Eric Raskin, USBets
The date was November 2, 1990. The Denver Nuggets were preparing to play their first game under new coach Paul Westhead, the man behind the explosive late-’80s run-and-gun Loyola Marymount offense, and they were taking on the high-powered “Run TMC” Golden State Warriors led by Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullin.
Blair Rodman, now best known as a World Series of Poker bracelet winner and a poker strategy author, was at the time part of a professional sports betting group. And he and his associates loved what they saw that day from the Las Vegas sportsbooks.
“Westhead didn’t care about defense, he just wanted to run up scores as best he could,” Rodman recalls. “His first NBA game, nobody knew what to do with the total.”
As best Rodman can remember, the Stardust Lottery started the Nuggets-Warriors total at 255 points. He bet the over. The Stardust Lottery used a system at the time that only allowed you to bet so much before you had to get back in line. So Rodman kept getting back in line and betting the over.
“I bet it at 255, 257, I bet it at 259, I kept betting,” he remembers. “The thing went up until it closed at like 310.”
At the end of the first quarter, the Warriors led 43-41. It was 87-83 at halftime. By the end of the three quarters, the score was 125-122 — just eight points shy of the initial line. And at the final buzzer, Golden State had recorded a 162-158 victory. The two teams had combined for 320 points.
“That’s the biggest move I’ve ever seen on anything,” Rodman says. “It’s an extreme example of smart money outsmarting the books.”
What is smart money?
In skill-based gambling verticals — sports betting, daily fantasy, poker — it’s possible to win over the long run. Sports betting is the only one of those three where players are up against the house. And as we know, the house always wins, ultimately.
“Smart money” means money bet by “sharps,” those bettors who really know what they’re doing and are capable of coming out ahead over a sustained period. The opposite is known as “public money” — your casual bettors who help make that “the house always wins” cliché ring true.
The challenge is to identify where the smart money is going and act and react accordingly. For many bettors, that means being a “follower” — joining in on the fun when you see, for example, that the smart money is flooding in on the over in that Denver-Golden State game. For sportsbooks, that means adjusting your lines … but hopefully not so much that you create a “middle,” a zone that allows gamblers to be over one number, under another, and positioned to win huge if the final result falls in between.
“Avoiding the middle is pretty much the mandate when you’re a bookie,” Jay Rood, the VP of Race & Sports at MGM Resorts International, tells USBets.com. “There are different factors that can dictate line moves. Sometimes weather, sometimes injuries, sometimes just a poor number. But you control what you can, such as how much you allow a sharp player to bet. That’s why we have limits and don’t give carte blanche to sharp players.”
Rodman says that when he was at his peak, putting 80 hours a week into his sports betting business in the ’90s, his team was probably the second biggest out there, behind only Billy Walters’. It took a lot of work, but they were able to make a profit taking on the bookmakers.
“Sharp money moves lines,” says Rodman, whose book Bet On Sports is due for release most likely in the spring. “Some books are scared of sharp money, they don’t want it. Some offshore books take it and then turn around and bet it in other spots themselves. Some books even have bots set up, and as soon as a sharp player calls, they hit the button and they go out and bet that play everywhere they can.”
Rest is here…
