Latest / The Favorites Sports Betting Podcast / Great Moments In Gambling's History Part III

Transcript

Great Moments In Gambling's History Part III · The Favorites Sports Betting Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome to The Favorites, the podcast part of the Volume
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: podcast Network. I am Chad Milman of the Action Network.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Today. I'm joined as always by my co.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Host, my companion, Mike Cabadre, my BFF professional better Assignment hunter.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Hello, sign in.
• 0:27
  Speaker 3: Hello Chad.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: Over the weekend, I heard from my doctor who I've
• 0:31
  Speaker 4: known for twenty years about.
• 0:33
  Speaker 3: Our Pope Show. That's how weird He liked it.
• 0:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, even though after the fact, obviously, it just cracked
• 0:39
  Speaker 4: me up that my guy texted me again. He knows
• 0:42
  Speaker 4: what I've done my whole life, he knows what the
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: podcast and everything. It never hits me up about it.
• 0:46
  Speaker 4: He texted me, how much you enjoyed the Pope Show
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: and just how we brought a totally different look to
• 0:51
  Speaker 4: it and how we view the market. And yeah, we
• 0:55
  Speaker 4: got pretty lucky. We at least we mentioned the name.
• 0:56
  Speaker 4: We didn't give it out as a winner, but at
• 0:59
  Speaker 4: least the name was mentioned here on the show, So
• 1:02
  Speaker 4: shout out to Dubunda.
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  Speaker 1: You know what I feel like, I thought about this naturally.
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  Speaker 1: I thought about it from the point of view of
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: me and the Pope market. That I was highest on
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: was the dude from France from Marseille, who had a
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: three percent chance, and my logic on him, if you remember,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: was he's an outlier candidate. He has a lot of
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  Speaker 1: experience with immigration, which is important to the church right
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: now and bringing together cultures from a lot of disparate
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  Speaker 1: places where they need to grow the Catholic community. And
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  Speaker 1: it's not going to be someone who's got the shortest dods,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: because it's never someone who has the shortest dodds.
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  Speaker 2: So my logic was one hundred percent right.
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  Speaker 1: I just discounted my guy from Chicago, and I like,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I have been loving, loving, like the text chain that
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: I've had with my Chicago boys about the Pope and
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  Speaker 1: the memes and the Annie Agar tweet where she immediately
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: sent out the post that Chicago has a pope before
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: it has a four thousand yard passer, and the t
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  Speaker 1: shirts that sayd Pope, Like the video that someone did
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of the Pope being introduced to Saint Peter's Square, to
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: the Alan Parsons project intro that used to be with
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: the Bulls and Michael Jordan. I'm here for all of it.
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  Speaker 1: I freaking love it. I love his brothers who just
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: keep talking about him and like are having a blast,
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  Speaker 1: Like everything about it is familiar. I had an uncle
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: who lived on the southwest side of Chicago in the
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: suburbs near where he lived, and they all sound alike,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: they all look alike.
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  Speaker 2: I'm just I'm loving the Pope lost.
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  Speaker 4: It was a smart move by then. Like we talked
• 3:02
  Speaker 4: on the show, I thought they've given up on the West.
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: Clearly they have not, and that's a market they're going after.
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  Speaker 4: So what they wanted to do is working.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 4: He's becoming already a sensation here in America. And I
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: joked with a buddy who's a Roman Catholic like I am.
• 3:18
  Speaker 4: You know, he always goes to eleven o'clock Mass, usually
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  Speaker 4: half empty. What do you think it was this weekend?
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: Check packed, packed, packed for Mother's Day. So yeah, I'm
• 3:28
  Speaker 4: excited to see what this is going to do going forward.
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  Speaker 4: And you know, like we joked on the show, it's
• 3:33
  Speaker 4: such a niche market. It sucked that it didn't work out.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: Where you know, we did the show an hour later.
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  Speaker 4: I believe we got the text from Matt Mitchell like,
• 3:41
  Speaker 4: holy shit, white smoke. But the show, if you go
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: back and listen to it's it's an interesting market and
• 3:47
  Speaker 4: something that going forward, if me and Chack, Guy Luhn
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: or some together in twelve twenty years, I look forward
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  Speaker 4: to our next Pope show.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: Brother, Why wouldn't we be together? Simon?
• 3:56
  Speaker 4: I have terrible health concerns for myself, not you. You'll
• 3:59
  Speaker 4: be fine. I don't know.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: You know what, Simon, You and I are going to
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: be together in about two weeks because I'm coming down
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: to Philly and we're going to spend the day together.
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  Speaker 1: Maybe we should go to Mass. Maybe we should go
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  Speaker 1: to like an eleven am.
• 4:12
  Speaker 4: Massames as soon as I stepped through that, and we
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  Speaker 4: will really.
