Ex-Trafford pool hall gambler talks sports betting industry
It’s a good bet that Jimmy Vaccaro knows more about the world of sports wagering than virtually any other American.
Now 72, he grew up placing illegal bets on pro and college games — in addition to shooting dice, playing numbers and indulging in other gambling — in the pool halls, social clubs and back-door joints around his hometown of Trafford, as well as Braddock, East Liberty, Youngstown and elsewhere.
He is one of the few Western Pennsylvanians who candidly will lay claim to having lost money on the Immaculate Reception game by betting on the Oakland Raiders against the
Steelers. He was no “homer” only backing his hometown team, as is common among so many bettors his casinos have taken money from over the years.
In December 1972, he recalls, “I was driving around in my Chevy station wagon with my dog, listening to the radio — remember, that game wasn’t televised, it was blacked out — and I’m listening, and I said, ‘What the [expletive] is going on?’ I blew my $400 or whatever. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny back in the instant.”
That was in his early 20s, before he went to the other side — the one where the odds are in his favor.
Since the late 1970s, Mr. Vaccaro has been among a legion of Pittsburgh-area natives who became leaders in Las Vegas in setting odds and running the casinos’ sports “books,” as their betting operations are known. Now the oddsmaker for the South Point Hotel Casino & Spa, he previously managed operations at the Mirage, MGM Grand, Golden Nugget and Barbary Coast, among others.
Nevada’s casinos until recently had a near-monopoly on legal wagering on sports events in America. Gamblers risked nearly $5 billion there last year on football, basketball, baseball and lesser-followed sports, with the house retaining about 5 percent of that. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in May opened the door for other states to allow such gambling, with Delaware and New Jersey the first to jump in. Pennsylvania’s casinos may follow suit within months, once regulations have been finalized, if they’re willing to pay a $10 million fee to the state.
During a lengthy conversation while on vacation to revisit his roots, a relaxed, coffee-sipping Mr. Vaccaro says, naturally, this legal proliferation of what he has done his entire life is overdue — it’s what people want.
“Look, my friend, it’s entertainment ... a new way of utilizing their time,” he explains. “I’m not the only one who says this — that the world is getting so screwed up that this is a release for people. You can just enjoy yourself and not worry about the other crazy things going on that affect us all.”
If anything, Mr. Vaccaro says, his home state — with its massive armies of fans devoted to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia sports teams and a long-running, underground gambling culture — is more ripe for legalized sports betting than most places. Familiarity with illegal sports betting here is part of what made it so easy for him and others to transition into and rise in the ranks of Nevada’s legalized business.
“Pennsylvania’s a betting state. I still think everybody does bet back here,” he says, though the gambling parlors he frequented from age 12 and up are long gone.
“Louie’s pool room” in Trafford is where he got his start. He went there often with his older brother, Sonny, well-known locally as a sports marketing executive and co-founder of the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic.
“Louie had this rule you had to be 13 to be allowed to go into his pool room,” Mr. Vaccaro remembers. “I got a waiver. He knew I was Sonny’s brother, and he said, ‘How old are you, boy?’ I paused and said, ‘Twelve. ... Please, don’t throw me out, Louie!’
“He said, ‘ All right, you can stay.’ I went every night at 6:45, waiting for the pool room to open up.”
In 1975, Mr. Vaccaro abandoned elementary education studies at Youngstown State University, having decided he would fit better in a casino than a grade school. He flew to Las Vegas with about $100 in his pocket and received training and employment as a blackjack dealer at the Royal Inn, owned by Michael Gaughan, the same entrepreneur who employs him today at South Point.
One day, Mr. Gaughan called him into his office in the Royal Inn, a small casino trying to make a name with a new venture.
“He says, ‘ Do you know how to run a sports book?’ I said no,” Mr. Vaccaro said. “And his infamous answer was, ‘Good, neither do I.’ And from then on, I was a sports book manager.”
He went on to become the head man at much larger operations in ensuing decades for magnates such as Steve Wynn.
Mr. Vaccaro was known for a willingness to take large wagers and use his own instincts, such as in 1989 being the first to take bets on “future win totals.” It’s a now-popular option in which before the season you can bet on whether a team will win more or fewer games than a certain number. (You can bet today at the South Point and elsewhere, for instance, on whether the Steelers will top 10½ victories this year.)
The way the casino comes out ahead with that and most bets is it takes 10 percent more from a player if he loses than it gives him if he wins.
Mr. Vaccaro explains that most bettors place themselves at a disadvantage in other ways: People seeking “a big score” are willing to make bets with longer odds — such as the parlay cards where you have to pick multiple games correctly; amateurs care more about backing their favorite teams than studying numbers and probabilities; and if they win, people often just reinvest the money on other bets until they lose it anyway, instead of walking away with a profit.
