Vegas & Wall Street have merged> Wall Street Firm Uses Algorithms to Make Sports Betting Like Stock Trading.
(I've done this, and it is really something, let me tell you!)
It’s a sweltering August evening in Las Vegas, but it’s cool inside the sports-wagering emporium at the M Resort Spa and Casino. On one of the dozens of TVs around the room, the Detroit Tigers are playing the White Sox in Chicago, and Jimmy E. has a feeling.
Jimmy, a fiftyish man in Bermuda shorts and Crocs, sips green tea as he surveys his options on three small monitors in front of him. The veteran sports bettor would rather not reveal his full name, but he’s happy to share the details of his wagers. He has $8,600 on account that he can draw from. He also has a gut instinct that the next man up to bat, the Tigers’ Jhonny Peralta, is going to strike out. Jimmy taps one of the touchscreens, placing a $250 bet on Peralta whiffing. The first pitch is a swing and a miss. Jimmy’s a third of the way there.
The M Resort is a new casino 8 miles south of the glittering Vegas Strip. Its wood-accented sports book (gambling lingo for the casino within the casino where you can wager on sporting events) resembles a cross between an upscale sports bar and a midtier accounting firm. Some gamblers hunch over workstations identical to the one Jimmy sits at, feverishly entering fresh bets. Others wander around the floor clutching touchscreen tablet devices that they use to tap in spur-of-the-moment wagers. There are occasional cheers when a big play happens, but mostly there’s a palpable tension, a sense that everyone around you is engaged in intense concentration. If the big-screen TVs were playing CNBC instead of ESPN, you might mistake the place for a trading floor.
Jimmy squints through his glasses at the screens in front of him as Peralta goes after the second pitch. Another miss. Newly updated odds appear. The count is 0 and 2, and at this point, Jimmy could hedge the bet he made 45 seconds ago by entering a counterwager—with attractively long odds—that Peralta will actually get on base. Jimmy opts to sit tight, which turns out to be a wise decision—the third pitch comes and Peralta goes down swinging. In mere seconds, $777 is credited to Jimmy’s account. “My pending bets look favorable,” he says. He has money down on the outcome of the game, but he has also bet on specific at-bats, the performances of various players, and which team will win a particular set of three innings.
When the White Sox’s Mark Kotsay comes to the plate, Jimmy taps the touchscreen to bet $250 that Kotsay will be retired in any way other than a strikeout. If Jimmy is right, he will add $325 to his bankroll. But Kotsay swings, connects, and gets on base with a single—$250 gone forever. Jimmy looks a little drained by the accumulation of microdramas. “People say baseball is slow,” he remarks as he flags down a cocktail waitress to freshen his green tea. “But it doesn’t seem slow when you bet like this.”
Jimmy is operating more like a daytrader than a traditional casino sports bettor, moving in and out of positions on the fly, looking for hedges, capitalizing on fleeting moments of inefficiency. And that is not an accident. Since 2009, the sports book at the M has been run by Cantor Gaming, a division of the Wall Street financial services outfit Cantor Fitzgerald. The resort’s new bookmaker openly boasts that it’s bringing the pace and style of Wall Street trading to betting on baseball, football, and basketball—and dabbling in everything from horse racing to golf.
This style of on-the-fly wagering while the game unfolds, known as in-running, didn’t exist in Vegas casinos when Cantor Gaming arrived. Other big casinos in town give sports gamblers a narrow range of betting opportunities and a limited amount of time in which to bet. That appalls Lee Amaitis, formerly co-CEO of Cantor offshoot BGC Partners and now president and CEO of Cantor Gaming. “When Wall Street first opens, everybody starts trading; in this town, when a game gets going, everybody stops betting,” he says. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. The game is the market. Why not let people bet the market?”
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