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  Speaker 1: Really pray a lapsed Catholic and a Jew walk into
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  Speaker 1: eleven am Mass in South Jersey.
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  Speaker 2: What possibly could go wrong?
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  Speaker 1: Next week, We're going to have a lengthy discussion about
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the impact of the NFL schedule release, and I'm gonna
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: want to bring in some of the points that we
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: made in our show earlier this week that Evan noted,
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  Speaker 1: and see if we can start to apply some of
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: these things and see if there are games that normally
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: we would be trapped into picking that are we changing
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  Speaker 1: our thinking a little bit?
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  Speaker 2: So I'm excited for that.
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  Speaker 1: We're also going to sit down with Jason Bennetti, the
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers and nationally with Fox. Like
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  Speaker 1: he's been on the show before. He is so freaking good.
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  Speaker 1: He is so funny, He is so talented. He is
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  Speaker 1: so smart at calling games and keeping you entertained without
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  Speaker 1: it being intrusive, and understanding the really nitty.
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  Speaker 2: Greedy details.
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  Speaker 1: He used to do back in the day when he
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: was at ESPN, they would do these analytics broadcasts and
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  Speaker 1: he was brilliant at these. So I'm excited for Jason. Today,
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  Speaker 1: we're going to bring in Matt Mitchell. We did this
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  Speaker 1: show earlier in the off season and we got great response.
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  Speaker 1: As you can expect, people love betting history on this show. Look,
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  Speaker 1: my entire desk, you can't see it right now, is
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: piled with betting history paraphernalia. And I'm looking at a
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  Speaker 1: picture right now the guy who was the original bookmaker
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  Speaker 1: for the Mafia, and he's it's a picture of him
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  Speaker 1: hanging out in Cuba with a jockey and like Meyer Lansky.
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  Speaker 1: So it's I love this stuff. Matt Mitchell is gonna
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  Speaker 1: come on. He's gonna tell us more of the things
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  Speaker 1: he's unearthed from gambling's wild history.
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  Speaker 2: Welcome back to the show, Matt Mitchell.
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  Speaker 5: Oh, you know, it's just an honor to shoehorn myself
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  Speaker 5: into an off season episode chat.
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  Speaker 1: You've been working so hard at becoming talent. You're really
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  Speaker 1: you're getting close.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
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  Speaker 4: I love on camera Mat. He's very tamed. I I
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  Speaker 4: feel like he's nervous.
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  Speaker 3: He was like, am I about to say what I
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: should say? This guy? Are we taped right now? So
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  Speaker 3: I love on camera Mat.
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: You know what, I'll give a little look behind the curtain.
• 6:40
  Speaker 5: When we started one million years ago here, Chet was
• 6:43
  Speaker 5: very encouraging that I do more on camera stuff, become
• 6:47
  Speaker 5: more talent forward. That's right, I was. I wasn't as
• 6:49
  Speaker 5: interested in mostly as an exhausted parent of too at
• 6:52
  Speaker 5: the time incredibly small children. But more than that, I
• 6:57
  Speaker 5: don't enjoy shows where the producer tries to shoehorn themselves
• 7:00
  Speaker 5: into the show a lot. I appreciate that wherever our
• 7:04
  Speaker 5: beloved listeners are right now, on a yacht or a treadmill,
• 7:08
  Speaker 5: or at work, or in a subway or whatever the hell,
• 7:10
  Speaker 5: jumping on a trampoline, whatever they're doing, they're here to
• 7:13
  Speaker 5: hang out with their two friends, you know. Chad and
• 7:15
  Speaker 5: Simon and I can pop in once in a while,
• 7:18
  Speaker 5: but more importantly, if I need to kick somebody off
• 7:20
  Speaker 5: a show, not necessarily this one, but something else in
• 7:23
  Speaker 5: our network. It gets a lot harder to have those
• 7:25
  Speaker 5: conversations if you are on camera talent, because you by
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  Speaker 5: definition of saying, I'm better than that. So it was
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  Speaker 5: always easier to be someone whose impact was felt without
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: being seen, or whose flat rochestery accent wasn't heard on
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  Speaker 5: these airwaves. So I appreciate.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: That funny because we know that his position has clearly changed,
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  Speaker 1: because if you've been in one of the live shows,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: you know, Matt just takes it over and Simon and
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  Speaker 1: I become background noise for the entire event. Matt, we
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: just talked a little bit about betting the papacy. Did
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  Speaker 1: you bet on who would become the Pope?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah?
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  Speaker 5: Well, you two jag offs we're talking in that episode.
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  Speaker 5: I was. I realized that the market would close at
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  Speaker 5: the top of that that hour, so I need to
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  Speaker 5: get my bets in and I'm going through and I
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  Speaker 5: only wanted to bet, you know, twenty to one or
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  Speaker 5: higher for all the reasons we outlined in that episode.
