Review of You Can Bet On It!

Title:

You Can Bet On It!

Author:

Larry Grossman

Publisher:

Cardoza Publishing

Date:

2004

ISBN:

1-58042-140-7

Pages:

224

Price:

$14.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

March 18, 2005

Sports betting seems deceptively simple. Picking even a fairly slim majority of winners can be sufficient to turn any punter into a winner. However, despite the large number of people who try their hand, very few manage to win in the long term at this endeavor. In You Can Bet On It!, gambling authority Larry Grossman gathers together many of the biggest names in sports betting to discuss how one could manage to beat the books.

You Can Bet On It! is divided into seven sections, but each vignette generally discusses one of two topics: (1) how a Las Vegas sports book operates, and (2) how can one beat the spread betting sports. Some other topics are discussed, including extended information on horse racing. Most of the material is accessible to the sports betting novice, but the book is aimed more at the intermediate audience. The horse racing information is an exception to this, I'm guessing a track novice will wind up pretty mystified by most of what is contained in this book.

The information here is provided by many of the most respected names in sports betting, from Roxy Roxborough to Chuck Sippl to Sonny Reizner to Steve Fezzik along with many others. Because so many different opinions are represented, there is some overlap in the material presented in different sections in this book as well as some contradictory opinions. This appears to be a second edition of a book (by the same name) that was originally published a decade earlier. In this process some sections have been updated while some feel dated. This is a fairly minor annoyance, however. This becomes less distracting once one becomes aware that different articles are often written with a different time frame of reference.

As one might expect from a book with such a diversity of opinions, I think some of the material is excellent, some is informative, and some is pretty weak. As examples, although brief I think Fezzik's note that discusses what the player is up against provides an excellent summary. I believe much of Chuck Sippl's advice to be pretty solid, for example being careful not to overemphasize psychology or injuries in placing bets. On the other hand, I found Andrew Iskoe's "The ABCs of Sports Handicapping" to be almost entirely vacuous.

It seems that Grossman's book is aimed at the intermediate sports bettor. There are enough explanations of terms and situations that a beginner is unlikely to get terribly lost, but the authors generally assume that the reader has a basic understanding of the common bets, trends, and plays. On the other hand, there isn't much here that hasn't already been hashed out before for experienced sports bettors. There's likely to be at least a little bit here that most readers will find novel, but generally the more experience the reader has the less there is likely to be that falls into this category.

Overall, I found You Can Bet On It! to be a mixed bag. While little of the material in this book is the sort of atrocious information that one receives from many touts, there isn't a whole lot that I found especially revelatory either. There are some concepts in this book that a thoughtful intermediate-level sports better might find worthwhile, and there's some background information that folks fascinated by the industry and history of sports betting might find interesting. So, I would expect that many intermediate sports bettors looking for something entertaining to read will like You Can Bet On It!, although I think there are many books on the market that are even more interesting.

Capsule:

Larry Grossman's book, You Can Bet On It!, is a collection of essays by many of the world's most well-known names in sports betting. As one would expect, there are both some high and low points in this book, but overall I didn't find the book to contain too much material in either extreme category. The book is aimed at sports bettors with some experience but without truly extensive knowledge. Folks in this category are likely to find Grossman's book an interesting diversion, but it's not a must read. I believe that there exist more interesting sources of information available for the serious student of sports betting.