e., the A's are favorites by 1-to-2.8 odds. If you bet on the Mariners and they win, every $100 you bet can yield you $240, or 2.4-to-1 odds. (Yes, the total odds aren't even to the bettor, therefore assuring the house a profit in the long run. That's how they pay for all those flashing lights.)
The "8.5" is the line on how many total runs the teams will score. This is a relatively even bet, with -110 odds on both sides; you have to pay $110 for each $100 you want to win.
Sevransky, who prepares for his bets by studying news and statistical trends for 16 hours a day, sees that 8.5 run line as too low. "The Mariners have been scoring about nine runs a game lately, and Hudson's been very inconsistent," he said. "Hudson's an over pitcher right now. He's giving up runs and getting a lot of support." Sevransky placed a dime, a.k.a. a thousand bucks, on the over-8.5.
Sevransky likes betting the total run lines -- like many professional gamblers, he's wary of drastic favorites like Oakland, who cost too much to assure profits. The night before, he won $2,000 when he took the Indians-Royals under 9, and Jake Westbrook pitched Cleveland to a 6-1 win. "You had two major league pitchers (Westbrook and Zack Greinke) going against two minor league lineups," Sevransky said. "It was 2-1 into the ninth before the Royals bullpen started getting involved. Jeremy Affeldt started making me nervous."
<!---------------------PULL-QUOTE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR vAlign=top><TD width=4><SPACER height="1" width="3" type="block"></TD><TD>[font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]“[/font]</TD><TD width=225>[font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Professional bettors will attack baseball more than any other sport. You look at baseball and there should be a magic formula in the sky where you put in all the statistics and it gives you an answer, which you can translate into winning on a professional level. Football, you have only 16 games a season per team. In baseball, you have 10 times that. You have a chance to identify certain statistical trends and value situations.[/font][font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] ”[/font]</TD></TR><TR vAlign=top><TD width=4><SPACER height="1" width="3" type="block"></TD><TD></TD><TD width=225>[font=Times,serif]— [/font][font=Times,serif]Dan O'Brien, baseball analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants[/font]</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------PULL-QUOTE TABLE (END)--------------------->
(By the way, Sevransky won his Oakland bet on Tuesday, with the Mariners battering Hudson en route to a 7-2 win. He won his other wager as well, taking the over-10 on Boston-Tampa Bay.)
The likes of Sevransky have apparently made this season a poor one for the Vegas baseball books. "It was a bad year -- the bettors did very well," said Kenny White, whose company, Las Vegas Sports Consultants, recommends opening lines for most Vegas sports books. "In August, they were on the Cardinals and the Red Sox and those teams were on fire. The Dodgers were playing well too. The Yankees were down, and they bet against them. Over and over."
Sevransky claims he doesn't watch much baseball; he trusts the statistics more. He considers everything he can eyeball: home-road splits for the starters and lineups, lefty-righty splits, trends from the last 10 games, starter baserunners per game. He'll even consult Voros McCracken's Defense Independent Pitching Stats to see if a pitcher's on a lucky streak.
While Sevransky bets on the run totals, another Stardust pro -- he asked to be called Jose to protect his identity -- only predicts winners. This isn't really a matter of thinking one team will win or lose. This is more a matter of understanding whether the line is off -- if it's too high or too low, he can exploit that and make bets that in the long run should come up in his favor. For example, he could take a +180 on Detroit against Anaheim not necessarily because he sees the Tigers winning, but because he thinks the probability of the Tigers winning is better than the 36 percent the line suggests. In the long run, he winds up ahead.
"I bet on teams with strong bullpens and offense," said Jose, 27, who claims to clear $20,000 a year on baseball alone. "I look at bullpen use -- if they use eight relievers one night then the overs look good. I don't bet totals much because you can lose a game in the third inning. I bet teams that lose the first two games of series at home. They usually come back to win the last one, no matter the pitcher."
To varying degrees, the sharpest bettors have designed amazingly complicated computer systems to try to identify trustworthy trends. It could be average ERA of a lefty starter going from a pitcher's park to a hitter's park, and how that translates to his team's winning percentage. It could be a simulation program that determines a pattern, however slight, in the eternal rock-paper-scissors game that is hitting, pitching and fielding.
"Professional bettors will attack baseball more than any other sport," said Dan O'Brien, the main baseball analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants. "You look at baseball and there should be a magic formula in the sky where you put in all the statistics and it gives you an answer, which you can translate into winning on a professional level. Football, you have only 16 games a season per team. In baseball, you have 10 times that. You have a chance to identify certain statistical trends and value situations."
Sound easy? It isn't. Hang around a sports book for even an evening, and you sense a fascinating dynamic. As even us neophytes know, the casinos adjust the lines specifically so that bets fall evenly on each side; this ensures profit on every game with no risk to house. What this cultivates is an environment where the books wind up being merely conduits -- between the winning bettors and the losing ones -- with them pretty much cut out of the loop.
So when Ted Sevransky walks out of the Stardust with two grand in winnings, like tonight, he really isn't winning money from the house. He's winning it from people who think they know baseball but don't -- at least not how he does. In other words, you and me.
