Gambling

This is probably something that you never want to do in your life because of all the problems that it would cause you. A lot of lives have been destroyed by it and it will continue to destroy a whole lot more. We are talking here though about sports gambling. I was working at Circuit City at the time and a guy named Robert Johnson (I have changed the name of the person to protect his identity) was responsible for introducing a lot of us into the affair. We started with placing little bets on college football games and it stretched later into the professional football games. It was the beginning of the 1995 college football season and I was working in the ACE department at the Circuit City in Beltsville, Maryland. The University of Maryland was playing against Tulane University and Robert came up with football lines for the College football games that weekend. At the time I knew very little about the gambling part of sports. I had been watching college football games for maybe a decade now and never knew a thing about how the lines work. There were quite a few people in the store though that was into gambling, they knew about the lines, odds and effects of gambling. Robert explained to us how the lines work and being the adventurous person that I was at the time, I decided to give it a try. Our store Manager at the time definitely was not aware of what was going.

The first bet that we placed for the game was $25 each person. We ended up loosing that weekend though, because although Maryland won the game, they did not cover the spread. Robert by the way was not the main bookie. He was just the intermediary guy. The name of the real guy was Sid and I got to meet him twice. The first time was when he came to collect $5000 from Johnson(Robert had gone through a terrible week and lost all that money on a bad loosing stretch).The second time was about a year later when I went on a good winning stretch and Sid had to come make sure that I actually exist.
At first what we did was place our bets through Robert Johnson but later on he gave us a direct number through which Sid could be reached and we starting calling up Sid directly to place the bets. Robert collected any winnings for us and we also paid whatever we lost to Sid through him. After the Maryland game, I was mad for having lost $25 and I started making serious plans to make up for my losses the following weekend. I got a copy of the Saturday Washington Post and the lines for the weekend college football games where all there. I wrote down a long list of games and called Robert up that he should place those games for me during the weekend(9/16/1995).The bets were mainly $25 and $50,but added up to a potential lost of close to $900 dollars. I did not know the strength and weaknesses of some of the teams. I was just going by current record.
Anyway, I called up the bets and Robert was real surprise but took my bets though. I remember one of the games was Tennessee versus Florida in Gaines Ville, Florida. Tennessee was the higher ranking team though the Florida Gators were favored by a touchdown. All these bets where place early in the morning before I headed to the store for work. The games we could follow from various television sets that we had in the store. It was raining heavily at the "Swamp"(the swamp is the home of the Florida Gators and always a dangerous area for visiting teams),Steve Spurrier(nicknamed Coach Superior) was coaching the Florida Gators and at halftime his team was down to the Tennessee Volunteers by 34-17 on their way to losing their homecoming game or so we thought. In one of the great turn-around stories of the early season (week three) the Gators would respond in style, scoring 44 straight unanswered points, beating Tennessee 62-37.Tennessee managed just 3 second half points. I had $50 riding on this game and the bad news was just beginning. At the end of the playing Saturday I was down $700 to my bookie. This was my take home pay for two weeks at my job as a sales person for Circuit City. Some two weeks I did not even take this amount home. After the initial shock and talking to Robert, he agreed to cover it with his bookie and I would just pay him over time.
The experience of losing this amount of money did not stop me from further gambling though, I just cut down drastically on the number of bets to place at once. I believed I paid the loss that week over a period of about a year (some of it through future winnings) and about $150 was forgiving. I was hooked though to sports gambling and so were the majority of the store employees. We had some great fun and one of our favorite team that we followed was Ohio State throughout their magical run in the 1995/1996 season for the first 10 games before they eventually lost to Michigan. Ohio State had star players in their team in Eddie George, Terry Glenn, Bob Hoying, Shawn Springs and Orlando Pace. Eddie George would end up winning the Heisman trophy for his performance that season, Terry Glenn won the Biletnikoff award for the best college wide receiver and Orlando Pace won the Out land trophy for being college football's best lineman. He (Orlando Pace) finished the season without allowing a quarterback sack on his side of the field. By the fourth week we were (about six or seven of us) all putting money on Ohio State and they just were having a great season. They were blowing teams away and covering the spread at the same time. Some of the games would be close in the first half, but by the time the second half comes around, the other teams just seemed to get tired and Eddie George would just run over them. He would finish the season with 1927 rushing yards (scoring 24TD for the season).The Buckeyes crushed teams like Boston College, Washington, Notre Dame and Illinois. We were enjoying all the victories, especially the margin of victories. The magical run came to an end though at Michigan, where Ohio State played their last game of the regular season. It was the Tim Biakabutuka show as the Michigan's star running back ran all over Ohio State for 313 yards and led his team to a 31-23 upset victory of Eddie and Company. I have to mention that Michigan is always a difficult game for Ohio State no matter what the current records of the teams is. Not only did Ohio State not cover the spread, they lost the game.
