As a sports handicapper, you can really relate to the lifelong mantra of the great Rodney Dangerfield.  Like Rodney, we get no respect.  The most frequent image of the industry is the boiler room tout as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the 2005 film ‘Two for the Money‘.  To be sure, there’s no shortage of guys like this in the industry that spend more time screaming on scorephones about ‘locks’ and waving their arms around on early Saturday morning TV infomercials than actually handicapping sports.  The irony is that there’s plenty of demand for quality sports handicapping information, and I know firsthand that its a lot of hard work to stay ahead of the 11/10.

It’s also well known that there’s no shortage of mainstream sports properties that rely heavily on the sports gambling marketplace for much of their success.  Even so, you’ll never hear them admit it.  Perhaps the most egregious of these is the NFL who once testified before Congress–with a straight face no less–that in their view betting on professional football played no part whatsoever in their popularity.

Most recently, the flagship of mainstream sports media has gingerly begun dipping their toe in the sports gambling waters.  Not that they haven’t tried to serve this marketplace before–who do you think *needs* a scrolling ticker of scores from every game in every sport constantly crawling across the bottom of their TV screen?  Of course ESPN tries to act like this is simply ‘breaking news’ and their charade makes their sports ticker pretty much useless to a serious bettor.  It may be politically correct to include in progress scores from every NCAA Women’s basketball game, but it does nothing more than infuriate people who need sports information quickly and accurately.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’re no doubt aware that ESPN has done very well with poker programming.  As someone who came up in the gambling milieu, I’ve always respected serious poker players, and have more than a passing familiarity with the theory behind it.  In fact, I’ve read a lot of poker theory books by writers like Mike Caro, David Sklansky and Doyle Brunson.  You’d be surprised how much poker theory can also be applied to sports betting, and we’ll discuss this in greater depth in a future column.  Still, the idea that people will sit and watch other people play poker has always been downright puzzling to me but to each his own.

This may be responsible for ESPN’s recent effort to more explicitly serve the sports gambling public.  You’ll see lines on some game recaps such as the NFL pointspread in the attached picture (but not college football, of course, since they can’t piss off the NCAA).  They’ve added ‘game simulations’ and other matchup data in such a mumbo jumbo format that I can’t really figure out what they’re trying to convey.  Besides, if ESPN’s score projections were worth anything you’d see Chris Berman and Rick Riley living large in Las Vegas or Costa Rica and not irritating television viewers.

Of all of ESPN’s attempts to serve the sports gambling marketplace none is as laughably sad as the appointment of Chad Millman as some sort of ‘expert’ on the subject.  Now, Millman is a very good writer who presumably earned his ