Swimming with the Sharps: a Football Season Spent in Las Vegas

Every weekend throughout the fall, McCarran airport expels thousands of people on to the Las Vegas Strip. Many of these visitors come to Las Vegas to bet on football, hoping to profit from the obsession that overtakes their weekends from September to February. Many will return to McCarran a few days later, a little poorer but a little wiser. However another group, reveling in winnings, boards that departing plane with a belief they know more than those large casinos that dot the Strip; convinced they could leave behind their day to day life back in the town where they live, move to Las Vegas and make a living gambling on the sports they love. So, what would happen if someone actually did that? Swimming with the Sharps is a first-person account of an amateur trying to make a living via football gambling. Swimming with the Sharps follows David McIntire as he spends the 2012 football season in Las Vegas, chronicling what he learns and whether he wins or loses gambling on games every week. The book has two components. In part, it looks at the various components that make up sports gambling - such as developing a handicapping system, identifying when to bet or determining the size of a bet - and how professionals approach it compared to how McIntire handles it. McIntire talks with professional bettors, gambling journalists and bookmakers to understand what they have learned in their years in town while providing full transparency into his unique approach that straddles the worlds of amateur and professional bettors. Interspersed with this look at gambling fundamentals are the experiences of a football fan gambling each week in America's playground: days in sportsbooks surrounded by every character imaginable; insight into the lives of bookmakers who run these vast money-making operations; the joys of winning money; the pain of lost money and lost games for his favorite teams.