While college football was where we made some money, the NFL was where we were getting hammered. The guys at Vegas sure know how to set those NFL lines. With the NFL you can pick four teams and lay money on them and you would be very lucky to come out with a single team covering the spread. Bad teams would let you down as well as the teams that are enjoying a fine season. For some reason though we kept playing with the NFL.There were the regular 1pm and 4pm games, later on the Sunday night game and lastly the Monday night football game. What usually happens for me is that by the end of Saturday I would be ahead by about $125 won on the college games. Instead of waiting for Tuesday to pick up the winnings, the compulsive gambling drive in me would have me placing bets on the professional games on Sunday. By the time that the Sunday night game comes around, I would already be in the negative. I remember a typical such week in which a lot of us in the store had to depend on a Monday night game involving the Detroit Lions to come out of the hole. I was actually down by $200 before that game and I thought for a while about waiting to pay the debt or risking going down by $400 at the end of the week. Imagine the type of effect losing that type of money would have on somebody that does not make much money to begin with. I did call in the bet for $200 and I held my heart in my arm as the Lions pull off the offset, thanks in large part to their star running back Barry Sanders to cover the spread and make me and a few of my co-workers even for the week.
The extend of my own gambling problem was huge in terms of how much time that it took from my engaging in other activities. When you are involved in sports gambling, there is lot of things that you do. The first one is go out and purchase all types of magazines that give you analysis of the games and the trends. There were publications such at the sporting magazine. At times I would purchase and take them home to read, at times I would just go to the stores that sell them, Safeway stores, Giants food stores, People Drug store, all had a section for magazines and you could go to the stores and read out the analysis. Once in a while, there is a good pickup, but the majority of the time, all you get was information that is based on history that has nothing to do with what will actually take place on game day. Another information source was through the television channels. I had paid cable for most of the time that I was gambling and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there would be all types of people claiming to be experts at picking games. They had names like "big game" Tony, or "Big game" Wayne and they would say they have a sure thing for about $50.So the problem of gambling gets couple with that of people trying to sell you games that they claim are sure things. I did pay about $25 and $50 for about 5 games sometime during my gambling period and find out that there was nothing like a sure thing in sports.Also, once you call one of these numbers, they now have your contact information and you would be getting strange calls from different sources trying to selling you inside information that they claim to have. I remember at one time using one of my credit cards to try and buy a sure thing, but the credit card was maxed out and the person on the other end of the line said not to worry, that I have another credit card on their radar and they would just use that instead. Fortunately for me, that one was also maxed out. It did not end there though, about two weeks later, I got on my answering machine, a strange voice that when like this "Hey big guy, I got a play on the Texas A&M game, just give me a call back”. I was lucky in that I did not have any money to spend on the games at the time of the call.
I tried out just about every sport at one time or the other. After football, there was basketball, baseball, soccer and Ice Hockey. The soccer I still remember because this was during the Fifa 1998 world cup that France hosted and won. The game was Germany versus Croatia and I think the money line had me placing $90 to try and win $30.Croatia was a huge underdog on the game and as you can see from the lines, everybody was putting their money with the Germans. During this period of time though, sports gambling had become something that you could do over the internet. You no longer needed a bookie. All you needed was a credit card to set up the account for immediate action or you could go to one of the money transfer channels and send the money to your account. Anyway, big surprise for me in this game. Before the game, I had talked to one of my co-workers who worked in the video department named Bruce and boosted on how the Germans have a reputation for coming up roses on big games. He was surprised on my confidence on the Germans. I did not let him know though that I had money riding on the game. I left the store after work and headed home in time to catch the beginning of this 1998 world cup encounter. Croatia came up big in the game avenging a Euro-1996 lost to this same Germany team. I remember the game vividly with Croatia scoring two goals that look almost like an instant reply form identical sides of the pitch. Final score was 3-0 Croatia. Later-on, soccer games that I placed bets on did not come out any better, so I do not think that this is a good way of making money. For Basketball, the Pros games are a killer. The lines are almost impossible for you to cover. Robert Johnson used to place money on the pro-basketball lines and he would tell me that he had gone at times 0-11 which is the worst possible outcome for even those that know nothing about the sports at all. In my early days, I stayed off the pro-basketball game but did try it later-on using the money lines. Money lines is when you place say $10 on a team to win say $15.You do not get to lose money like in the lines spreads, but I did not win any money at all. A sure killer is to pick the higher money teams. It seems like each time that you do that the team loses. I did place some bets on the NCAA games and both regular season and playoffs pro-basketball games and got a little bit of success with the NCAA tourney games.

