Sportsbook at Wynn Las Vegas, during Super Bowl XLII, February 2008
A sportsbook (sometimes abbreviated as book) or a race and sports book is a place where a gambler can wager on various sports competitions, including football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, horse racing and boxing. The method of betting varies with the sport and the type of game. The more prominent the event, the more wagering options that are made available.
Winning bets are paid when the event finishes, or if not finished, when played long enough to becomes official; otherwise all bets are returned. This policy can cause some confusion since there can be a difference between what the sportsbook considers official and what the sports league consider official. Customers should carefully read the sportsbook rules before placing their bets.
The betting volume at sportsbooks varies throughout the year. Bettors have more interest in certain types of sports and increase the money wagered when those sports are in season. Likewise the interest in sports varies by country since the level of interest in the various sports is not constant the world over. Some major sporting events that don’t follow a specific schedule, like boxing, can create peaks of activity for the sportsbooks.
Word origin
A sportsbook is a portmanteau, French for “jacket holder,” meaning a suitcase with two storage spaces. Sportsbook combines two meanings into one word for a sports gambling operation, in this case SPORTS and BOOK which is short for bookmaking.
Odds
In the mid 1930s, Leo Hirschfield started a company in Minneapolis, Minnesota called Athletic Publications, Inc., that published and distributed odds to bookies across the country by telephone and telegraph. He had a team of handicappers analyzing the matchups who also studied newspapers across the country. The company was a major provider of odds and prices until it finally disbanded, under fear of prosecution from the Federal Wire Act of 1961.
Today most sportsbooks get their opening prices from other sportsbooks as well as private companies like Las Vegas Sports Consultants. They adjust prices based on the bets coming in, news, injury, and weather information, and the price movement by other sportsbooks.
Nevada sportsbooks
Today there are roughly 150 licensed sportsbooks in the United States, all located in Nevada casinos. Now that many casinos share the same parent company, they offer the exact same wagering choices and odds, which is a disadvantage to the astute gambler who in the past could do more shopping for better prices.
In the 1950s the first Nevada sportsbooks, called turf clubs, opened. They were independent from the casinos, and had an informal agreement with the hotels that they would stay out of the casino business as long as the hotels stayed out of the sportsbook business. The sportsbooks had to pay a 10% tax so they charged a high vigorish to gamblers, but they still brought in a lot of business.
In 1974 the tax was lowered to 2%, (and in 1983 lowered to 0.25%), and in 1975 Lefty Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust Casino, convinced legislators to allow them in the casinos, and soon nearly all of the casinos added them. The turf clubs were no longer able to compete and eventually all closed.
In Nevada casino sportsbooks you will find:
Betting Windows
Numerous big screen televisions
Places to sit and watch
Interactive betting stations
Odds boards, usually computerized
UK sportsbooks
Betting shops are common in the United Kingdom. Companies like Ladbrokes and William Hill have offered walk-in betting shops for decades.
Sports betting systems refers to a set of events that when combined for a particular game for a particular sport represents a profitable betting scenario. Since sports betting involves humans, there is no deterministic edge to the house or the gambler. Systems allow the gambler to have an edge.
Sportsbooks use systems in their analysis to set more accurate odds. Therefore the novice gambler may believe that using a system will always work, it is the general consensus that at some point, the oddsmakers will have adjusted for the system to make it no longer profitable. Very short-lived systems are called trends. Any single event that estimates a selection to have a higher likelihood of winning is called an angle as they are meant to be used in conjunction with other angles and trends to produce systems.
Betting on systems
Systems can be deceiving. Any sample space can be constrained enough with meaningless criteria to create the illusion of a profitable betting system. For example, a coin can be flipped with heads being home teams and tails being road teams. Heads and tails each have a 50% probability of landing but if the amount of flips is limited to a small number, it is conceivable to create the illusion of predicting heads will come up 75% of the time.
That, in conjunction with the fact that sportsbooks adjust their odds according to the systems makes it difficult to follow systems indefinitely. The sportsbooks are slower to adjust the odds in some sports versus other sports depending on the number of games played and the amount of money they take in from bettors.
Determining systems
Determining systems is a matter of using computer analysis tools and extracting all the possible games that meet a bettor’s criteria. Then the bettor analyzes the results of those games to make a determination if one team is favored over the other.
Soft lines is a betting terminology representing betting odds that have been poorly researched by sportsbooks.
Handicappers commonly use this term to emphasize the value of their play. Since handicappers can focus on a smaller subset of all the possible games, they have the chance to identify soft lines. Soft lines usually exist in the games where the least number of people bet because there is less incentive by the sportsbooks to put an effort into making strong lines.
In gambling, a proposition bet (also called a prop bet) is any bet made for a sum of money that involves a proposition. An example is the professional poker player, Howard “The Professor” Lederer, a vegetarian who wagered $10,000 with a fellow gambler that he could eat a cheeseburger. He did it and won the money. Golf is a very common game for prop bets.
A pick 6 is a type of wager offered by horse racing tracks. It requires bettors to select the winners of six consecutive races. Because of the great difficulty in picking six straight winners, plus the number of betting interests involved, payoffs for successful wagers are quite high, sometimes in the millions of dollars.The pick 6 has its roots in the daily double, the first so-called “exotic” wager offred by horse tracks. To win the daily double, a bettor must pick the winner of two consecutive races, traditionally the first two and the last two races of the program. The pick 6 merely extends this principle. The wager is offered once per program, and is usually offered on six races which conclude with the featured race of the day.
The wager is conducted in parimutuel fashion, with all pick 6 bets going into a separate pool from other kinds of betting. There is one “betting interest” for each available combination, and the number of combinations is equal to the product of the number of runners in all six races. A simplified example: If there are ten horses in each of the six races, then the number of combinations is 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10, or 1,000,000.
The pick 6 wager actually has two payoffs, one for bettors who pick all six winners, and a smaller payoff for those who pick five out of six. The total pick 6 betting pool is divided by precentage between the two payouts, along the lines of 75% for the six-winner pool and 25% for the five-winner pool.
Because of the sheer difficulty off successfully choosing six straight winners, plus the large number of betting interests, it is common for there to be no winning wager on all six races. When that happens, the six-winner portion of the pool carries over to the following program, and continues to carry over until it is won. This allows the “carryover pool” to grow to large sums, and tracks usually publicize the fact that their carryover pool has grown to six or seven figures. The five-winner pool is paid out each day, however; if no bettors have chosen five out of six winners, then those who have chosen four winners are paid, or even just three winners (which has happened when a series of longshots have won races). The pick 6 pool is also paid out in its entirety on the last day of a race meet; if there are no six-winner tickets, then the pool is split among five-winner tickets.
Because of the huge number of betting interests involved, bettors will often try to increase their chances of winning by selecting multiple combinations. This can be costly — a bettor who wants to cover two horses in each race muct bet on 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 combinations, or 64 combinations, times $2 for each for a total of $128. This method is called “boxing horses,” and is also used with other wagers such as a trifecta or superfecta.
Late scratches
Because all pick 6 wagers must be made before the first of the six races, there are many times when a horse is scratched from a race well after the wager is placed. How this is handled varies according to the rules of the racing jurisdiction. In most cases, the track substitutes the horse that is the post time betting favorite (in the “win” betting pools); if the bettor’s original horse is a late scratch and the post time favorite wins, then the betor is considered to have picked the winner for that race. In other cases, the track may declare combinations involving the scratched horse to have “no action,” and the wager is refunded.
