Super Bookie: Inside Las Vegas Sports Gambling–Book Review

Eye on Gaming is continuing our commitment to address the needs of the ‘smart’ sports betting and gaming enthusiast community by featuring review of gambling themed books. Over the coming weeks and months Editor in Chief David Glisan will profile some of the books in his library that he considers particularly insightful or otherwise significant. We’ll start things off with one of the first serious examinations of the Las Vegas sports betting industry:

SUPERBOOKIE: INSIDE LAS VEGAS SPORTS GAMBLING
BY ART MANTARIS w/ Rick Talley

In many ways, this is the book that started it all for me. It was the first gambling book I ever purchased at a time when I was just starting to learn about sports betting and handicapping. I was clever enough to figure out that the boiler room touts like Jack Price and Stu Feiner didn’t know anything, but I was frustrated by the lack of serious sports betting literature available in the pre-Internet era. Even in the years before the ‘poker boom’ there was a good assortment of books on poker, blackjack and horse racing but nothing on sports betting. After a search of about a dozen book stores in the Portland, Oregon area I found ‘Super Bookie’ at the now defunct Tower Books.

At the time, Art Mantaris was the Race and Sports Director at the Hilton Superbook and that inspired the title. Today he holds a similar position (actually ‘Vice President of Race and Sports Operations’) for the Stations Casino chain. He definitely tries to depict Nevada’s sports betting industry in a positive light in ‘Super Bookie’, as well as position himself and his employer at the time as the ne plus ultra of the bookmaking profession. In other words, the book doesn’t provide a hard hitting, pull no punches expose but does offer some interesting stories and a good primer to the nuts and bolts of sports betting circa 1991.

For the reader today, the book is borderline outdated in many respects. With a publication date of 1991, Super Bookie predates many transformational developments in the sports betting industry—not the least being the explosion of off shore sports betting and the entire Internet era. The fact that Mantaris makes it through 234 pages without even mentioning the ‘Internet’ is mind boggling to a serious sports bettor today, but provides a good examination of what bookmakers and handicappers had to work with during this ‘Paleolithic Era’.

Many of Mantaris’ broad concept predictions did come to pass, but not necessarily in the way he drew it up. Sports betting’s scope and handle exploded worldwide but due to an absurdly outdated view of gambling policy the United States and the state of Nevada didn’t reap the benefits as he predicted. Part of the reason for that is his now quaint observation about the explosive growth in the Las Vegas economy and job market—at the time the city led the country in job creation, not unemployment. It’s easy to just keep on doing things the way things have always been done when times are good, but when things go south is when incremental change gives way to revolution.

Ironically, the other reason that the sports betting industry—particularly in Nevada—didn’t grow to the extent Mantaris envisioned in the last two decades is a management philosophy that he’s credited for championing but was definitely not alone in implementing. As the Silver State’s gambling business became more and more corporate, the sports books became just another competitive necessity like a keno parlor or a buffet. It became a line on the balance sheet, where managers like Mantaris worried about minimizing downside risk and not about increasing volume or revenue.

The result was twenty years of near complete dormancy for Nevada’s sports betting industry. Even as the offshore sports betting world exploded due—among other things—to offering more betting options on more sports, Nevada sports books did little in this regard. Technology changed countless industries and completely redefined the world economy (not to mention every other component of the gaming business from slot machines to loyalty programs), but the only sign of that to be seen in Nevada’s sports books were better TV screens and LED displays. In fact, if you’d gone into a Las Vegas sports book in 1977 and returned 25 years later the experience would be very familiar—flat screen TVs and the absence of dry erase line boards would be the only real difference.

Even though the sports books themselves did little to ‘create demand’, sports betting was one of the few components of the casino gaming mix to grow in size and scope during the past decade. In other words, Mantaris was right on the money about the growth in consumer demand for sports betting. In hindsight, it’s odd that he and many others in the state completely abandoned grand plans to grow and leverage this demand instead choosing to undertake an inevitably futile defense of the status quo circa early 1990s. Mantaris saw the writing on the wall as clearly as anyone but instead of becoming an agent of change he became a barrier to it.

The change is coming, of course, thanks to the need to create revenues and good old fashioned competition from companies like William Hill and Cantor Gaming. Mantaris’ company—Station Casinos—has thrown their hat into the ring both in terms of online wagering within the state and providing management to sports books at other properties (the El Cortez downtown). The absurd stasis of the Federal government in affording gambling rights to its citizens on par with most European companies continues to be a barrier, but for the first time in decades Nevada looks poised to benefit from the eventual changes.

‘Super Bookie’ is no longer the revelation it was when I first read it, though it remains a fun and entertaining narrative on what many consider the ‘glory days’ of Nevada bookmaking. With the passage of time and the benefit of greater knowledge and insight into the gambling business it’s more of a historical document of a previous era in the state’s sports betting business. For the modern reader, it’s a story of countless missed opportunities for the Nevada sports betting industries and the companies within it.