orget everything you think you know about Sin City.
In ‘SuperBookie: Inside Las Vegas Sports Gambling’, author
Art Manteris, who at the time of publication held the highly
influential position of vice president and director of Race and Sports
Operations at the Last Vegas Hilton, unpacks the colourful history of
Nevada’s gambling mecca across 234 absorbing pages. Offering an
invaluable insider’s perspective on everything from point spreading
to spot fixing, Manteris explains in jargon-heavy if uncomplicated
and invariably snappy terms how legalised sports betting became
a multi billion-dollar industry built around an intricate network of
odds-setters and high-stakes bettors.At the heart of all this is “the house”, which here refers to the
SuperBook at the Las Vegas Hilton, regarded as one of the state’s
“big three” race and sports books along with Caesars Palace andTITLE
AUTHOR
YEAR
TEXT
SuperBookie : Inside Las
Vegas Sports GamblingManteris, Art
1991
Senior Librarian
Adam Woodward
F
the Mirage. Betting on major sporting events has always been big
business in America, but according to Manteris things really took
off in Las Vegas when the resort hotels and casinos discovered that
there was serious money to be made from operating in-house race
and sports books. Surprisingly, and contrary to what the movies have
led us to believe, he also asserts that Las Vegas bookmaking is
one of the purest, most stringently regulated industries in America.
To quote one prominent gambler named in the book, the idea that games
in Las Vegas are fixed is “the biggest bunch of nothin’ I ever heard.”So how does one beat the bookie? Manteris stops short of giving
up his profession’s most closely-held secrets, but he does provide
detailed breakdowns of several triumphs and defeats that took
place under his watch, revealing exactly what’s at stake for everyone
involved. One of the most common observations made of gambling is
that you never hear about the losses, yet Manteris appears to relish
flouting that particular maxim even though it clearly pains him to do
so. Right off the bat, he recalls how a missed field goal attempt in the
1991 Super Bowl saw the SuperBook miss out on $1 million, sending
him into an emotional tailspin from which it seemed he might never
recover. Not winning, you see, is just as bad as losing.The book is full of scenarios like this, each giving a sense of the
complex psychology of sports betting; the risks and rush inherent
to laying and taking massive wagers. Manteris insists he doesn’t
gamble himself, not because he’s necessarily smarter or savvier than
the next man but because he simply can’t stand losing – and yet the
way he writes about his experiences, good and bad, implies a certain
compulsiveness. As he sets about debunking (and occasionally
reinforcing) various myths about Las Vegas, sprinkling in anecdotes
concerning local characters with names like Sonny Reizner, Roxy
Roxborough, “Injun” Joe and one legendary oddsmaker known as
“The Wizard of Odds”, you very quickly understand what Manteris
means when he says there are winners and losers on both sides of
the betting counter024 The Uncut Gems Issue