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  Speaker 5: I'm doing foreign dudes, no Americans. That that felt ridiculous,
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  Speaker 5: and I opened up Bob's odds. I'm trying to find
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  Speaker 5: ages in locations. Oh sixty nine years old, Oh, Chicago, Illinois.
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  Speaker 5: No way. I opened it up, could have bet it
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  Speaker 5: and said, no way, make a couple more. I opened
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  Speaker 5: up one more guy, Cardinal Burke. Oh, he's from Wisconsin.
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  Speaker 5: I mean, well, I'll put ten bucks on this guy.
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  Speaker 5: I threw away money on an American papal candidate that
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  Speaker 5: wasn't the right one. Four minutes for the market closed.
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  Speaker 5: I will be haunted forever, but at least we got
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  Speaker 5: a pope who has ben and said my two favorite
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  Speaker 5: restaurants Wah wah and Portillo's. So I feel like he'll
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  Speaker 5: have my best interested heart despite not being a Catholic
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  Speaker 5: at all. But yeah, I wish him the very best.
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  Speaker 1: My god, it's great, all right, Matt Mitchell subject number
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  Speaker 1: one in How Sports Betting Explained the World, there's a
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  Speaker 1: really famous book called How Soccer Explains the World.
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  Speaker 2: The writer who's brilliant.
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  Speaker 1: His name is Franklin for and he writes for the Atlantic,
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  Speaker 1: but in his previous years he has written for a
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  Speaker 1: bunch of different magazines, and newspapers. At one point he
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  Speaker 1: was the eder in chief of the New Republic and
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: it was a seminole book and sort of just the
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  Speaker 1: title alone defines the framing of something really small explaining
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  Speaker 1: something really big. And he wrote this book called How
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Soccer Explains the World. So I think about this as
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: the how Betting Explains the World episode. Your first topic
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  Speaker 1: America's lottery fever, Matt Mitchell, The flora is yours.
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  Speaker 5: Love that framing. Great job, great hosting, as always, Chad,
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  Speaker 5: thank you well. As you can imagine from its very founding,
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  Speaker 5: America has loved betting, and who couldn't. But one of
• 10:19
  Speaker 5: the hardest parts of having a new and pretty large
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  Speaker 5: nation is collecting money, collecting tax revenue. We as Americans,
• 10:27
  Speaker 5: we would rather be throwing tea into a harbor than
• 10:30
  Speaker 5: paying our taxes. That hasn't changed. So within the first
• 10:34
  Speaker 5: couple decades of America's birth, if the government wanted to
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  Speaker 5: finance a large public project, they did the smart thing.
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  Speaker 5: They ran lotteries. They turned tax collection into gambling. And
• 10:46
  Speaker 5: if you've ever wondered how, like very old East Coast
• 10:49
  Speaker 5: cities like New York and Philadelphia, how they got so
• 10:52
  Speaker 5: nice even before eighteen hundred, those two cities alone, just
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  Speaker 5: isolating those two they financed public projects using more than
• 11:01
  Speaker 5: two thousand state authorized lotteries. They were all over it.
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  Speaker 5: So I've got a couple of my favorite lottery examples.
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  Speaker 2: You guys ready, I am ready, simon, are you ready?
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: Let's do it all right.
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  Speaker 5: So, when they were literally draining the swamp to build Washington,
• 11:21
  Speaker 5: d C. They financed a lot of that construction through
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  Speaker 5: federal lotteries. And the first of these huge federal lottos
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  Speaker 5: offered a big grand prize a building called Blodget's Hotel.
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  Speaker 5: If you won this lottery, you would win this big
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  Speaker 5: ass building. And the first ticket in that big lotto
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  Speaker 5: was purchased by George Washington, so we know that he
• 11:45
  Speaker 5: gambled at least one time. In fun fact, twenty years later,
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  Speaker 5: when those disgusting, filthy Brits burned down a lot of Washington,
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  Speaker 5: d C. In the War of eighteen twelve, that building
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  Speaker 5: bloge It's Hotel, and I would end up serving as
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: the temporary home of Congress And although Logit's Hotel that
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  Speaker 5: would also eventually burn down years later, the Hotel Monaco
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  Speaker 5: in DC stands there now in the shadow of Capital
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  Speaker 5: One Arena where the Washington Capitals will be playing a
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  Speaker 5: playoff game this very evening.
