Vegas Baby!It is Wednesday night and the tournament starts tomorrow. Mrs. Becker and I are ensconced in a luxury suite at Bellagio (in my dreams) and she is sitting with Street and Smiths NCAA Tournament review and quizzing me on point spreads for tomorrows betting. Mrs. Becker takes and active roll in my betting and gambling and is constantly amazed at the “clever” bets that I make. She has suggested that instead of going to the windows and betting college basketball for the next 4 days that I could just hand her $1,000.00 dollars and she could kick me in the crotch and we could fly home. She is very supportive.
Tomorrow I will go down to Bally’s book shop at 6:00 A.M. I will wake up my nephew (Gates) who has been sleeping on 4 chairs there for me since 3:30 A.M. when he drunkenly crawled in from The Palm or the Hard Rock or wherever he and his pathetic, drunken, stupid friends have been unsuccessfully chasing girls (are they still girls at 28 or 29?) all night. It is possible that he will have dried vomit somewhere on his clothes. He will then go to his room (read his parents room) and crash for a few hours showing up some time in the late morning (hopefully after a brief shower). I will set large masses of Newspapers and tip sheets on several places in an effort to “save” them for later. This is very stressful as people do not react well to getting up at 7 and finding that they do not have a place to sit. I have perfected my system over several years. It has a great to do with lack of eye contact and moxy.
Bally’s book shop is set up as a coliseum with tierd seating moving up from the betting windows and 4 large screen projection TV’s which normally broadcast racing are all on the various CBS satellite feeds. Bally’s book shop is old and weathered at this point having been around in basically this form for at least 20 years and for me...on this weekend....it is home.
Around 7:00 they open the Stage Deli which is only a few feet away and I will order my first breakfast of the day and get an iced tea. The rest of the early morning is spent reading the paper, analyzing the point spreads, betting absurd 4 team parlays (flushing money down toilet) trying to pick winners of each of the regional brackets and making silly bets on them, and waiting. I wait for two things. One is for my lovely wife to come down stairs from her slumber. I wait for her arrival for several reasons:
1. It means the start of my second breakfast because she wants to eat;
2. It means that I have the value of her company and insight as I squander the re mainder of money we had set aside to educate our children and/or retire on;
3. It normally means I can start to drink; and
4. Sometimes she is able to stop me from betting a 100 dollar 7 team parlay, even after I have explained to her that it is a “lock.”
The second thing I wait for is 9:20 A.M. Because 9:20 A.M. on the west coast is 12:20 on the east coast and that means “TIP OFF!” The book shop is filled to over flowing. there are not enough seats so people are standing in the aisles and in back the crowd spills out into the concourse. The crowd is 97.8% male. I only know this because over the years, sitting my wife I have noticed that groups of men seem to come to this event and their language and behavior can best be described as...colorful. But when 9:00 A.M. comes along it is a big cheer as the first ball is tipped. Everyone is here for the same reason and as that first ball goes into the air it is the first whoop of the day. At this point a large number of men are drunk and some are already hostile as they believe based on their team losing the tip that they are “totally screwed.” There will be a group of 50 people standing in line who did not get their bets down on the first game before it tipped off. This is because they did not line up soon enough and because also, the casino refuses to staff up for this early morning crowd other then in bringing in additional cocktail waitresses.
You have to remember that the NCAA Tournament bettor is a sick, sad individual. Unlike most of you who have regular jobs and value relationships with the opposite sex, sometimes even leaving your parents basement or the closest sports bar to conduct the business of life, these guys (and almost all compulsive gamblers outside of slot machines tend to be men) have absolutely NOTHING else in there lives. Even if they do...they put it aside for a few days in mid March for the start of the NCAA’s. As i said, it is almost all men and my wife is alternately shocked and amused (often based on her own alcohol consumption) by the level of banter and intellectual acument displayed by the herding males. To say the conversation is inappropriate and ugly is an understatement. Men on their own without the control of spouses are a problem. Add unlimited alcohol and a 7:00 A.M. start time by the first tip it is hard to live through.
From the First tip on Thursday. Through the afternoon and early evening Sunday there will be 48 games played. Every one will have a ton of money on the game. There are a minimum of 30 packed book shops in Vegas and there are a lot of people who just place their bets and then go gamble or walk around keeping updated on the TV’s but the games are on EVERY TV in the casino. It is exhausting and wonderful.
***
THURSDAY UPDATE
We go to the bookshop at Bally’s where I always set up shop and we have a packed house. I was dutifully there at 5:45 A.M. after 5 gruelling hours of sleep and the places I attempted to reservge by putting threatening signs in place were still there. I camped out as described above and by the tip of the Maryland/Davidson game had put some money down. It was a good first set of games at 9:00 and I hit all three in a Parley with a straight bet on Maryland and the under in thst game. I had Louisville who humiliated Stanford and Boston College who squeezed Bobby Knight out. Maryland and the under looked bad for the first have but the 2nd was awesome for me and they covered and came in under 157 points. The three team parley paid well. I am happy.
Most interesting even of the day was being in the bathroom at Bally’s and hearing a guy in the handicapped stall doing a phone job interview. Several of us stopped to list as he said “Well my strengths are that I work well with people and I am a creative problem (FLUSH) solver.” If I could hired him...I would of. Brilliant multi tasking.
It was an interesting day. It looks like all favorites and a lot of them covered absurdly large spreads. So much for parity and so much for the mid majors whining.
The KUBE has in the past run into technical difficulties keeping everyone up to date but with new modern technology and Al Gore’s internet I promise to bore you with every inane observation as I watch grown men sob like little baby girls as their team misses that last three pointer to go down in flames.
I hope you all got your brackets in. We had a few early technical glitches with MAC people and I kept giving the wrong web site but other then that it is, or it appears to be ALL GOOD. Don (”The Money”) Kukla informs us that we have 220 or so players and will soon calculate payoffs. I will pass along details as to how many people still owe and who they are and then go about destroying their lives.
Get your money in. God Bless and goodnight....
“We were somewhere in the middle of the desert around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.”-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
No comments:
Post a Comment