Bettor Days

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Big Daddy is one cool customer. A backslapping good old boy who owns a string of lucrative “casual gourmet” restaurants, he’s also a world-class golf hustler, a rapacious competitor and one of the most feared and loathed men in Las Vegas. Big Daddy, a k a “the Wizard of Odds,” a k a “Rick Matthews,” is the kingpin of the so-called Brain Trust, a shadowy cabal of gamblers who wager enormous amounts of money on sports events, using a supercomputer and a SWAT team of injury and weather experts to take advantage of minor discrepancies in the point spreads set up by the Vegas linemakers. 


It’s a multimillion-dollar business — and legal — but there’s a wrinkle: they like to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars per game, and whenever the casinos sniff out betting syndicates like the Brain Trust, they show them the door in a heartbeat. That’s because in addition to risking huge losses each week, the bookmakers are forced to adjust their betting lines — sometimes by two or three points for a football game — whenever the “smart money” wades in, since they desperately need other customers to bet the other side to balance their action and stand a chance of making money. 


As a result, the syndicates deploy couriers to make their wagers in secret, scrambling to stay one step ahead of the casino managers, whether in Las Vegas or in the growing number of offshore operations. “It’s a game that almost nobody can conquer,” Michael Konik writes in “The Smart Money.” “Big Daddy is the man who can beat it. He’s the man who sends thousands of bettors and bookies scrambling for the phone when he releases one of his plays.”

Konik should know: for several years he was a bagman for the Brain Trust. Much of this memoir tells of how Konik, a Los Angeles-based journalist and the author of several books about gambling, goes from low to high roller as he perfects his front as a “square,” or unsophisticated gambler, while shuffling sacks of cash from casino to casino and laying huge wagers for his bosses. He also has to joust with suspicious bookies, persuade them to keep his room and meals comped, and maintain his rocky relationship with his girlfriend — but he quickly warms to his work and its perks.

By and by, though, the casinos begin to catch on and roll back his betting limits, and he’s reduced to finding “outs” for his bets with online sportsbooks in Costa Rica and the Caribbean — outfits with dubious reputations but willing to take bets of $50,000 and up. Before long, the occupational hazards begin to take a toll: “extortion” by cyberbookies, the outright pirating of bets and the siphoning of Brain Trust wagers to rival betting groups. “As much as I enjoy the charade, being a richly compensated human mule taxes my psychic endurance,” Konik admits. “I feel like I’m addicted to the constant pursuit of more. It’s what Las Vegas encourages in the most monastic souls.”

Speaking of monastic souls, Konik’s real mentor turns out to be Big Daddy’s right-hand man, Brother Herbie, a seminary student turned “degenerate gambler” who gives Konik his few glimpses into the Brain Trust’s inner workings. That’s a source of continuing frustration to the author, and to the reader: Konik never gets more than a peek, and even he admits that “the relentless opacity of Big Daddy’s operation is driving me crazy.” (Konik originally pitched his book anonymously as “44” — his Brain Trust handle — claiming he needed to protect the privacy of his sources, but his real identity was quickly revealed, along with that of Rick Matthews, who turned out to be Bill Walters, a Las Vegas developer.) The trouble is, however folksy and unflappable he seems (“How you doin’, pardsy-wardsy?”), Big Daddy remains a cipher — which, come to think of it, may be exactly as he intended: he knew his loyal courier would write this book one day, and in his business it pays to be elusive.

The other problem with “The Smart Money” is that the thrill of the chase becomes much less thrilling once the action shifts from smoky Vegas betting rooms and parking-lot handoffs to the faceless online sportsbooks. It’s fun to hang out with guys named Pencil Stevie and Gino the Suit, but wringing flesh-and-blood drama from wire transfers and long-distance phone calls isn’t easy. I suspect Big Daddy and 44 come to regret that as well, given the time they spend griping about the “ineptitude and inhospitableness” of the Vegas bookmakers as their business gets driven overseas.
Toward the end of the book, Konik is pretty well outed, and leaves the Brain Trust to set up his own mini-syndicate, “the Hollywood Boys,” manned by a fresh army of friends and acquaintances who serve as couriers. But even as he reaches new heights (in his best week his operation makes $608,000), he feels “clinically depressed” and, in a crisis of faith, abandons “this ugly business, populated by clumsy extortionists and liars.”
By this point, most readers will share his disgust and exhaustion, but also the certainty that for a particularly obsessive breed of gambler, all that matters is the never-ending quest for the perfect point-spread differential. That, and the knowledge that there’s a bottomless pool of squares out there.
“We’ll have plenty of other games to bet on,” Big Daddy says in what passes for the ultimate gambling wisdom. “It’s all one big long game.”

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