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  Speaker 1: How betting explains the world right there? You know, we
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: had David schwartz On who who wrote the book Roll
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  Speaker 1: the Bones, that we get a lot of that we
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: steal a lot of these ideas from. I remember interviewing
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: him fifteen sixteen years ago in the library at UNLV
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: where the gaming research studies are done, talking about the
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: hypocrisy of state by state, everybody allowing lotteries but not
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: allowing sports betting. And honestly, it was in that moment
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  Speaker 1: in the library where I realized this shit's going to
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  Speaker 1: be legal. Like, at the end of the day, it's
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: too much money to leave on the table for every
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: state that needs more and more money every single year.
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  Speaker 1: If we've been doing it since the beginning of the Republic,
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  Speaker 1: it's just a matter of time. Lotteries to sports betting.
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  Speaker 1: Nicely done, Matt Mitchell.
• 13:17
  Speaker 5: Yeah, if we could just pay our federal state taxes
• 13:20
  Speaker 5: in the form of scratchers, I feel like we'd solve
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: a big part of our deficit right there. So here's another.
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  Speaker 2: Example, by the way, did George Washington win the hotel.
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  Speaker 5: He did not. In fact, I think the guy that
• 13:32
  Speaker 5: fronted that scheme blotch it. I think that ended up
• 13:35
  Speaker 5: going belly up and he ended up in Debtors' prison.
• 13:38
  Speaker 5: But I can't remember the details of that one, but
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  Speaker 5: we'll just celebrate it as a big victory USA number one.
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  Speaker 2: Debtor's prison was a big thing.
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  Speaker 1: I just finished reading the book The Gambler, probably one
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: of my favorite authors. His name is Dostoevsky. In The Gambler,
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  Speaker 1: Debtor's prison was a big thing. If you wrote an
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: iou you piece of paper like that was as good
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: as a contractor. If you cannot pay that, you went
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: into prison and you were there until someone paid your debt. Obviously,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: The Gamblers a novel, but he was Debtor's prison in
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: that window of time seemed to be a really big thing.
• 14:16
  Speaker 5: I feel like the Milwaukee Box and Cleveland Kevalis are
• 14:18
  Speaker 5: working as hard as they can to put me in
• 14:20
  Speaker 5: Debtor's prison this spring, so I can appreciate the feeling.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: What is the over under on the number of air udite,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: potentially arrogant literary references I can make on the show.
• 14:36
  Speaker 5: Just Oh, just your Way there's so many more opportunities
• 14:38
  Speaker 5: for you. You'll do. You're very smart and handsome.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 14:44
  Speaker 5: All right. So we've discussed that lotteries became essentially the
• 14:48
  Speaker 5: first solution to any American problem. Here's another one. So
• 14:53
  Speaker 5: Thomas Jefferson is dying and he's got a han a debt.
• 14:57
  Speaker 5: Debts are super high. He had a lot of people
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  Speaker 5: a lot money, and so they arranged a lottery to
• 15:03
  Speaker 5: raise money for his daughter Martha. And the three prizes
• 15:06
  Speaker 5: for this lottery were going to be three of Jefferson's properties,
• 15:10
  Speaker 5: and the grand prize was going to be Monticello, And
• 15:13
  Speaker 5: for those unfamiliar, if you have any loose change in
• 15:17
  Speaker 5: your pocket, that's the picture on the back of the
• 15:20
  Speaker 5: US nickel. It's a pretty fucking famous house. So that
• 15:24
  Speaker 5: was going to be the grand prize of top three
• 15:26
  Speaker 5: prizes in this lottery. But obviously Jefferson was incredibly famous
• 15:31
  Speaker 5: and had a lot of wealthy friends, and a lottery
• 15:34
  Speaker 5: for his property and belongings is pretty humiliating. So they
• 15:37
  Speaker 5: tried to pull their money together to buy it, and
• 15:40
  Speaker 5: that didn't work. And then the lottery that they arranged
• 15:43
  Speaker 5: sold sofie tickets. They basically canceled it, and eventually Martha
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: just sold the house for a fraction of its value.
• 15:51
  Speaker 5: And were these kind of lotteries? Were they above board?