“The average American is coming, making their bets and enjoying the whole process — the social media or whatever, the standing in line drinking a Corona, talking to the person next to them while waiting to place their bet. The wise guys are now dwarfed by the general public.”
Those wise guys Mr. Vaccaro refers to are professional handicappers who he estimates might be only about 3 percent of bettors — ones who come out ahead in the long run (winning at least 53 percent of wagers, which is what’s required to beat the casino’s house advantage) by studying trends and percentages, maintaining discipline and making only bets in which they have confidence instead of for entertainment.
At one time — before ESPN, the internet and social media made every athlete’s twisted knee and every stadium’s wind conditions a source of common knowledge to anyone who wanted — the wise guys might have information edges on both the casinos and average bettors, Mr. Vaccaro said.
Now, he says, everyone has pretty much the same information. The sports books set out odds seeking relatively even levels of betting action on opposite sides, so that the sheer volume attached to the 10 percent house edge — the “vig” or “juice” — provides a profit no matter an event’s outcome.
When he’s asked about the potential for legalized sports betting to create more compulsive gambling problems — the family, financial and mental health distress connected to people who can’t control their urge — Mr. Vaccaro acknowledges the possibility but dismisses its extent.
“Look, my friend, to say there won’t be some increase is an absolute insane statement I’ll never make, but there’s other worse things,” Mr. Vaccaro said, and he goes on to explain that he’s a non-drinker who sees alcohol problems as far more harmful to society.
In addition, people already have ample opportunity to wager illegally, if they desire, and end up in deep debt on a bookmaker’s credit. Like the time Mr. Vaccaro lost $2,400 when New York’s underdog Amazin’ Mets won the 1969 WorldSeries versus the Baltimore Orioles. He was a young man with nothing near that amount in his wallet.
“That was big money then,” Mr. Vaccaro said. “I went to Irwin [his bookie] and said, ‘I need some time.’ He goes, ‘How much time do you need, Jimmy?’ I said I’m gonna need a month or two. He goes, ‘Ya got anything?’ That was always the question: ‘Ya got anything?’ They wanted anything they could get from you right then. I gave him like $300 or $400, and it took me like three or four months to pay him.
“What the casinos have going for us, compared to the illegals, is when you come to the counter, you’ve got to give us cash. If you’re broke, you can’t bet anymore. You can only blow what you have.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision, other concerns have arisen about how proliferationof legal gambling could lead to more point-shaving, game-fixing and scandals, as different sports have already been rocked in such mannerin the past.
At the Mirage in 1994, Mr. Vaccaro was a close witness to one such scandal connected to Arizona State University’s men’s basketball team. An unusually high amount was bet on one of its Saturday games, more than 10 times what would be normal, and almost all was against ASU, knocking it down from an 11-point favorite to 3-point favorite.
He checked with peers around Las Vegas, found out they were experiencing something similar. He contacted his casino’s regulatory compliance officers, who he believes contacted Nevada gaming authorities. The state officials suggested that casinos quit taking bets on the game.
Mr. Vaccaro kept taking bets — “I was always a rebel” — and a federal investigation later found there was indeed an attempt to fix the game, only it failed. Arizona State won the game and beat the point spread, but a player and the organizers of the scheme — who had been successful betting against ASU on a smaller scale in three prior games — were prosecuted and convicted.
Mr. Vaccaro maintains that the more that legalized gambling is permitted, with the more eyes on it throughout the industry and public, the less likely it is that anything nefarious will occur.
“To say it can never happen is an insult to everyone’s intelligence, because every day somebody somewhere is thinking of some way to [cheat] somebody down the line,” he says. “But the odds of something like Arizona State happening again? If it was a thousand-to-one then, it’s now a million-to-one, because everybody’s looking. Everyone will blame us if something goes wrong, so we’re the best watchdogs. It’s our business.”
One might think the opportunity in other states to bet on sports could hurt Mr. Vaccaro and his Nevada compatriots, as serious sports betting aficionados will be less compelled to go there. He acknowledges the possibility but figures it’s offset by increasing people’s appetite for sports gambling in general, while also giving veterans of Nevada’s industry a chance to go to other states and win a stake in their new ventures.
One way or another, he has seen the public’s interest increase through his four decades in Las Vegas, and doesn’t figure on it waning.
“Look at it this way, my friend: Even during what they called the Great Recession, 2008 to 2011 or something like that, I was in the casino every day of my life,” he said. “Even at that time, when it was affecting every other business in the country and affecting [the casino] like everybody else, the only department that never went down in revenue was the sports book ... and it’s getting bigger and bigger every year.”