Ted Baxter's Football Gambling System on MTM

I’m mostly a Dick Van Dyke fan, but I occasionally indulge in some Mary Tyler Moore episodes. I recall from one episode that Ted, the arrogant anchorman, developed a gambling system for betting on football. It had something to do with the point spread, I don’t recall the specifics.

If anyone remembers the system that Ted used, to much success, in that episode, please let me know. Football season is rapidly approaching after all.

Thanks in advance to any TV Land junkies who remember this.

RexDart

Ted did something successfully?

As I recall, he bet on the favorite unless the point spread was more than fourteen.

There are no systems in football betting that will not lose money in the long run.

Regards,
Shodan

There is no system in any kind of betting that can beat the odds. And the house sets the odds. The expectation of a return is computed from the odds, or the probabilities, and those are always set so that the expectation is positive by enough to insure against short term catastrophe for the house. In the long run they always win. That’s how they are able to pay for those lavish casinos and make a profit.

We may be approaching Great Debates territory, but I’d have to disagree with this in part. I certainly agree as far as traditional casino games like blackjack or roulette are concerned.

Sports betting is different, though. Bookies (legal or otherwise) do NOT set the point spread to accurately reflect their sense of the possible outcome of the game, but to get equal betting on both sides of the bet from the Teeming Millions.

IF (and it’s a big if) the Teeming Millions are consistently wrong in their betting, then it would be theoretically possible to exploit that fact. Let’s say the Teeming Millions tend to overbet heavy favorites, underestimating the chance of an upset. The point spread in those cases would then be set WIDER than would otherwise be rational to encourage more people to bet on the underdog. Those with the Straight Dope could bet underdogs and beat the system in the long run.

Are you sure about that, DRS? It was my understanding that if the bookies are convinced the betting public is out of touch with reality, they will adjust the odds to make them conform more closely to their own expectations.

Bookies do tend to move the spread in order to balance the betting from the public. This minimizes their risk. If they get exactly the same number of bets on each side of the play, they are guaranteed profit.

However, if the public is seriously wrong, the bookie may decide to keep the more accurate spread (in his opinion), or to move it but not all the way. But this makes the bookie a gambler - essentially, he’s betting on the game himself now. So the bookie generally has to feel that the public is not just wrong, but so wrong that it’s worth throwing his own money into the hat.

But there’s another problem with this. If the bookie moves his line differently than other bookies do, he can get ‘middled’. A middle is where a gambler finds two bookies with spreads so different that the gambler can bet one way with one bookie, and bet the opposing way with the second, and lower or eliminate his risk. This will allow him to bet large sums of money. Bookies don’t like being middled.

You CAN make a profit betting sports, and I know lots of people that do it for a living. There are some professional syndicates that have made millions doing it. But you have to have the gift of being able to spot lines that are wrong, which means you need to be able to accurately handicap yourself. That is not easy. The guys I know who do it seriously basically spend most of their time studying teams, statistics, matchups, historical results, etc.

Generally, pros beat the house by knowing something the house doesn’t. Remember, the pro can study just one game, while the bookies have to set lines for hundreds of games that may be going on that day in many different sports. For example, you may know that the weather forecast calls for rain, and that this disadvantages one team more than another, based on their style of play.

The internet makes it all tougher, because bookies communicate with each other now. One common way to beat the house in the old days was to exploit the ‘home team support’ angle. Basically, the population of a city where the home team is playing will tend to bet with the home team, which moves the line away from where it ‘should’ be. Gamblers used to exploit that by betting against the home team with the local bookie, or betting with them with a bookie in the opposing team’s city, getting better odds than the locals are. Or there might be a good middle opportunity.

Today, because bookies communicate, the local bookie will tend to leave his line unbalanced in order to keep his spread the same as other bookies, which means the local lines are now more accurate.

Finally, the true professional sports bettor does not bet every game, or even anywhere close to it. It’s a tedious business, because you have to spend a lot of time analyzing games, only to find that the bookie’s line is pretty much correct. So all that work goes down the drain, and you start another. Some pros will only bet one or two games for every 20 or 30 they analyze.

Btw, you can also beat blackjack, contrary to what DRS said.

You can beat blackjack because although overall the game is in favour of the house, when there are a lot of 10’s, picture cards and aces left in the deck, the odds are slightly in favour of the player. So you count the cards - note what cards have been played - and adjust your betting accordingly.

The house uses bigger decks. In some places if you are suspected of counting cards you’re tossed out of the game. The house makes the rules and the house does not lose.

Sam’s right. I made a small amount of money by middling bookies, as he’s described. Unfortunately, I never had a large enough supply of cash, however, to make any real large-scale profits. Also, several times I’ve made an early bet with a bookie, only to find that a few days later the odds had changed so much that if I bet against myself, I’d be guaranteed a profit regardless of result. In the early days of the Internet, I was still able to spot occassional discrepencies in lines and pulled a small profit that way. These days, though, it’s nary impossible to find. And I don’t have the time or the inclination to analyze teams to find good odds.

But sports betting is definitely one area of gambling where you can make money in the long run if you know what you’re doing and are willing to devote all your time to it. With that amount of time and energy, one might as well simply get a job and be done with it.