Baseball though is strangely an area in which I had quite a bit of success. It was a surprise thought because I was not following the sports a lot. I had to call in the bets to some 1-800 numbers that I got, I do not remember where and I starting calling in the bets on the underdog’s teams. The way the money lines on the underdog teams work is pretty good. You get to risk less money for a greater reward. If you are going to do any gambling on baseball, for me this is the way to go. The bets were money line bets and I remember the Chicago Cubs coming out smelling like roses for me during this stretch. I won in like three different occasions $500 and the feeling was such an uplifting one because this money made up for the loss that I had suffered in the past. The money itself took sometime to get to me. I had to call on about three different occasions before I would get a number from a lady on the other end of the line saying that the money would be coming from this person in this part of the country. Out of these three winnings I ended up losing $300 on a strange night out in the streets on Washington DC. Do not ask me what I was out doing at the time.
I tried some Ice hockey games and winning money gambling on hockey games was just as hard. After all these sports gambling my final conclusion was that you do not make money gambling on sports. I have watched a sports gambling documentary in which a guy was interviewed who made about $50,000 a year on sports gambling. I do not doubt his claim, but his story is the exception and not the rule according to my own personal experience.
I finally just stopped sports gambling after I left Circuit City in 1998 to join Sprint PCS in early 1999.This was a good thing because I was making much more money at Sprint PCS, but my experience in the past had taught me that sports gambling was not the way to go. Once in a while, I did go to the Casino but this was usually with money that I could afford to lose.
Why do people gamble their money away in the first place?
Part of the reason is that you have this belief that you could beat the odds, which is not true at all. Also, once you get into it, you are hooked and a lot of people find it very difficult to get out once this happens. Another reason is the thrill of winning. You ask any sports gambler and they would tell you about the high-lifting feeling that they get from winning one from the boys in Vegas. The problem with this is that you completely forget the loss that you have encountered in the past. My advice for the to be sports gambler is that if you need the thrill, there are a lot of places that you could place bets of about $5 and $10.This does not seem like a lot of money at all, but the advantage is that when you are winning, the feeling is just as good as winning a lot of money and if you lose, the pain would not be too bad. There is such a sinking feeling when you drop a big one on a game. The feeling hits you once the game is over and it carries on for quite a while. Your spirits are down at work and you would have some of your managers and co-workers asking you what is wrong. It takes some time before you get over it. What used to happen to me is I would go for a period without any sports gambling, then all of a sudden, the feeling would come back and I would be back in action trying to win some money. NCAA football bowl games was one of such period and what would happen, is after all the games are done I would tally everything up and find out that there was no money won at all. This was after I had some experience and knowledge about the different sports. I believe a legislation was passed by Congress(around 2006) banning sports gambling, even online in the US except of cause when you are in the state of Nevada where all types of sports gambling is allowed. This is good news because I had such a fear of what bookies could do to me if I lose and could not pay up my debts. There are a lot of movies that chronicle all the dark sides of sports gambling, including people losing body parts because of none payment. When I started sports gambling, I had such a fear of Sid(the bookie) and though when I did meet him he was not very scary at all, there was a certain loneliness in the way he looks and I got the feeling that the life of a bookie could not be such a glamorous one at all.
The good side is the amount of knowledge that you collect about the sports. You asked me any star sports personally around the mid-1980s through the year 2005 and the answer comes right out. You want details of some of the games that I watched during this period of time and you get it. It is time consuming though and you can go long stretches during which you have time for nothing but the games.