LAS VEGAS -- Just before halftime on Jan. 19, as Oakland linebacker Eric Barton secured possession for the Raiders at the Titans' 16, Chuck Esposito saw his Super Bowl Sunday coming together.
With Oakland turning back Tennessee at a key moment and then grabbing a 21-17 lead, the chief oddsmaker for Caesar's Palace turned to his top lieutenant, Lou D'Amico, and grinned. "How 'bout that, eh, Louie? I'm thinkin' 4-1/2 or 5, huh?"
On Sunday, fortunes will be made and lost on whatever figures these men arrived at for the Super Bowl's point spread and the offbeat "proposition" bets invented only for this game. (In one of Esposito's more outlandish concoctions, bettors this year can pick between Super Bowl rushing touchdowns and Houston Rocket rookie Yao Ming's blocked shots against the Chicago Bulls that day. Yao is the 1.5-point favorite.)
More than $70 million will be wagered in Nevada on the Super Bowl, making it the biggest single betting event all year. An estimated $1 billion more will be bet illegally around the nation, often based largely on Vegas betting lines.
"Everybody wants to have a stake in the game, to back their opinion up with a buck," Esposito said.
On the sports-book floor, boisterous crowds roar with carnival intensity as they watch every play on six 11-by-15-foot screens. The screens stand alongside the odds, posted on mammoth electronic boards in foot-high red letters and treated as gospel.
Yet behind the wizard's curtain is a nondescript office where Esposito and D'Amico scrutinize a litany of statistics and utter what are, at least when they debut, just the informed opinions of a few guys.
Esposito deploys software at the beginning of the day to derive a basic figure, feeding it full of statistics about the various players, injuries, scoring patterns and the like. In that respect, it's similar to the way fantasy football and baseball fans select and predict, except the same stakes are rarely involved.
Last week, the computer predicted Oakland would win by 1.5 points over the Buccaneers if those teams made it to the big game. But that's just a starting point for discussions between the bookmakers that account for intangibles a computer can't appreciate.
Those discussions are as much about sports as about the perception of sports. These men aren't predicting the Super Bowl's outcome so much as anticipating which team the public will back. In that math, Tampa's easy triumph over Philadelphia earlier in the day counts for less than Nevada's proximity to California, which means fervent Oakland fans will flood nearby Reno to bet on black. And the Raiders' cult following, Esposito said, "make them a very public team," meaning they have a national fan base that's going to want to side with them on a bet.
The Raiders practically get home-field advantage at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, said Esposito. They play there every year, and it's just a day's drive for hometown fans. D'Amico agreed, noting that the road-weary Bucs faced a more exhausting travel schedule.
"Those sorts of calculations are how bookies make their money," gaming industry analyst Jonah Haines said. "They're paid to know how to pick numbers that will split the public, so there's two-way betting action and the house's exposure gets balanced out."
In the end, Esposito and D'Amico picked Oakland to win by 5. But within minutes, betting for Tampa forced Esposito to move the line down to 4. He suspected it would rise slightly by Sunday, but even as he worked to strike the right balance, he kept an eye toward the future.
Last weekend, Esposito put out the opening line for the 2004 Super Bowl, too. The Raiders are already 4-to-1 favorites.