• 15:54
  Speaker 5: Sometimes sometimes not? For example, thirty years after that first
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  Speaker 5: log It's hotel Federal lottery that I just mentioned, they
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  Speaker 5: ran another one for a beautification project, and the manager
• 16:07
  Speaker 5: who ran it sold all the tickets. He announces a
• 16:10
  Speaker 5: winning number, does all the things he's supposed to do,
• 16:12
  Speaker 5: except he took all the money and disappeared. They I
• 16:15
  Speaker 5: don't believe they ever found him. And usually the attitude,
• 16:18
  Speaker 5: because it's America, was like, dah, you know what, what
• 16:20
  Speaker 5: can you do that? You pay your money and you
• 16:22
  Speaker 5: takes your chances, and sometimes you know that's life. Buyer
• 16:25
  Speaker 5: beware buy, hey, buyer, beware man. Sometimes you know it's
• 16:28
  Speaker 5: not a ticket I bought, it's just an old cracker
• 16:30
  Speaker 5: or whatever. But this time the guy that wins was
• 16:34
  Speaker 5: furious because the grand prize was one hundred thousand dollars,
• 16:38
  Speaker 5: which today would be two point seven million dollars. And
• 16:41
  Speaker 5: they said, hey, listen, you know we don't have any
• 16:43
  Speaker 5: of the money. The guy stole it. So this guy
• 16:46
  Speaker 5: files a lawsuit. He fights it for four full years,
• 16:50
  Speaker 5: and eventually the United States Supreme Court orders the City
• 16:54
  Speaker 5: of DC to pay him the money, so you can
• 16:58
  Speaker 5: fight city hall. And he did get his money. And
• 17:01
  Speaker 5: you'd think that that scandal would make people less interested
• 17:04
  Speaker 5: in lotteries, right, No. Shortly after that, one newspaper estimated
• 17:09
  Speaker 5: that the top eight cities alone sold almost seventy million
• 17:14
  Speaker 5: dollars worth of lottery tickets, which is five times larger
• 17:18
  Speaker 5: than the entire federal budget at the time. But unfortunately,
• 17:23
  Speaker 5: the fraud did worry a lot of regulators and state governments,
• 17:26
  Speaker 5: so within about ten years, state lottos were illegal in
• 17:30
  Speaker 5: almost every state. But that is the some of the
• 17:32
  Speaker 5: fun anecdotes from our early obsession with the.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: Lottery country boats on gambling.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: The yingingyang of our puritanical values and our need to
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: risk it all to win big is a constant theme
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: throughout the building of our democracy.
• 17:54
  Speaker 5: One of the best anecdotes they had from Did Schwartz,
• 17:57
  Speaker 5: author of Roll the Bones, fabulous book, was how many
• 18:00
  Speaker 5: blottery offices there were in New York, and they were
• 18:02
  Speaker 5: even more in Philadelphia, and even puritanical Boston had fifty,
• 18:07
  Speaker 5: Like there are still a few in Boston even though
• 18:09
  Speaker 5: they hated gambling there. You can't keep the gamblers down.
• 18:12
  Speaker 5: They're always going to crawl out of the woodwork.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: No one knows self loathing better than Bostonians. That's exactly right, Matt.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Can you please give us your next story?
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: This week is the second leg of horse racing's Triple
• 18:29
  Speaker 5: Crown Preak Mistakes at Pimlico, and I want to give
• 18:33
  Speaker 5: another nod to the ponies and their crucial role in
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: the popularization of sports betting worldwide, because Chad, obviously on
• 18:42
  Speaker 5: a recent episode you referenced the origin of the term handicapping,
• 18:46
  Speaker 5: which comes from British horse racing in the seventeen hundreds,
• 18:50
  Speaker 5: before the establishment of odds based wagering, the performance of
• 18:54
  Speaker 5: a faster horse was literally handicapped by placing weights on
• 18:58
  Speaker 5: them during a race to kind of even things out.
• 19:00
  Speaker 5: You know, the bigger the perceived favorite, the heavier the weights,
• 19:04
  Speaker 5: the kind of quote bigger the handicap. I want to
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: talk about another phrase. So after odds making on horses
• 19:12
  Speaker 5: was common in the early eighteen hundreds, that paved the
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: way for establishments known as commission offices or racing banks.
• 19:20
  Speaker 5: But what we hear on the show would call the
• 19:23
  Speaker 5: OTB off track betting. If you've never been to an OTB, Chad,
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: how would you describe it?
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: I would describe it as a gloriously sad, dingy, dirty
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: for Micah floored, fluorescent lit single room that if you
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: walked by it on the street, as I have many
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: many times in New York, you might think it was
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: a storefront that was for lease because there's so little
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: signage and it's so sort of uninviting inside.
• 20:07
  Speaker 5: That sounds rich. Simon, you've been doing OTB.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, never an America, only in England. It's equally
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: as depressing. In both places.