Well, not me. No way I would place a bet of my own, getting sucked into a hurricane whose calm center I could never reach. But I do leave wondering just what I might learn about baseball by hanging around these guys for a bit, instead of Tony Phillips. Alan Schwarz is the senior writer of Baseball America and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His new book, "The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics," is published by St. Martin's Press and can be ordered on Alan's Web site.
A sight for sore eyes
'); } else { var SOB=new flashObj(); SOB.ID = "espnHeadline"; SOB.flashFile = "http://static.espn.go.com/swf/storypageheadline.swf?h=A%20sight%20for%20sore%20eyes"; SOB.DenyIEdl = "TRUE"; SOB.bgcolor = "#FFFFFF"; SOB.width = "430"; SOB.height = "45"; SOB.FlashVer = 5; SOB.cabVersion = "5,0,0,0"; SOB.altTxt = "<span style=\"font-family: Verdana; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 25px;\">
A sight for sore eyes<\/span>"; document.write(SOB.render()); } //--></SCRIPT><NOSCRIPT>A sight for sore eyes
</NOSCRIPT><!-- END HEADLINE SWF FILE -->
By Alan Schwarz
Special to ESPN.com
<!-- template inline -->I like to think I'm a pretty well-versed baseball guy. I understand strategy, I understand clubhouse politics. I understand statistics and hard-core scouting. Heck, I even understood Tony Phillips about half the time.
Imagine my horror, then, when upon striding into the Stardust sports book in Las Vegas before game time on Tuesday I was met with a cascade of conversation I could barely comprehend.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5 rowSpan=2><SPACER height="1" width="5" type="block"></TD><TD width=275>
"I'm not paying the juice on that dog."
"I'm sorry, but Padilla ain't no minus-168."
"Get over on the runline if Oakland-Seattle drops to 8.5."
The unintelligible banter was as thick as the smoke. I wasn't interested in betting at all -- I was eyeing the poker tables, so I could wing what Wanda Sykes taught me on Celebrity Poker Challenge -- but became too intrigued to not stick around and learn how this bustling corner of the baseball world works, particularly with our version of the Super Bowl fast approaching.
Everyone knows how to bet football -- pick a team against the point spread -- and, using everything from Bayesian regression models to the color of the teams' helmets, has a system for making picks. Basketball is similar, point-spreadwise, and like football finds its lines (both for college and the pros) published in most daily newspapers. But baseball is a completely different and more complicated world, operating in ways I, for one, never knew.
To even consider betting on baseball is, of course, as dangerous as putting your head in a tiger's mouth. (Something Siegfried's pal Roy learned all about last year down the strip at the Mirage.) While football flaunts its "any-given-Sunday" parity, baseball is actually far more random. As any fan knows, a first-place team can easily lose to a last-place club if the latter has a good pitcher going. And beyond that, even if all logic suggests one team is the resounding favorite, it can still lose 9-3. That's baseball.
It's for this reason that at the Stardust, like most books, the teams' overall records don't even appear on the giant odds board above all the televisions. They're all but irrelevant. Here's an example from Tuesday night:
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=580 border=0><!--<th colspan=5 style="background-color:#000000;">Place table heading here</th>--><TBODY><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=112>MARINERS </TD><TD width=112>Meche </TD><TD width=112>+240 </TD><TD width=112>8.5 </TD><TD width=112>-110 </TD></TR><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=112>A'S </TD><TD width=112>Hudson </TD><TD width=112>-280 </TD><TD width=112> </TD><TD width=112>-110 </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->
Ted Sevransky looked up at this and not only understood the gobbledygook; he saw a $1,000 bill hanging unguarded, begging to be plucked like a pinecone. A 37-year-old professional gambler, Sevransky bets about two games per day, usually $1,000 apiece, understanding the betting numbers as well, or more, as he does home-road ERAs.
Baseball doesn't use point spreads -- you don't take a team and give 1.5 runs, for example -- but offers two primary options: betting on who wins outright, and how many total runs are scored in the game. The three-digit numbers beside each pitcher represent the odds the casino is offering. To bet on Oakland, you have to put up $280 for every $100 you want to win, i.e., the A's are favorites by 1-to-2.8 odds. If you bet on the Mariners and they win, every $100 you bet can yield you $240, or 2.4-to-1 odds. (Yes, the total odds aren't even to the bettor, therefore assuring the house a profit in the long run. That's how they pay for all those flashing lights.)
The "8.5" is the line on how many total runs the teams will score. This is a relatively even bet, with -110 odds on both sides; you have to pay $110 for each $100 you want to win.
Sevransky, who prepares for his bets by studying news and statistical trends for 16 hours a day, sees that 8.5 run line as too low. "The Mariners have been scoring about nine runs a game lately, and Hudson's been very inconsistent," he said. "Hudson's an over pitcher right now. He's giving up runs and getting a lot of support." Sevransky placed a dime, a.k.a. a thousand bucks, on the over-8.5.