Races moved from turf to dirt
At North American tracks, races which are run on a turf (grass) course must sometimes be moved to the main dirt course, usually due to heavy rain or other adverse weather conditions; sometimes this switch is made after pick 6 wagering is closed. Moving from turf to dirt greatly affects the wagering decisions of astute handicappers, as many horses perform differently according to the racing surface. For pick 6 wagering, different tracks handle this situation in different ways. In New York, a race moved from turf to dirt after pick 6 wagering closes is declared an “all win” race, where picks on any horse in that race are declared successful. If only one race is moved, bettors who successfully pick the other five race winers will win or share the ful six-winner pool, including carryovers. If two races are moved, bettors who pick the other four winners will win or share in that day’s six-winner pool, but no carryover, and the previous carryover pool only goes to the next program. (Few North American tracks schedule more than two turf races in a program.)
A parlay is a single bet that links together two or more individual wagers and is dependent on all of those wagers winning together. The benefit of the parlay is that there are much higher payoffs than placing each individual bet separately since the difficulty of hitting it is much higher. If any of the bets in the parlay loses, the entire parlay loses.For example: Joe placed a three-team NFL parlay on the Lions, Bears and Bengals. If any one of those teams fail to cover the spread, Joe loses his parlay bet. But if all three teams beat the spread, Joe gets paid $600 for every $100 bet.
An over-under or over/under bet is a wager in which a sportsbook will predict a number for a statistic in a given game (usually the combined score of the two teams), and bettors wager that the actual number in the game will be either higher or lower than that number. For example, in Super Bowl XXXIX, most Las Vegas casinos set the over-under for the score of the game at 46.0. A bettor could wager that the combined score of the two teams would be either more than or less than that number (as it happened, the combined score was 45, so anyone who had bet the under won).
Statistics
Though this bet is most commonly made with the combined score of the two teams, many other statistics can be used, including:
A team’s win-loss record for the season
In football, a player’s or team’s total rushing yards or attempts, first down conversions, third down conversions, interceptions, completions, etc.
In basketball, a player’s or team’s total assists, blocks, turnovers, steals, field goal percentage, etc.
In baseball, a player’s or team’s total number of home runs, RBI, etc.
In probability theory and statistics the odds in favor of an event or a proposition are the quantity p / (1 − p), where p is the probability of the event or proposition. The logarithm of the odds is the logit of the probability.Odds have long been the standard way of representing probability used by bookmakers, though the method of presenting odds varies by location.
Taking an event with a 1 in 5 probability of occurring (i.e. 0.2 or 20%), then the odds are 0.2 / (1 − 0.2) = 0.2 / 0.8 =
.25. If you bet 1 at fair odds and the event occurred, you would receive back 4 plus your original 1 stake. This would be presented in fractional odds of 4 to 1 against (written as 4 : 1 or 4/1), in decimal odds as 5.0 to include the returned stake, in craps payout as 5 for 1, and in moneyline odds as +400 representing the gain from a 100 stake.
By contrast, for an event with a 4 in 5 probability of occurring (i.e. 0.8 or 80%), then the odds are 0.8 / (1 − 0.8) = . If you bet 4 at fair odds and the event occurred, you would receive back 1 plus your original 4 stake. This would be presented in fractional odds of 4 to 1 on (written as 1 : 4 or 1/4), in decimal odds as 1.25 to include the returned stake, in craps as 5 for 4, and in moneyline odds as −400 representing the stake necessary to gain 100.
The odds are a ratio of probabilities; an odds ratio is a ratio of odds, that is, a ratio of ratios of probabilities. Odds-ratios are often used in analysis of clinical trials. While they have useful mathematical properties, they can produce counter-intuitive results: in the example above an 80% probability is four times the chance of a 20% probability but the odds are 16 times higher.
The Nassau bet is a type of bet in golf that is essentially three separate bets. Money is wagered on the best score in the front 9, back 9, and total 18 holes. The Nassau is one of golf’s most classic and most popular wagers.The amount of the bet is established — often $2 or $5 — for each nine with a third bet for the overall 18-hole match. Points are calculated by scoring each hole as a separate match. The player with the lowest score on a hole wins a point. If the scores tie for a hole, this results in a “push,” or no points won or lost.
