Schuetz: On Sports Betting Sharps — Including David Hill

“I’ll bet my money on the bobtail nag, somebody bet on the bay.”

— Stephen Foster, “Camptown Races,” 1850

Sports betting needs two critical conditions to exist. The first is that the bettor needs a bankroll. The second is that the bettor needs an opinion.

It is obviously much easier to have an opinion than a bankroll. One need only look at social media to see that many people have opinions on sports betting and are eager to share them for free.

On the one hand, a pricing model that gives picks away for free should indicate what they’re worth. On the other hand, there are those who are willing to monetize the sports opinion business by selling picks, which often leads to a discussion centered on the question: If the picks are valuable, why would the individual or consortium not simply bet them?

In Las Vegas during the mid-1980s, I knew a gentleman who was selling picks through a 900 number. For those unfamiliar with the 900 number experience, the caller would be charged a fee to make the call, and the revenue would be divided between the phone company and the content provider. A great and somewhat humorous description can be found here.

These numbers offered a range of services, including opinion polls, celebrity messages, jokes, sports scores, psychic predictions, and more. A big component of the demand for these phone services was sexually oriented, taking talking dirty to a whole new level (an area that surprised many parents when they received the phone bill and discovered that little Johnny wasn’t spending all of that time in his room with the door closed working on his homework).

Getting back to the gentleman who sold picks through a 900 number, he added an interesting twist to the touting business. He would recommend one team in a game to half the callers, and the other team to the other half of the callers. That would mean that half of his market would have winners. He would then take the winning population and split it into two groups, giving each group a different side of the next game. He would do this until he had a group with four consecutive wins and then charge a much higher price for the next pick to those four-time winners.

Did I mention that my friend was very wealthy?

Let’s form some opinions

During my tenure running the casino at the Stardust, when it was the book in Las Vegas, my friend Scott Schettler was the Race & Sports Book director. He took an old hallway by the book that no longer went anywhere and created a Bettor’s Library. He would hang newspaper articles, magazine articles, and things like The Gold Sheet on the walls. We would even announce to the folks in the book when we hung something of interest in the library, and people would get up and check it out.

Time after time, someone would walk out of the library, make a left pocket move for their bankroll, march up to the counter, and make a laydown. I always thought Scott was brilliant for starting the library, and it clearly made the point that we just needed a player with an opinion and a bankroll to get action. Scott gave them a place to get an opinion.

The Stardust was also well known for hosting the radio show The Stardust Line, where betting aficionados would discuss all things betting from within the casino. Whenever I talk about the Stardust, someone will say they used to listen to the show for entertainment and betting insights.

Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder also served as an important chapter in the opinion-giving world. The Greek had a biography indicating that he was both a qualified handicapper and a bookie, although there is a mix of opinions about his skills. He may have also neglected to pay off a debt or two (or more), and in the real betting world, that can damage a person’s reputation. He was, however, skilled at self-promotion.

In 1976, he was hired by CBS for the NFL Today show as a betting analyst. At that time, it was illegal to transmit betting lines across state boundaries, so The Greek’s strategy was to pick the final score, such as the Bears to beat the Rams 27-24. This would indicate that the Rams were favored by 3 points and the total was 51.

(As an aside, while Snyder was a popular figure and very much a celebrity, people argue that he really was not a very good handicapper … once again demonstrating the notion expressed by W.C. Fields that you can fool some of the people some of the time, and that is generally enough to make a decent living.)

Anyway, that it was highly daring for CBS to have someone discuss betting on professional athletics on a major sports show in the 1970s may be difficult to understand in modern times, now that betting entities and leagues are closely intertwined. Yes, the U.S. betting world has changed, and changed a lot.

King of the Hill

For the 2022-23 NFL season, The New York Times waded into the picking business by hiring a gentleman by the name of David Hill. Mr. Hill was to provide a weekly feature during the football season in which he picked every game on the schedule, and the paper dedicated a full page each week to this endeavor.

What is of interest about Mr. Hill is that he was not a bettor, per se, but rather a writer who studied philosophy in college, and who has a great list of publications on gambling and other topics. He does not have a hard-scrabble accent, and his whole demeanor makes much more sense in a Harvard classroom than in the generally coarse world of bettors.

When David got the gig at the Times, his work and life experiences had made him familiar with gambling but not necessarily betting on the NFL. His book The Vapors received critical acclaim, and he writes articles on a variety of gaming topics for a variety of outlets. But predicting winners for the NFL was a different kettle of fish.

He met this new challenge by seeking out some smart folks in the area, and the most important resource he found was the Massey-Peabody power rankings, developed by Wharton Professor Cade Massey and professional bettor Rufus Peabody. A great explanation of this model is here, and a fun example of its use is here.

David augmented the use of power ratings with a spreadsheet of his own, where he sought to understand player injuries and other unique, time-specific circumstances not addressed within the Massey-Peabody model.

He was then ready to take on the NFL, and his assignment with The New York Times required him to pick every game against the spread each week.

How did he do? For the 2022-23 season, he finished with a record of 143-131-10 — above .500, but roughly break-even once you account for the vig.

Time’s up

David’s time with The Times was limited to this one season, however. The paper soon acquired The Athletic in a $550 million acquisition, and that created a whole new structure for the delivery of sports content by The Times, and David’s picking column became a casualty of that reality.

David shifted his picks to At the Races with Steve Byk, a SiriusXM sports magazine primarily focused on racing. David’s picks are offered every Thursday, and he’s posted a winning record all four years he’s made the picks — with a particularly strong record on the show this NFL season of 43-33-2.

David has kept his day job, and we certainly need people with his intellect and communication skills in the gaming space. It is also important to learn from David rather than be subjected to the steeper sections of the learning curve. 

His story underscores the importance of acquiring the best information you can, and his use of Massey-Peabody is certainly better than listening to the drivel that is a constant on social media. 

He is also emotionally grounded and would be hard to trigger to chase. Betting is an intellectual challenge as well as an emotional challenge, and both of those attributes are important — and David seems to possess both.

I have known Michael “Roxy” Roxborough since the early 1980s, and I have been blessed with several recent opportunities to spend time with him. One important lesson he is willing to share is that he often let the business and practice of betting become so central to his life that he shut out people who loved and were close to him. 

I would bet that David will never make that mistake, and I have come to understand that the real winning in sports betting is the people one meets along the way.

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Richard Schuetz entered the gaming industry working nights as a blackjack and dice dealer while attending college and has since served in many capacities within the industry, including operations, finance, and marketing. He has held senior executive positions up to and including CEO in jurisdictions across the United States, including the gaming markets of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno/Tahoe, Laughlin, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In addition, he has consulted and taught around the globe and served as a member of the California Gambling Control Commission and executive director of the Bermuda Casino Gaming Commission. He also publishes extensively on gaming, gaming regulation, diversity, and gaming history. Schuetz is the CEO of American Bettors’ Voice, a non-profit organization dedicated to giving sports bettors a seat at the table.