Some Redskins Fans Have More Than Pride on the Line
Paul Holland is betting on the Washington Redskins going to the Super Bowl this season. But the oddsmakers say the team is the longest of the long shots.
(By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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Friday, January 13, 2006
As the NFL season reached its final weeks, the Redskins were down, nearly out. David Hinson, a New York Giants fan who lives in the District, thought he could capitalize on this with Redskins fans who were still willing to root with their wallets. A bet. Or several.
"When your team is playing," Hinson said this week at ESPN Zone, "everybody who's got that team has a lot of mouth. It's very easy to neutralize that: You tell 'em to put up or shut up."
So for weeks, he bet on the Giants and other Redskins opponents.
The Redskins went on a winning streak. "I took a beating," Hinson said.
He's still ready to bet any Redskins fan on this week's playoff game -- but not against the current 9 1/2 -point spread. "That's crazy," Hinson said.
Then there's the flip side of the coin.
Even at the team's nadir, District resident Paul Holland was proclaiming that the Redskins were Super Bowl-bound. He was taking all comers, at $200 a game.
"I've won $800 so far," Holland said, "and I'm going to keep right on going with them to the Super Bowl."
In the beginning, there was the handshake. Then there was the neighborhood bookie. Then casinos. And finally, the Internet and its offshore gambling Web sites. It's all illegal (except in Nevada), but nevertheless, as pro football builds toward its annual zenith, betting on pro football -- and the Redskins -- is in a parallel delirium.
"You've got all of the frenzy that is usually spread out among 14 or 16 games now condensed into four games," said Kevin Smith, spokesman for BetonSports.com, one of the largest Internet sports books, based in Costa Rica. "And with the Super Bowl, people who may not bet normally on football will bet on the Super Bowl, and we start to see a little bit of that now."
Besides betting winners and losers, online bettors can make "proposition" bets, right down to, "Will a player with odd or even jersey number score the first TD?" or, "Which team will enter the Red Zone [inside the 20-yard line] first?" or even, "Will the yardage of the first punt be an odd or even number?"
Las Vegas, widely thought to be the headquarters of sports gambling, is gradually ceding ground to the Internet because casinos find that the roughly 5 percent profit margin doesn't compare to a row of slot machines or blackjack tables, experts said. Still, Nevada handled $10.5 billion in sports bets in 2004, the biggest chunk from football, according to David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of a book on Internet gambling.