• 20:15
  Speaker 5: It's a magical place and they are there is a
• 20:17
  Speaker 5: ubiquity to them. It is a great place if you
• 20:20
  Speaker 5: have six dollars to lose, but want to make that
• 20:22
  Speaker 5: take an hour and a half. So otbs are springing
• 20:26
  Speaker 5: up all over the place, and it's where betting on
• 20:29
  Speaker 5: the Ponies started to transition from this like sportive kings
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: and wealthy elites to something that like ordinary people could
• 20:37
  Speaker 5: finally participate in. So it used to just be guys
• 20:41
  Speaker 5: that like if you closed your eyes and said, like
• 20:43
  Speaker 5: picture the King of England or Chad Milman, it was
• 20:46
  Speaker 5: guys like that that used to be the only people betting,
• 20:49
  Speaker 5: and thanks to otbs, it could finally include people that
• 20:53
  Speaker 5: looked more like Bert the Dick van Dyk character from
• 20:56
  Speaker 5: Mary Poppins, or Simon and his ancestors Jim Jimminee, Jim Jimminee,
• 21:03
  Speaker 5: Jim Jim Cheru.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: I does what I likes, and I likes well I do.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 21:11
  Speaker 5: There was an egalitarianism to being able to wager away
• 21:15
  Speaker 5: from the track, and some of these locations were big,
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: sharp operations, and of course some of these were very dodgy,
• 21:22
  Speaker 5: called you know, mayfly operations, because in some of these
• 21:25
  Speaker 5: shittier places, you know, they might need a heavy favorite
• 21:28
  Speaker 5: to lose a race, to quote Bob Scucci, fur their lungs,
• 21:32
  Speaker 5: and if that favorite ended up winning, they might just
• 21:35
  Speaker 5: shut down, not open the next day and just leave town.
• 21:39
  Speaker 5: But in both places they're quickly emerged another character that
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: the three of us know even better today than they
• 21:47
  Speaker 5: did then, the tout. This was the creation of the
• 21:52
  Speaker 5: tout the tipster, because basically as soon as these British
• 21:56
  Speaker 5: otbs opened in the early eighteen hundreds, they offered print
• 21:59
  Speaker 5: cuvere of the races, and as soon as there was coverage.
• 22:03
  Speaker 5: There were guys advertising subscription tallet services that guaranteed gambling
• 22:10
  Speaker 5: profits the Victorian era. Bretts Chad just like us.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: Listen, Matt.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: I think for everyone listening, they should know that there
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: will be a third of the final exam will be
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: on horse racing, the importance of the daily racing form,
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: in the interconnectivity of the OTBS, the formation of the OTBS,
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: and how that led to broader sports betting throughout the country.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: All of that, there's going to be an essay on
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: that that everyone can write in their blue books.
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: I was gonna say, I had my blue book ready.
• 22:42
  Speaker 5: I'll be ready to go, King.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Simon and Matt, can you remember the name of the
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: person who owned the daily racing form that helped propel
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: the information economy around sports betting?
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: I mentioned it in a previous show.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: Oh I can't do that, Mo and No.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: Former owner of the Philadelphia in Choir.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: I believe.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Film throughout the causes throughout the city of Philadelphia actually unions.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: The train station in Philly might be like the Annenberg
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: Hall or something. I'll figure it out when I'm there
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you when I
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: get out of the train.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: I gotta say, check from this show.
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: The most amazing thing I'm going to take away from
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: is the fact that our fraud government was less corrupt
• 23:28
  Speaker 4: back then it is today. I can't imagine if our
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: government owed some guy in the news making bad headlines
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: about them two million dollars, that guy would just disappear
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: back then.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: They paid him. I'm so shocked by that. So yeah,
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: as always loved Matt Mitchell.
• 23:42
  Speaker 5: I think this is a good example of something we
• 23:44
  Speaker 5: talked a lot about a couple of weeks ago, which
• 23:46
  Speaker 5: is that there's this idea, especially in America, that these
• 23:50
  Speaker 5: betting phenomena are like a newer thing, when in fact
• 23:53
  Speaker 5: they're very, very old. Like check this out. The lawnmower,
• 23:58
  Speaker 5: the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, refrigeration, all of these
• 24:04
  Speaker 5: are newer inventions than the subscription tout service. Like these
• 24:09
  Speaker 5: are very old ideas. And one final thing on this
• 24:13
  Speaker 5: before we move off. Victorian era Britain, named for the
• 24:16
  Speaker 5: reign of Queen Victoria, who's queen for like the last
• 24:19
  Speaker 5: sixty years of the eighteen hundreds, one of history's preeminent haters.
• 24:24
  Speaker 5: Not a barrel of laughs and Britain would make otbs
• 24:27
  Speaker 5: illegal in eighteen fifty three. They just basically became a
• 24:31
  Speaker 5: giant black market. But I want to shout out her
• 24:33
  Speaker 5: oldest son very much, a friend of the show, who'd
• 24:36
  Speaker 5: become King Edward the Seventh when she died in nineteen
• 24:39
  Speaker 5: oh one. This guy loved betting, and he said that
• 24:43
  Speaker 5: because horse racing was quote a manly sport that is
• 24:46
  Speaker 5: popular with englishmen of all classes, there was no reason
• 24:50
  Speaker 5: to restrict gambling on it. And so he may have
• 24:52
  Speaker 5: looked a little bit weird, maybe because his parents were
• 24:55
  Speaker 5: first cousins. It's none of my business, but friend of
• 24:58
  Speaker 5: the show, the people's king, shout out to him.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: All right, Matt, last one, you have a story that
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: involves a famous Russian gambler. Gosh, I wish I had
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: read the script, because now is where I could have
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: dropped in my Dostoevsky reference.