Nassau Presses
This is a side bet offered during a Nassau match by the side that is losing in an effort to even their money for either the front or back nine. If the player who presses then beats his opponent over the remaining holes on that nine, he wins the press bet. In effect it is a double or nothing proposition. When a side is two or more points down in the match, they may request a press. The opposition has the option to accept or reject the press, although it is usually accepted.
The press bet runs for the remaining holes to be played on either the front or back nine holes only. Press bets can be re-pressed if the player falls two more points behind. The amount of the press bet is the same as the original match bet. For example, in a $2 Nassau, presses are for $2.
As with any golf game, players of greatly different abilities can compete. Handicaps are used to determine how many strokes one player must give another.
Kelly gambling is an application of information theory to gambling and (with some ethical and legal reservations) investing. An important but simple relation exists between the amount of side information a gambler obtains and the expected exponential growth of his capital (Kelly). The so-called equation of ill-gotten gains can be expressed in logarithmic form as
for an optimal betting strategy, where K0 is the initial capital, Kt is the capital after the tth bet, and Hi is the amount of side information obtained concerning the ith bet (in particular, the mutual information relative to the outcome of each betable event). This equation applies in the absence of any transaction costs or minimum bets. When these constraints apply (as they invariably do in real life), another important gambling concept comes into play: the gambler (or unscrupulous investor) must face a certain probability of ultimate ruin, which is known as the gambler’s ruin scenario. Note that even food, clothing, and shelter can be considered fixed transaction costs and thus contribute to the gambler’s probability of ultimate ruin.
This equation was the first application of Shannon’s theory of information outside its prevailing paradigm of data communications (Pierce).
Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) are computerised machines normally found in betting shops which allow players to bet on the outcome of various games and events with Fixed Odds. They were introduced to UK shops in 2002, shortly after the abolition of the Betting Tax in October 2001.The most commonly played game is Roulette. The minimum bet per spin is £1 and the maximum is £100. Chips can be as small as 20 pence. The maximum amount that can be won on any spin is £500.
Other games include Spoof, Bingo, Virtual Racing and Triple Disc.
Shops are allowed a maximum of four such terminals, although since this number also includes fruit machines, many shops have fewer than four.
An Exacta is a type of bet placed in horse racing which requires the bettor to select the 1st and 2nd place finishers of the race in the correct order.This is more difficult than selecting only the winner of the race, and the resulting payouts for correctly placing an exacta bet are therefore correspondingly higher.
Called a perfecta in some New England (U.S.) states, though this particular use of nomenclature is widely considered to be anomalous.
In gambling a Dutch book or lock is a set of odds and bets which guarantees a profit, no matter what the outcome of the gamble. It is associated with probabilities implied by the odds not being coherent.In economics a Dutch book usually refers to a sequence of trades that would leave one party strictly worse off and another strictly better off. Typical assumptions in consumer choice theory rule out the possibility that anyone can be Dutch-booked.
Gambling
In one example, a bookmaker has offered odds and attracted bets that make the result irrelevant; in this case the implied probabilities will add up to a number greater than 1.
Horse number
Offered odds:
Bets:
Implied
probability:
1
Evens
100
0.5
2
3 to 1 against
50
0.25
3
4 to 1 against
40
0.2
4
9 to 1 against
20
0.1
Total
10
.05
In this case, whichever horse wins, the bookmaker will pay out 200 (including returning the winning stake) and so make a profit of 10.
If for some reason Horse 4 was withdrawn and the bookmaker was foolish enough not to adjust the other odds, the implied probabilities would add up to 0.95 and a gambler could lock in a profit of 10, by betting 100, 50 and 40 on the remaining three horses respectively.
