Apparently Foster Brooks was teetotal since the early 60’s. He played an excellent drunk though.
How dare he act! I demand all my hollywood drunks to be real drunks. Next you’ll be telling me that Dean Martin didn’t drink either.
I actually heard that about Foster Brooks. He gave up alcohol, but the drunk act was too good.
And then there’s this cautionary tale from last year:
Dude bet $1.4M midgame moneyline on the Chargers, when the score was 27-0, to make a potential profit of … wait for it … no, wait … $11,200. The Chargers lost, 31-30.
All the sources I’ve found seem to confirm the story – I haven’t found any debunking of it. So be careful out there. Don’t be this stupid.
Good bet a hefty amount of expensive Scotch had been downed between the start of pre-game festivities and that fateful halftime decision.
Plus maybe some controlled substances.
One always has to know what the outlay is, and what the expected return is. Sometimes, it’s best to step back and ask yourself whether it’s worth risking, say, $1000, in order to win a whopping $50. No guarantees of winning, of course.
Hey, I’ll be at the track later today. Nothing like the above for me. Hello, $2 wagers!
Yeah. A 0.1% return is not a great bet even if it wins.
Well, I couldn’t win. One of the boys won a trifecta, but it was very low-priced, bringing in $13.90, for his total outlay of $6 on a $1 part-wheel wager.
Never mind what all this means if you don’t understand it (*), except that I had fun with my friends, which is the point of the endeavour. We had a few beers, laid down a few bets at the minimum, lost mostly, bullshat each other, and had a great time. Which is as it should be. Horse race betting should be entertainment, and my experience today certainly was. Point is, once again, you’ll never make a living from the track. But you can have fun.
(*) In a recent phone call with my sister, which occurs maybe once a week, I wanted to tell her about a recent visit to the track. I heard a great sigh over the phone. “Spoons, I’m interested, but can you please put it into English so I understand what you’re telling me?” Yes, the track has its own language. Thankfully, I can speak it, and translate into English for Sis.
I once placed a trifecta bet, choosing my three at random because I liked their names. My three turned out to be long shots, and the payoff would have been great.
They ran 1-2-3 the entire race exactly as I picked them, then some other horse came up and ruined it for me.
This is exactly why I always have a tranquilizer dart gun with me.
Whiskey works better, and you don’t have the needle stick pain.
No, no - he meant for the horse coming up to spoil the trifecta. Wait, whoosh, zoom! I’m chuckling.
Well played!
You cannot make money at sports betting. I don’t care what your math mark is.
Sports betting destroys the lives of thousands of people who think they can make money at it. I assure you that you cannot; the number of people who can make a living doing this is tiny (and 99 out of 100 people who tell you they make money at it are lying to you, themselves, or both) and they usually work in teams and work INCREDIBLY hard at this. The few that have done well are sometimes famous, like Bob Voulgaris, but the very fact you asked this question shown you’re years and years behind. You do not have anywhere near the knowledge or resources to know more about the probabilities than do the bookies.
And as Sam Stone points out, EVEN IF you could beat the bookies, your margin is maybe 2-3 percent - so unless you have a huge bankroll, you could go broke anyway. Bankroll management is as important as knowing sports. Maybe more so. If you wanted to make an actual living, you need a bankroll in six figures.
You are as far from being a break even sports better as you are from being an Olympic shot put champion.
If you want to toss around a few $20 bets for fun, go ahead. Do not rely on this as a living. Please.
Furthermore, according to conventional wisdom, agencies here in OZ will boot you off if win too often, or they subject bettors to other win limiting strategies.
I don’t doubt that “conventional wisdom” believes that. I doubt it’s factually accurate simply because it’s unnecessary. The collective public will lose with mathematically reliable certainty; there’s no need to result to skullduggery to juice that result.
“As the American sports betting industry continues to expand, it has reached a high water mark, posting a record $10.92 billion in revenue for 2023 , according to the American Gaming Association’s annual report.”
“Sportsbooks bake their cut into the odds on both sides of a bet, and that cut is generally 4.5% and up. For sportsbooks to maximize their cut, bets on any line are as close to 50-50 (percent) as possible. If one side of a bet with 80% of the money on it wins, the sportsbook loses.”
Get a job for a sports book, don’t waste your money there.
We all listened to a poker buddy’s stories of betting on pro sports, playing blackjack in Vegas, and when he got to a story about an all-night and all-next-day poker party on a high-roller’s yacht, we did the math…
“So, wait, you lost but then you won, and ended the party up four hundred bucks… but, you were playing for twenty-four hours straight, right? So you made about minimum wage. Less than a waitress after tips.”
.
After that, I’m always dying to ask the sports bettin’, big talkin’ guys at my local saloon how much they make per hour, once they figure in the research they do. They stay up late nights, compare a dozen different web sites, sports blogs, tv and radio shows. Some of them have their own spreadsheets developed (don’t ask about those, unless you need to waste an hour…).
I’m thinking easily fifty hours a week to make a thousand dollars… so, $20/hr (and that’s only on a BIG WINNING week).
It’s not work if you’re having fun. Nor if you’re feeding your obsession. Both those things are subjective.
Whether you actually make a profit: now that’s objective. As is your hourly rate if you keep good logbooks.
In other words, gamblers lost $11 billion in 2023. But good luck!
That’s revenue, though, not profit, right?
It appears that it is profit, even though they use the word ‘revenue’ in the article. From the source:
So total wagers were $119.84 billion, with the bookies taking 9.1 percent ($10.9 billion) and returning $108.9 billion to winning bettors.