At just past 9 on Thursday morning, hundreds of beefy bettors were packed into a spacious sports book like cold cuts in those skyscraping $10 sandwiches they serve in this glitzy strip hotel-casino. With complimentary cocktails in their hands and a weary eagerness in their eyes, they talked about "juice," but not the kind you get with breakfast. They studied carefully plotted lines, but not those along the Iraqi front.
And the bad numbers they moaned about had nothing to do with the economy. These hoops handicappers were eagerly awaiting the start of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, a two-week gambling gala for them. Suddenly, the image on six theater-size TV screens flashed from a "Showdown With Saddam" update to the tournament-opening tip-off of the Marquette-Holy Cross matchup.
As the basketball went up, so did a great roar among the grateful patrons, one so strident that it rattled the glasses on the trays of overworked cocktail waitresses. Seconds later, an even louder howl ensued when Holy Cross took a 2-0 lead. "OK," yelled an ecstatic Rolfe. For visiting gamblers like Rolfe, this virtually nonstop, two-day NCAA tournament debut has become Las Vegas' second most popular sports-betting weekend, topped only in totals of bettors and bets by the Super Bowl.
With 48 games played between Thursday and Sunday, with a reasonable $10 minimum bet, and with every sports fan's belief that he or she is an expert, March Madness has become a manageable obsession for Joe Six-Pack. "You can't get hurt too bad," Rolfe said. "I know guys that blow everything on one bet for the Super Bowl. I'm not in a position to drop a bundle. Here, you bet a little on this game, a little on that. All you've got to do is not listen to what Dick Vitale and Billy Packer say."
While the casinos do not release statistics, officials acknowledge that by the time this tournament ends in April, Vegas books probably will have handled close to the $70 million the Super Bowl rang up. The bulk of that, Mirage executives said, will be bet during the first two weekends of the tournament.
"Interest actually dies down as the tournament progresses," said Robert Walker, the Mirage's Race and Sports Book director, "because you have fewer teams and fewer fans involved." If the Super Bowl is paradise for the professional gambler - "We prefer that term to `wise guys,' " Walker joked - the nearly nonstop action on this game-packed NCAA weekend appeals to the more typical bettor.
"The crowds are totally different," said Walker, who sets the odds here. "For the Super Bowl, you get your mega-casino players. For this, you get mostly young men with a couple of hundred dollars who want to bet all the games and have a good time." They seemed bent on doing just that on Thursday. Though outside this city's darkened, noisily jangling casinos, news of war was omnipresent.
Early in the morning, Walker had tuned just one of the dozens of televisions to CNN's war coverage. A customer outcry ended even that tiny concession to the real world. "They told us to get it off," he said. "They wanted to see the games. I guess the war was something they just didn't feel like dealing with."
The Connecticut-BYU game, which attracted more than $100,000 in wagers, was the patrons' favorite on Thursday. When the first burst of games ended and the crowd thinned, Rolfe, 29, found himself ahead by about $1,000. He relayed his good fortune to anyone who would listen, and though he hadn't yet been to sleep since arriving here Wednesday afternoon, he glanced keenly up at the TV screens in search of another basketball wager.
Finding no games in progress, Rolfe turned restlessly to his left, where another bank of televisions was devoted to East Coast horse racing. His eyes lit up like the Las Vegas strip at dusk. "Hey, let's bet some trifectas," he said to his buddies.
