I have been in this industry in one capacity or another my entire life, having been a bookmaker early on, then eventually deciding that this is the side of the counter that I not only enjoy the most, but feel that I have a huge advantage because as a book, I had to deal with someone else setting the price, but now, I get to decide on whether or not that price is right...
If there is one thing that I remember though in my days as a bookmaker, is that I was always finding myself cheering in the Dog and Under because of the fact the betting public would be on the Fav & Over more times than not...well it has been a long time since those days, but I still have many friends on that side of the fence all across the country, and living here in Vegas, I also have access to what is happening on the "Strip"....
Well as we approach the end of Round 2 of the 2008 NBA Playoffs, one thing is for sure....the books are not happy with the oddsmakers price setting at all...in fact, prior to last night's Game 5's, we had seen "16" FAVS and only "2" DOGS cover the number...and even worse for books, the Dog that covered was Cleveland in GM1 at Boston, a game which the bettors were all over taking the points and not until GM4 of the Orl/Det series, when the Dog came through on the road to go up 3-1, did the books actually get a chance to celebrate a dog winning/covering...
So what does this all mean...well for one, I can tell you that surely the books are not happy at all about it and I am not the first to say that its the oddsmaker's fault for this....because they do have the power to change that outcome and it was proven to us last night, just how simple it actually is...the only problem with that is that when they panic and are forced to adjust so drastically...it does very little to help the books because today's bettors are so much more sophisticated that they saw it coming also and the books were not as one sided as they would have hoped....
This also makes it much more difficult on the professional sports bettors also, because even though we need to have the confidence that our own reasoning and prognostication skills are better than those setting the price, we still need the oddsmakers to have control of the market and be able to adjust much quicker than they have been doing...
It happend early on in the NFL season when we watched the Pats and Over come in for a few weeks...but because of the pressure brought on by the books, the oddsmakers did the right thing and made them a 17-24pt fav...and we began seeing much more balance at the windows...and that is what the books are hoping for to salvage this playoff season because I know for fact that the public is cashing tickets almost every single night, and its obvious from our own record, that so are the pro bettors...so then why am I urging the oddsmakers to tighten up and get on the same page as what is transpiring ?
The answer to than is simple....because when the people in charge of setting the price, have no rythem or grip of the situation, they tend to over react and when that happens, all it does is make things so much less predictable and even the books tend not to like it because it gives them no chance of recovering their losses since just like last night, even though the Dogs came in...they were taking more work on those dogs because of the over reaction...for a market to be moving smoothly, both the books and pro bettors that I know all say the same thing...we need a nice mix, as close to 50/50 as possible so that we can profit best....now lets see how Round 3 is going to turn out, and you can be sure that the books and oddsmakers are hard at work trying to get a feel for what is going on before its too late.