Other forms of Dutch books can exist when incoherent odds are offered on exotic bets such as forecasting the order in which horses will finish. With competitive fixed-odds gambling being offered electronically, gamblers can sometimes create a Dutch book by selecting the best odds from different bookmakers, in effect by undertaking an arbitrage operation. The bookmakers should react by adjusting the offered odds in the light of demand, so as to remove the potential profit.
In Bayesian probability, Frank P. Ramsey and Bruno de Finetti required personal degrees of belief to be coherent so that a Dutch book could not be made against them, whichever way bets were made. Necessary and sufficient conditions for this are that their degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability.
Economics
In economics the classic example of a situation in which a consumer X can be Dutch-booked is if he or she has intransitive preferences. Suppose that for this consumer, A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C, and C is preferred to A. Then suppose that someone else in the population, Y, has one of these goods. Without loss of generality, suppose Y has good A. Then Y can first sell A to X for B + ε; then sell B to X for C + ε; then sell C to X for A + ε, where ε is some small amount of the numeraire. After this sequence of trades, X has given 3·ε to Y for nothing in return. Y will have exploited an arbitrage opportunity by taking advantage of X’s intransitive preferences.
Economists usually argue that people with preferences like X’s will have all their wealth taken from them in the market. If this is the case, we won’t observe preferences with intransitivities or other features that allow people to be Dutch-booked. However, if people are somewhat sophisticated about their intransitivities and/or if competition by arbitrageurs drives epsilon to zero, non-”standard” preferences may still be observable.
A daily double is a type of wager offered by horse and dog racing tracks. It requires bettors to select the winners of two consecutive races. Because of the increased difficulty of picking two straight winners, wining daily double bets often pay off at relatively high odds.The daily double was the first so-called “exotic” wager to be offered by American racetracks. The wager was typically offered only for the first two races of each day’s program, as an enticement for spectators to arrive early for the entire program (and hopefully wager more). As with all other American racing wagers, the “double” is conducted in parimutuel fashion, with the number of betting interests in the daily double pool equal to the product of the number of runners in both races — in other words, if there are ten entries in the first race and eight in the second, there will be 80 separate betting interests, one for each combination. By sheer mathematics, this results in the higher payoffs than those found in straight betting for win, place or show.
For many years, the daily double was the only exotic wager offered. Later on, the exacta was also offered on select races during each program. The wagers were offered only a few times each day largely because of the limitations of electro-mechanical totalisator systems. When computer technology took over, many more exotic wagers were introduced, such as the trifecta, superfecta and pick 6. The higher payouts for these wagers tended to diminish interest in the “old fashioned” daily double, but it is still offered at all tracks, sometimes more than once during a program. (A “late double” is frequently offered on the last two races on a program.)
The “Pick 3″ and “Pick 4″ wagers are derived from the daily double; they require bettors to pick the winners of three or four consecutive races. These are often offered on a “rolling” basis — a rolling pick 3 on races one through three, another on races two through four, and so on throughout the day.
Occasional doubles are offered on important races contested on separate days. The most prominent example of the “Oaks-Derby Double” offered by Churchill Downs, where bettors pick the winners of the Kentucky Oaks and Kentucky Derby. The Oaks is run the day before the Derby.
A Calcutta Auction is an open auction held in conjunction with a golf tournament, horse race, or similar contest with multiple entrants. It is popular in Backgammon and is currently enjoying rising popularity for NCAA Basketball pools during March Madness.Bidding for each contestant begins in random order, with only one contestant being bid upon at any time. Accordingly, participants (originally in Calcutta, India, from where this technique was first recorded by the Colonial British) bid among themselves to “buy” each of the contestants, with each contestant being assigned to the highest bidder. The contestant will then pay out to the owner a predetermined proportion of the pool depending on how it performs in the tournament. While variations in payoff schedules exist, in an NCAA Basketball tournament (64 teams, single elimination) the payoffs could resemble the following schedule: 1 win – 0.25%, 2 wins – 2%, 3 wins – 4%, 4 wins – 8%, 5 wins – 16%, tournament winner with 6 wins – 32%.
