Beth Raymer. Lay the Favorite: A Gambling Memoir. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 201. 240 pages.
Sports betting might be the clubbiest form of gambling. Every game has its own lingo, but sports betting, maybe because it’s rooted in real physical competition, just seems a little more insular. There are plenty of books out there that suggest the best ways to pick winners, but few in-depth, from-the-inside, looks at what it’s like to be a big-money sports bettor. With LAY THE FAVORITE, Beth Raymer gives a peek inside that world, through the eyes of someone who doesn’t bet herself, but “just gets the doughnuts.”
Like many others, Raymer finds herself in Las Vegas as a victim of circumstance. She comes out there with her boyfriend, breaks up with him, and finds herself needing a new job when by chance she ends up in the office of Dink, Inc. Dink is a professional sports bettor who employs about a half-dozen people who check lines, place bets, and move money for him. Raymer has a keen eye for what’s beneath the surface (at least in hindsight) and paints a suitably Runyon-esque portrait of Dink and his coterie.
Through another series of events, she finds herself in New York and winds up working for another sports bettor, Bernard, and even follows him down to Curacao, where he runs his own online betting site; from there its back to the States again. At the end of the book, she’s on the move again, possibly having learned a bit about how to live from the series of mentors she’s had.
It’s an interesting book, and gives the reader a good sense of the unbalanced lives that those who Raymer encounters live. For the most part, these are not healthy people in any sense of the word; they overeat, they break the law, they allow others to take advantage of them, and they take advantage of others. It’s not a pretty picture, and it might be difficult for readers to find a sympathetic character in the narrative. As a result, it’s not necessarily a happy read; there is a lot of desperation and poor choices in here. But that’s the story of most of the people Raymer encounters (at least as she sees it).
A good counterpoint to this book is Alan Jay Zaremba’s THE MADNESS OF MARCH, which takes a more analytical and academic slant on the “gambling memoir” idea. It chronicles an extended weekend of “betting and bonding with the boys” in Las Vegas on the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament over the course of an extended weekend, and while he’s just as sharp an observer as Raymer, the men he encounters betting on the games come nowhere near the “degenerate” level of Dink, Bernard, and the others. It’s a reminder that, for most of those who bet, this is just something to make the game a little more interesting, not a way to make a living (or not).