• 25:17
  Speaker 5: I do want to again stress to any listeners how
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: little Chad prepares that how much of this show is
• 25:23
  Speaker 5: the work of people you don't see or hear, Because
• 25:26
  Speaker 5: obviously I'm going.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: To talk about we're seeing him constantly. Now he can't.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: He doesn't want to be on the show yet. We
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: can't get him off the show, so you know, take
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: that for what you will.
• 25:39
  Speaker 5: Wow, if only the listeners of the podcast would hear
• 25:42
  Speaker 5: the sarcasm that I'll so surely cut out of this episode.
• 25:46
  Speaker 5: Ah all right, So a lot of very famous Russians
• 25:50
  Speaker 5: love to gamble. There's one thing that they know a
• 25:52
  Speaker 5: lot about, and that's suffering. So obviously they're special to
• 25:56
  Speaker 5: gamblers of all nationalities. For example, Leo Tolstoy, the writer
• 26:00
  Speaker 5: in Peace, he once lost a fortune at the German
• 26:03
  Speaker 5: spa town of Bodenboden. But Tolstoy can't compare to our friend,
• 26:09
  Speaker 5: renowned Russian novelist Theodor Dostovsky. To my credit, incredible.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: It doesn't say Dustyevsky in the script that I got,
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: It just says Russian gambler.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: Story.
• 26:23
  Speaker 5: Full credit to you, Shame on me. You're doing a
• 26:26
  Speaker 5: great job and are very smart and handsome. So, to
• 26:30
  Speaker 5: make a long story short, when Theodor Dostovski was in
• 26:34
  Speaker 5: his thirties, he was pretty critical of the Russian government,
• 26:37
  Speaker 5: which I wouldn't recommend really then or now. And he
• 26:40
  Speaker 5: gets sentenced to death by firing squad. But he gets
• 26:43
  Speaker 5: that sentence commuted and instead, he's got to do eight
• 26:47
  Speaker 5: years of hard labor and then military service in Siberia.
• 26:51
  Speaker 5: It's a step up from a firing squad, but obviously
• 26:54
  Speaker 5: not not a barrelo laughs. While in Siberia he does
• 26:57
  Speaker 5: what we would do, and that's gamble a lot with
• 27:01
  Speaker 5: the fellas, and obviously that was, you know, to helped
• 27:04
  Speaker 5: you pass some of the time. But he also does
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: what every good Russian you know has always done, suffer
• 27:09
  Speaker 5: and suffer and suffer some more. He's now a gambling
• 27:12
  Speaker 5: enthusiast and long suffering. And to connect it back to
• 27:16
  Speaker 5: earlier in the show, once those eight years in Siberia
• 27:19
  Speaker 5: are over, if you look up a portrait of Dostovsky,
• 27:23
  Speaker 5: like if you just go to his Wikipedia page, he
• 27:26
  Speaker 5: looks a lot like all of the guys you run
• 27:28
  Speaker 5: into at any otb. It's like, exactly if you, like,
• 27:32
  Speaker 5: I have never been to one, what of the guys
• 27:33
  Speaker 5: look like? Just look up Theodora Dostavski. Anyway, after he's
• 27:38
  Speaker 5: out of Siberia, he makes his first visit to one
• 27:41
  Speaker 5: of those fun German spa towns like Tolstoy had been too.
• 27:45
  Speaker 5: And at first, stop me, if you've heard a story
• 27:47
  Speaker 5: like this before. At first he wins a bunch of money,
• 27:50
  Speaker 5: but once he gets to baden Baden, he loses a
• 27:54
  Speaker 5: ton of money. And there's this great description of his betting.
• 27:57
  Speaker 5: I think this will sound familiar to lots of people.
• 28:00
  Speaker 5: To quote Roll the Bones, he played in a state
• 28:04
  Speaker 5: of grim agitation, his creative mind exponentially magnifying every win
• 28:10
  Speaker 5: and every loss. This guy sounds like a riot.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: You should read The Gambler. I just read it literally
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: two weeks ago. It's slims, so you should be able
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: to handle it quickly.
• 28:21
  Speaker 5: I can actually tell you how many fucker words it is.