The most interesting element of Calcutta Auctions is in determining an appropriate wager for each contestant, as the payoff will directly hinge on the size of the pot and thereby the size of the bids being placed. Thus the value of each team fluctuates during the course of the betting. For example, even if a bidder knew the Tar Heels would be the tournament winner and thus pay out 32% of the pool, she would still be unsure of the exact value of the team (unless it was the last team being bid on) as the payout would depend on the sum total of all winning bids.
This is similar to parimutuel betting, in that the winnings are awarded from the total pool of bets, but differs in that only one player can bet on any one contestant. However, a player may purchase as many contestants as they desire.
Point shaving, in organized sports, is a type of match fixing where the perpetrators try to prevent a team from covering a published point spread. Unlike other forms of match fixing, sports betting invariably motivates point shaving. A point shaving scheme generally involves a sports gambler and one or more players of a sports team. In exchange for a bribe, the player or players agree to ensure that their team will not cover the point spread. The gambler then wagers against that team.Point shaving occurs most frequently in amateur and collegiate sports, whose athletes are presumably more vulnerable to a gambler’s bribery than professionals. Professional-level players earn significant sums of money each year, whereas collegiate players are prevented by strict regulations from earning compensation for their play.
Basketball is a particularly easy medium for shaving points because of the scoring tempo of the game and the ease by which one player can influence key events. By deliberately missing shots or committing well-timed turnovers or fouls, a corrupt player can covertly ensure that his team fails to cover the point spread, without causing them to lose the game (or to lose so badly that suspicions are aroused). Although the NCAA has adopted a zero tolerance policy with respect to gambling activity by its players, some critics believe it unwittingly encourages point shaving due to its strict rules regarding amateurism, combined with the large amount of money wagered on its games.
Point shaving perpetrators
Henry Hill
Benny Silman
Stevin Smith
Richie Perry
Matthew Wood
References in popular culture
The 1974 movie The Longest Yard features a main character, Paul Crewe, who is thrown out of the NFL for point shaving. There was also a remake of The Longest Yard in 2005 staring Adam Sandler.
In an episode of The Sopranos, “The Rat Pack”, it is mentioned that New York mob boss Carmine Lupertazzi invented point shaving.
An Asian Handicap is a sports betting term used to describe spread betting in football (soccer). Described as Asian because of its Eastern origins, the phrase has little else to do with the region. This form of soccer betting has gained increased popularity over the last few years and is now offered by a variety of mainstream bookmakers.Football bets can be made using a few different formats. From a gambler’s standpoint, Asian handicap odds provide many benefits. For starters, the Asian handicap system eliminates any chance for loss due to a tie, which increases the gamblers chances of success. Secondly, bookmakers typically charge less Vigorish than with other bets.
Description
Soccer is one of the few sports in the world where a tie is a fairly common outcome. With traditional fixed odds, ties are treated as an additional outcome to the game. In other words, bettors lose when they place a wager on either team to win and the game ties. With Asian Handicaps, however, the chance for a tie is eliminated by use of a handicap that forces a winner. This creates a situation where each team has a 50-50 chance of winning; similar to the odds for a basketball or baseball game where a tie is impossible.
This system works in a straight-forward manner. The bookmakers’s goal is to create a handicap or “line” that will make the chance of either team winning (considering the handicap) as close to 50% as possible. Since the odds are as close to 50% as possible, bookmakers offer payouts close to even money, or 1.90 to 2.00. Asian Handicaps start at a quarter goal and can go as high as 2.5 or 3 goals in matches with a huge disparity in ability. What makes Asian Handicaps most interesting is the use of quarter goals to get the “line” as close as possible. Taken in conjunction with the posted total for the game, the handicap essentially predicts the game’s final score. Take a look at this example:
Example
Match: Everton vs. Newcastle United
Handicap: 0 : 1 1/2
Explained: This handicap states that Everton is “giving” Newcastle one and one half goal for the match.
