On Friday, Ivy League Is Often the Only Game in Town for Betting Sports

On Friday, Ivy League Is Often the Only Game in Town for Betting Sports

By JOSHUA ROBINSON
LAS VEGAS — On Friday afternoons throughout the basketball season, a longtime sports bettor named Lem Banker sits at his kitchen table with a pair of phones, a large-digit calculator, columns of his wagering calculations and a computer screen flashing live odds. One recent Friday, he homed in on the odds for Harvard’s game at Princeton.
A few miles away, another gambler, Alan Boston, scours publications like The Harvard Crimson and The Cornell Daily Sun, making notes in three-ring binders that include all of his estimates and musings on college basketball. This week, Boston was tracking the health of a Brown forward that would certainly affect his projections.
Banker and Boston are among a small cadre of savvy gamblers who, because of a quirk in college basketball scheduling, become Ivy League scholars each Friday. As nearly every other Division I conference takes the night off, the Ivy League offers the gamblers an opportunity to capitalize on the dearth of information available on teams that represent institutions better known for patents and professors than for athletic prowess.
Banker, 81, who says he has been a professional bettor for more than 50 years, noticed on Feb. 20 that sports books in Las Vegas, where wagering is legal, had listed Princeton as a 5-point favorite. His calculations suggested the score would be closer. He figured that Princeton should be favored by a point.
“That constitutes a play to me,” he said.
A few hours later Harvard beat the 5-point spread, and Banker had a winning ticket.
“I’ve been very successful with the Ivy League, just from the feel,” he said.
Since its rise to Division I status in 1956, the Ivy League has had teams play games on Fridays and Saturdays to uphold the philosophy that student-athletes are students first. This commitment has also made it a favorite destination for educated bettors simply because it gives them something to play on Fridays, which typically offer only about 10 men’s college basketball games. (About 60 games are usually scheduled for Thursdays, and 140 on Saturdays.)
The attention the Ivy League gets from gamblers has cooled somewhat over the last 15 years as the N.B.A. has bolstered its Friday night lineup. One recent Friday afternoon, under the theater-sized screens of the Las Vegas Hilton sports book, most of the chatter revolved around a couple of N.B.A. games on the East Coast. Other college conferences, like the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, have also taken to scheduling Friday night games and, similarly, have attracted gambling action.
But several sports book directors here said they still took thousands of dollars in bets on Friday night Ivy games — largely from professional gamblers.
“It doesn’t get any action except for the sharp action,” said Jay Kornegay, the director of the sports book at the Las Vegas Hilton. “You can sit there and put up all these lines and they’re not going to play anything until you make a mistake.”
Whereas a typical top-25 matchup may generate $100,000 in wagers in Nevada, Kornegay said, an Ivy League game on a Friday night brings in about $12,000 to $15,000 — nearly all of it from a few gamblers. “And most of the time they’re the big plays,” he added, meaning bets in the $500 to $2,000 range. “You just don’t have the average Joe.”
Without wagers from the general public — those who gamble for entertainment and not necessarily for a living — the sports books are left exposed. Over the years, some gamblers learned that the conference of Harvard, Yale, low scores and high grades could be an opportunity because reliable information was at such a premium.
“If Columbia suddenly doesn’t start three guys, we have no way of knowing,” said John Harper, a senior oddsmaker at Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which supplies lines to most of the sports books in Nevada.
Everyone has their own method for scouting. Besides gut feeling, there is the obvious strategy of rigorously examining box scores. Kenny White, the chief operating officer of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, spends much of the off-season doing exactly that. It is how he assembles a massive binder that covers every team in Division I men’s basketball. Each team has a sheet that lists every player, statistic and result from the previous season. And each sheet is tweaked religiously as games come and go.
As White puts it, he “massages the stats” and then assigns a number for every side. Of course, he adjusts for things like past performance, injuries and home court but also for a few more esoteric elements like “revenge” — how badly a team might want to avenge an embarrassing result in their previous meeting. Thus, for every matchup, he is left with a pair of numbers. The difference between them becomes his spread.
But finding accurate information on injuries is still a challenge. White said that Web sites like collegeinjuryreport.com could only take a gambler so far. That is why Boston, an Ivy League alumnus (Pennsylvania) and a professional gambler for more than 20 years, remains a loyal reader of the Ivy League student newspapers. Because none of the Ivy papers publish a Saturday edition, he said he was less inclined to bet on the conference’s Saturday games. And besides, there is other action around anyway.
“You’d actually think the Ivy League would be a little tougher than other conferences I bet because you don’t have the information,” said Boston, who estimates that he and his partner have won close to $100,000 betting on Ivy League basketball over the last 20 years. “But because of that, I’m a little more careful with the Ivies.”
So are the sports books. Kornegay and John Avello, the director of the book at the Wynn Casino here, explained that any large bets placed quickly after a point spread was set commanded respect and raised interest.
“These guys are better handicappers than a guy who comes up to the window in a UConn shirt and wants to bet his Huskies,” Kornegay said. “So we can be more aggressive when it comes to moving the lines. We might move it a whole point after a single bet.”
After Friday, which is the last Friday of the Ivy League season, Kornegay will not have to worry about it for another 10 months.


On Friday, Ivy League Is Often the Only Game in Town for Betting Sports