January 01, 2005
Betting for Dummies
Readers familiar with my long, tortured history of Ill-Advised Sports Wagers will not be surprised to hear that on a recent trip to Las Vegas, I placed a $10 four-team college bowl parlay anchored by the California Golden Bears. As you may have heard in the funny papers, Cal failed to win, let alone win by the 12-point spread assigned to them by bookmakers at Bally’s Las Vegas. Thus, my dream of quitting the day job to live the rest of my days living of the wages of sin was dealt a death blow one game into the four-game bet.
Placing a bet on Cal actually violated two tenets of sports wagering that I try to live by:
- Never, ever place a bet on a team you root for, because if they fail to win, it’s like getting kicked in the groin andgetting mugged, instead of one or the other; and
- Never, ever bet on sports at all, Michaels you jackass, since you obviously suck at it.
Seriously. I think if we were to compile a history of my sports handicapping efforts, it would look something like this:
| Wins | Losses | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sporting Events Phil Predicted But Didn’t Wager Money On | 150 | 100 | .600 |
| Sporting Events Phil Wagered Money On | 0 | ∞ | .000 |
So why do I keep doing it? Because I dream of one day giving up the workaday world to live the life of the professional gambler, I suppose. Well, if that’s my dream, I better just stick to cards, because I don’t think this sports betting thing is going to pan out for me any time soon. Especially not since that same trip to Vegas included me placing the traditional bet on the A’s to win the World Series. The Bally’s line: 18-1.
That line was set before word of the Mulder trade came down, by the way.
Incidentally, for a time, it looked like Cal’s loss might be the only thing standing between me and filthy lucre, making the Holiday Bowl beatdown all the more depressing. After all, Boise State managed to cover the all-too-generous 14-point spread assigned to it in the Liberty Bowl, and Iowa’s last-second Hail Mary meant that it didn’t even need the seven points LSU was laying in the Capital One Bowl. That’s two wins, right there.
Fortunately, an otherwise meaningless fourth-quarter Wisconsin touchdown meant that the Georgia Bulldogs failed to win by the necessary touchdwon to beat the spread in the Outback Bowl. So even if Cal had decided to show up Thursday night, I still would have gone down to ignomious defeat.
So thank you, Georgia Bulldogs. Young men shall sing songs paying tribute to your inability to beat the spread for generations to come.
Trackback Pings
You can ping this entry by using http://weblog.intertext.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/475.
Comments
I just got the A's at 30 to 1 at the Las Vegas Hilton -- Viva la Rookie Big 3!
In other news, Jim Caple is so not funny it hurts:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=caple/041228
Ah, the Fake Year Column. What else would we expect from the master of the Fake Quote Column?
I googled "football betting for dummies" and your blog came up so I checked it out! As u can imagine, I got like a gazillion hits and I'm trying to narrow it down. Do u have any recommendations of good web sites for someone like me (a girl yet!) who has a good working knowledge of sports (esp football) betting but is still kinda green. I've actually signed up w/Bet US.com but I haven't opened an account yet! I am fascinated w/this whole online betting thing but still am not sure how some things works. If u have time, can u help? (Oh thanks for the tip about not betting for one's favorite team; I am a hardcore Redskin fan-do NOT laugh and the 1st time I actually bet on them was this past week...I still don't like to talk about it...)
Post a comment
