More from the conference
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Wagering on sports has come a long way since the days of the cigar-chomping, mob-backed neighborhood bookie who would take bets on games.
Today, the bettors are far more sophisticated, armed with computer-driven statistics and analytics used to beat the bookmakers in Nevada's legal sports books as well as the offshore books that the Internet-savvy can find — betting markets that have an estimated $500 billion handle per year.
Several presentations at this week's International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking offered research on trends gamblers are using to become more sophisticated in their betting.
Kevin Krieger of the University of West Florida offered a theory on how wagering against NFL teams that made the playoffs the previous year in Week 1 of the new season has been profitable for the last nine seasons with a 22.6 percent return for bettors. Krieger said he believes bettors have had an overreaction to previous impressions that sway them to bet on a posted favorite.
In an earlier session, four presenters explained their methods for forecasting the outcome of horse races and professional sports.
Niko Suhonen of the University of Eastern Finland, Ming-Chien Sung of the University of Southhampton and Noah Silverman of UCLA explained separate mathematical equations they've developed to predict outcomes in horse races. The presenters explained how they plugged in dozens of variables to their formulas to project winners.
William Mallios of Mallios Associates in California showed how he has developed a system of candlestick charts showing wins and losses by NFL, NBA and MLB teams and whether those teams covered lines posted by casinos.
The graphics help Mallios discover patterns over time, enabling him to post forecasts of how well teams will perform from game to game and the tendency of some teams to let up and fail to cover a spread after winning and covering earlier.
But the biggest question in the minds of sports gamblers now is: Will other states break Nevada's monopoly on legal single-game sports wagering, and would the arrival of legal Internet poker play eventually lead to online sports betting, a practice that has been popular in Europe for years?
Those questions were debated at the conference, sponsored by UNLV's International Gaming Institute and UNR's Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming. About 450 industry theorists from around the world are attending.
In a series of panels and presentations Wednesday, the consensus was that they expect online sports betting would become a reality someday — but not anytime soon.
Keynote speaker Chad Millman is among those who believe now is the time for a push to expand legal sports wagering in the United States.
Millman, editor of ESPN the Magazine, chronicled the evolution of sports wagering in the United States from the days that it was run by the mob to its explosive growth in the mid-1980s, driven by the development of an NFL proposition bet in Super Bowl XX in 1985 by Las Vegas bookmaker Jimmy Vaccaro.
"He had an idea to increase his handle," Millman told the lunch crowd. "Defensive lineman William 'The Refrigerator' Perry was an iconic sports figure that year, and the Chicago Bears used him occasionally as a fullback because of his size and his athletic ability.
"So he put up a prop bet: Will Fridge score a touchdown? The odds on the Fridge scoring a touchdown were 40-to-1. Newspapers from around the world thought this was the greatest idea ever. They started writing stories about it, and they were interviewing Jimmy Vaccaro.
"Jimmy Vaccaro ended up having a liability of about $40,000, and by the time the game kicked off, the odds were down to 3-to-1. Jimmy Vaccaro lost that money — because Fridge scored a touchdown, in case that wasn't clear — but it opened the floodgates to the language of sports betting being part of the way fans watched the Super Bowl. Jimmy Vaccaro created a phenomenon around the Fridge that revolutionized how people have Super Bowl parties because now everyone can understand 'Is Ben Roethlisberger going to throw for more than 300 yards or less than 300 yards?' You didn't have to know anything about point spreads or totals or odds. All you had to do was know somebody's name."
Millman said the increased popularity of proposition bets opened the accessibility of sports wagering to people who had no interest in football.
It also brought sports betting terms into popular culture. When it's time for NCAA basketball tournaments, most people know something about "bracketology." Scientific angles of probability became tools in a sports bettor's arsenal. Bettors used the same statistics and algorithms of "Moneyball" and sabermetrics to place bets.
Reformed Wall Street traders and actuaries were making bets, and some organizations refer to sports betting in investment terms.
Even President Barack Obama went on television to fill out his NCAA basketball bracket — and made a few gambling references, despite sports betting being illegal in nearly every state.
"Whether it's a $5 bet by the mill worker in Minnesota or a $5,000 buy-in by a Wall Street executive, all of America has a stake in these games," Obama said in one ESPN television appearance.
Millman said sports betting has become "more sanitized" and acceptable.
"The way that ESPN can engage in this idea is to be doing it in the same way that people in this room are doing it — from an intellectual, analytical research perspective," he said.
Millman said now is the time to debate the expansion of legalized sports wagering.
"A couple of years ago, the state of Delaware tried to legalize Vegas-style sports betting," he said. "They were dismissed by a federal judge, so they are now allowed to offer parlay-style betting.
"The state of New Jersey is now picking up the fight. You could see Gov. Chris Christie walking around the boardwalk (in Atlantic City) after Hurricane Sandy, and the boardwalk was a mess. They firmly believe that sports betting is one of the ways in which they can generate revenue to save it.
"It was basically Chris Christie who challenged the (professional sports) leagues and challenged the federal government when he decided he wanted to overturn the Professional-Amateur Sports Protection Act, and he said, 'If someone wants to stop us, let them try to stop us.'"
The case was heard by a federal judge and denied. Next, it will be heard by an appellate judge. Millman expects the case to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
" think it will have a huge impact over the next few years in the way that we're having a conversation about sports betting," he said. "Now, it is not a conversation being had in the degenerate space. It's a conversation that's largely being had in the political space."
Richard McGowan, a professor at Boston College, expects the sports-betting debate will become a confrontation between government leaders who see gambling revenue as a potential source of revenue to fill budget shortfalls and the NCAA, which opposes all forms of legal and illegal wagering on college sports.
McGowan believes the tide is turning toward gambling advocates. He said that despite laws that have been in place since the 1960s limiting and prohibiting gambling, many of his college students believe they're not doing anything immoral when they access offshore gambling sites on the Internet.
But McGowan added that the debate is much more complicated when the social costs of compulsive and underage gambling and operator integrity are brought into the discussion.