Sevransky likes betting the total run lines -- like many professional gamblers, he's wary of drastic favorites like Oakland, who cost too much to assure profits. The night before, he won $2,000 when he took the Indians-Royals under 9, and Jake Westbrook pitched Cleveland to a 6-1 win. "You had two major league pitchers (Westbrook and Zack Greinke) going against two minor league lineups," Sevransky said. "It was 2-1 into the ninth before the Royals bullpen started getting involved. Jeremy Affeldt started making me nervous."
<!---------------------PULL-QUOTE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR vAlign=top><TD width=4><SPACER height="1" width="3" type="block"></TD><TD>[font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]“[/font]</TD><TD width=225>[font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Professional bettors will attack baseball more than any other sport. You look at baseball and there should be a magic formula in the sky where you put in all the statistics and it gives you an answer, which you can translate into winning on a professional level. Football, you have only 16 games a season per team. In baseball, you have 10 times that. You have a chance to identify certain statistical trends and value situations.[/font][font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] ”[/font]</TD></TR><TR vAlign=top><TD width=4><SPACER height="1" width="3" type="block"></TD><TD></TD><TD width=225>[font=Times,serif]— [/font][font=Times,serif]Dan O'Brien, baseball analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants[/font]</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------PULL-QUOTE TABLE (END)--------------------->
(By the way, Sevransky won his Oakland bet on Tuesday, with the Mariners battering Hudson en route to a 7-2 win. He won his other wager as well, taking the over-10 on Boston-Tampa Bay.)
The likes of Sevransky have apparently made this season a poor one for the Vegas baseball books. "It was a bad year -- the bettors did very well," said Kenny White, whose company, Las Vegas Sports Consultants, recommends opening lines for most Vegas sports books. "In August, they were on the Cardinals and the Red Sox and those teams were on fire. The Dodgers were playing well too. The Yankees were down, and they bet against them. Over and over."
Sevransky claims he doesn't watch much baseball; he trusts the statistics more. He considers everything he can eyeball: home-road splits for the starters and lineups, lefty-righty splits, trends from the last 10 games, starter baserunners per game. He'll even consult Voros McCracken's Defense Independent Pitching Stats to see if a pitcher's on a lucky streak.
While Sevransky bets on the run totals, another Stardust pro -- he asked to be called Jose to protect his identity -- only predicts winners. This isn't really a matter of thinking one team will win or lose. This is more a matter of understanding whether the line is off -- if it's too high or too low, he can exploit that and make bets that in the long run should come up in his favor. For example, he could take a +180 on Detroit against Anaheim not necessarily because he sees the Tigers winning, but because he thinks the probability of the Tigers winning is better than the 36 percent the line suggests. In the long run, he winds up ahead.
"I bet on teams with strong bullpens and offense," said Jose, 27, who claims to clear $20,000 a year on baseball alone. "I look at bullpen use -- if they use eight relievers one night then the overs look good. I don't bet totals much because you can lose a game in the third inning. I bet teams that lose the first two games of series at home. They usually come back to win the last one, no matter the pitcher."
To varying degrees, the sharpest bettors have designed amazingly complicated computer systems to try to identify trustworthy trends. It could be average ERA of a lefty starter going from a pitcher's park to a hitter's park, and how that translates to his team's winning percentage. It could be a simulation program that determines a pattern, however slight, in the eternal rock-paper-scissors game that is hitting, pitching and fielding.
"Professional bettors will attack baseball more than any other sport," said Dan O'Brien, the main baseball analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants. "You look at baseball and there should be a magic formula in the sky where you put in all the statistics and it gives you an answer, which you can translate into winning on a professional level. Football, you have only 16 games a season per team. In baseball, you have 10 times that. You have a chance to identify certain statistical trends and value situations."
Sound easy? It isn't. Hang around a sports book for even an evening, and you sense a fascinating dynamic. As even us neophytes know, the casinos adjust the lines specifically so that bets fall evenly on each side; this ensures profit on every game with no risk to house. What this cultivates is an environment where the books wind up being merely conduits -- between the winning bettors and the losing ones -- with them pretty much cut out of the loop.
So when Ted Sevransky walks out of the Stardust with two grand in winnings, like tonight, he really isn't winning money from the house. He's winning it from people who think they know baseball but don't -- at least not how he does. In other words, you and me.
Well, not me. No way I would place a bet of my own, getting sucked into a hurricane whose calm center I could never reach. But I do leave wondering just what I might learn about baseball by hanging around these guys for a bit, instead of Tony Phillips. Alan Schwarz is the senior writer of Baseball America and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His new book, "The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics," is published by St. Martin's Press and can be ordered on Alan's Web site.
"I don't bet totals much because you can lose a game in the third inning."
If that was a serious response I have to question how sharp the guy is?
My guess is it was just and off-the-cuff response, When you are a serious gambler who care whether you lose in the 3rd or 11 inning?
I think both those tickets will cash for the same amount.
If that was a serious response I have to question how sharp the guy is?
My guess is it was just and off-the-cuff response, When you are a serious gambler who care whether you lose in the 3rd or 11 inning?
I think both those tickets will cash for the same amount.