• 28:24
  Speaker 5: Sixty thousand words. It's exactly half as many words as
• 28:27
  Speaker 5: crime and Punishment. But we'll get to that. So the
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: next year, more suffering his wife dies than his brother dies,
• 28:35
  Speaker 5: and because of debtor's prison and those regulations, he inherits
• 28:39
  Speaker 5: all of his brother's debt. So he needs money, so
• 28:42
  Speaker 5: he signs a publishing deal and he has to deliver
• 28:45
  Speaker 5: a book in the next eighteen months, and if he doesn't,
• 28:48
  Speaker 5: he's going to get a huge fine, and he's going
• 28:50
  Speaker 5: to lose the rights to all of his other books.
• 28:52
  Speaker 5: And he's in the middle of writing Crime and punishment,
• 28:54
  Speaker 5: but it won't be done in time because Chad, as
• 28:56
  Speaker 5: you know, it's like ten billion pages long. Yeah, So
• 29:00
  Speaker 5: our boy fyodor he's backed into a corner and then
• 29:03
  Speaker 5: he feels like he's been set on fire, and he
• 29:06
  Speaker 5: gets a great idea. He hires a twenty year old
• 29:09
  Speaker 5: stenographer named Anna. Great idea. Then in just four days
• 29:14
  Speaker 5: he dictates that entire novel to her, which spoiler alert
• 29:18
  Speaker 5: would become the classic novel The Gambler, and it gets
• 29:22
  Speaker 5: him out of his jam, and then he marries Ana
• 29:25
  Speaker 5: the stenographer. Hey, great job. Game balls all around for Fyodora,
• 29:29
  Speaker 5: but he's still a gambling addict and he still owes
• 29:32
  Speaker 5: all of his brother's debts. So he does the right
• 29:34
  Speaker 5: thing here and he skips down. He heads out on
• 29:37
  Speaker 5: a promotional tour, and soon he winds up in and Boden,
• 29:41
  Speaker 5: the casino town in Germany. I wonder what's gonna happen there, guys.
• 29:45
  Speaker 5: He starts betting like a complete fucking maniac. He sits
• 29:49
  Speaker 5: down and wins forty times his money at roulette. Almost
• 29:52
  Speaker 5: right away, Anna the stenographer wife is like, hey, why
• 29:55
  Speaker 5: don't we get the fuck out of here? And he
• 29:57
  Speaker 5: knows he has to get out of here. He does not.
• 30:00
  Speaker 5: He loses all of the money that he won than
• 30:03
  Speaker 5: all the money that he has. Then he sells his clothes,
• 30:06
  Speaker 5: makes his wife sell all of her shit. They lose
• 30:08
  Speaker 5: that money total, washed out, degenerate situation, and then he
• 30:12
  Speaker 5: continues later traveling betting more strains his marriage. But our
• 30:17
  Speaker 5: story here has a very nineteenth century Russian solution. A ghost.
• 30:24
  Speaker 5: When he's fifty years old, Theodor's dead father appears to
• 30:28
  Speaker 5: him in a dream and scares the absolute shit out
• 30:31
  Speaker 5: of him and warns him of impending doom. And it works,
• 30:35
  Speaker 5: It actually works, he writes to his wife, He apologizes,
• 30:39
  Speaker 5: He promises to focus only on writing. He promises to
• 30:44
  Speaker 5: never gamble again, and thanks to the spooky ghost of
• 30:48
  Speaker 5: his dead Russian father, he never gambles again.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Matt, you are our very own Dostoevsky. A life eventless suffering, Chad,
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: That's exactly what I was thinking. Brilliant, brilliant storytelling, suffused
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: with long, simmering, gestating suffering, My pleasure to serve and.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: A good lesson for kids.
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: Chad, You'll never be a winning gambler if you eventually quit.
• 31:19
  Speaker 5: Jesus, there's not enough ghosts. There's not enough ghosts to
• 31:24
  Speaker 5: visit the three of us.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, that is too funny. Matt Mitchell, that
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: was great. I'm so excited for you to go back
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: to producing and then find a way to wiggle your
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: way on the show.
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: Oh it's just a pleasure to share a zoom screen
• 31:38
  Speaker 5: with someone so smart and handsome. Thank you so much
• 31:40
  Speaker 5: for having me on.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: See you're saying it with sarcasm, but I internalize it
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: and think, huh he could.
• 31:48
  Speaker 5: Be right, and so so many good ideas as well. Incredible, Yeah,
• 31:53
  Speaker 5: and well read. So literate.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: That's right, so literate, the most literate sports betting podcast
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: in America.
• 32:00
  Speaker 5: And you know what.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: We will return with our next episode of The Favorites
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Tuesday on the Action Network YouTube page. Download us from Spotify,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Apple podcast, wherever you get your pods, rate review, subscribe,
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: We with spotstars say whatever you want, feedback is you
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: get Until next time, Love you.
• 32:20
  Speaker 5: Action Network reminds you please gamble responsibly.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem,
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: help is available twenty four to seven at one eight
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: hundred Gambler