This means is that Newcastle is starting the game with a 1.5-0 lead. If the final score of the game is 2-1, then a bet on Newcastle wins the with the final score (considering handicap) as 2-2.5.
Quarter Handicaps
Subsequently, many matches are handicapped in 1/2 and 1/4 intervals; both of which eliminate the possibility of a tie since no one can score a half-goal. Quarter (1/4) handicaps split the bet between the two next closest 1/4 intervals. For instance, a $1000 bet with a handicap of 1 3/4 is the same as betting $500 at 1 1/2 and $500 at 2. With 1/4 handicap bets, you can win and tie (win 1/2 of wager) or lose and tie (lose 1/2 wager).
Whole Handicaps and Ties
Handicaps that are whole numbers still allow for the possibility of a tie. Sportsbooks will refund both bets in the event of a game tied by the handicap.
Reference & Payout Charts
Asian Handicap Betting Article from DragonBets.com
Betting strategies or betting systems are approaches to gambling intended to increase the odds of winning.
Independent Events
The following betting strategies have been recorded as being applied to games which operate on independent events. For such games, the odds of a particular outcome are identical for every bet played. No such strategy can beat the house edge (if any) in the long run, and all of them trade off many small wins for a big loss or vice versa.
Martingale – doubling bet after each loss until a win is achieved (or fails when the amount of the bet becomes excessive).
A bar bet is a bet made between two patrons at a bar. Bar bets can range from wagers about little-known trivia, such as obscure historical facts, to feats of skill and strength. Some bar bets are intended to trick the other party into losing.
Famous bar bets
The annual Midnight Sun baseball game played in Fairbanks, Alaska (the only game to be contested after midnight without the use of artificial lighting) was established in 1906 as the result of a bar bet. 2
Two of Tony Hawks’ books, Round Ireland With A Fridge (ISBN 0-091-86777-0) and Playing The Moldovans At Tennis (ISBN 0-091-87456-4), were written describing Hawks’ attempts to win two bar bets.
The film To Have and Have Not is supposedly the result of bar bet between Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks, with Hemingway betting Hawks that Hawks couldn’t make a good film from Hemingway’s worst novel.
It is widely believed that the creation of Scientology was the result of a bar bet between L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein. According to Scientology critic Lindsay this is “definitely not true”, no such bet was ever made, it would have been “uncharacteristic of Heinlein” to make such a bet, and “there’s no supporting evidence”.
Three Bar Bets Involving Fire. Daily Lush Magazine. Retrieved on 2005-12-19. — The Daily Lush describes a bar bet as being the “last remnant of a great American con artist tradition” and gives examples of bar bets.
Rub Cruit (October 1985). 175 Ways to Win a Free Drink: The Complete Book of Bar Bets. Dodd Mead. ISBN 0396085865.
Henny Youngman (1974). Bar bets, bar jokes, bar tricks. Citadel Press. ISBN 0806504048.
Alan Ericksen (1981). Bar games, bets and challenges. Warner Books. ISBN 0446906484.
Links
Gerry Riskin. Want to win a bar bet?. Amazing firms, amazing practices. Retrieved on 2005-12-19, 2005-10-14. — An example of a trick bar bet. Riskin describes a bar bet where the correct answer to the question about a photograph of a man tied to a chair is not the obvious one.
Even and Odd Permutations. Introduction to Group Theory. Retrieved on 2005-12-19. — Another trick bar bet. The trick lies in the even and odd parity of the initial and final conditions.
In gambling, a Bank Job is a term for putting all of your money on a particular betting option, for instance “Yankees to beat the Kansas City Royals is a Bank Job”
It is often mocked by statements claiming people have “Multiple Banks” on a particular bet, for instance “I have 4 Banks on Chelsea to win the English Premier League”
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Sportsbook at Wynn Las Vegas, during Super Bowl XLII, February 2008
