Review of The Best of Sonny Reizner
- Title:
- The Best of Sonny Reizner
- Author:
- Marty Mendelsohn
- Publisher:
- GBC Press
- Date:
- 1997
- ISBN:
- --
- Pages:
- 124
- Price:
- $19.95
April 4, 2006
Many people have achieved success in the field of sports betting, but
very few have been accomplished on both sides of the counter. One
of the very few who has garnered the admiration of his peers both as
a handicapper and as a sports book manager is the late Sonny Reizner.
His thoughts on handicapping have been captured by the late Marty
Mendelsohn in The Best of Sonny Reizner, a pamphlet
published by the Gambler's Book Club.
Reizner covers a lot of bases in this spiral bound book. He begins
by discussing a necessary topic, losing, before he discusses
winning. Dealing with losing first indicates the centered, self-aware
disposition that is required to become a winning sports bettor. He
then moves on to cover, in turn, his experiences in betting
basketball, baseball, and football. The first two are Reizner'
s specialties, but because of the huge interest in football betting,
that game is certainly worthy of coverage as well.
From the stories he tells it seems clear to me that Reizner was old-school
when it comes to his handicapping. He seems to favor a qualitative approach,
relying on his instincts and having superior information than the line
makers. His tales are replete with situations where through his diligence
Reizner managed to come up with some bit of information that his
opposition either did not have or did not appreciate, and this would give
him a considerable edge.
The problem is that gaining this kind of exclusive information became
much more difficult in the media age, as Reizner acknowledged. In the
present Internet age such opportunities are even more rare, although
by no means impossible. While I greatly respect what Reizner was able
to accomplish, I believe his qualitative, information-based approach
just isn't terribly practical these days. Given that other books and
successful handicappers are relying on detailed computer models and
data mining techniques, I'm not sure anyone's instinct can keep up,
no matter how well-honed it might be.
That doesn't mean that it's not worth listening to what a successful
handicapper from the past has to say. Reizner's mental approach is
still worth understanding, and many of the stories he tells are very
entertaining. In fact, he had me laughing out loud at more than one
of his tales. The bottom line is that The Best of Sonny
Reizner isn't a great handicapping book, but it does contain
some timeless wisdom and manages to be very entertaining, and that's
not shabby.
I don't agree with everything Reizner says in this book, however.
I have some problems with his thoughts regarding trends and
streaks (in his nomenclature, apparently, trends are due to real
changes in the way athletes perform, while streaks are due to luck.)
He advises that one way to get an edge is to discover trends before
everyone else catches on, but he doesn't give any advice on how to
determine which are trends and which are streaks. Without an
ability to distinguish between the two, this seems like a perilous
strategy to me. Scientific researchers have done work in the
area of trying to tell whether athlete's performance is susceptible
to trends or not, the most famous of which is a 1985 paper from the
journal Cognitive Psychology titled, "The Hot Hand in
Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences". Without
providing a rigorous way to tell trends from streaks, I'm afraid
Reizner's advice may hurt bettors more than help.
The one aspect to this booklet that I found most annoying, though, is
the copy editing. I'm not certain of this, but it looks to me like
the book probably was originally issued in another format, and that book
was scanned using OCR (optical character recognition) software before
being republished in the present format. Unfortunately, it appears
that nobody bothered to proof read the present edition of the book
after it was scanned but before it went to press. As a consequence
we get sentences such as, "It is almost tin-American [sic] not to back
your learn [sic] in the Super Bowl." It's not hard to figure out what
this was really supposed to say, but it's sloppy and annoying, and
readers shouldn't have to deal with this.
Despite these flaws, I found The Best of Sonny Reizner
to be entertaining overall. The methods by which Reizner earned his
edge as a sports bettor will almost certainly be much less effective
in this age than they were in Reizner's heyday. Nonetheless, his
mind set is still valuable and his stories are entertaining, so I
mildly recommend this book. By no means is this a must-read, and it
doesn't contain anything ground breaking, but I liked it.
Capsule:
The Best of Sonny Reizner is an entertaining book that
contains some good advice about how a successful sports bettor and
sports book operator approached his craft. Reizner's success came in
a different era, and many of his approaches to handicapping are
not likely to be nearly as successful these days. I also have some
minor problems with some of what Reizner has to say about trends and
the book's typography, but I enjoyed reading this book. This isn't
a must-read or anything, but it's not bad at all.
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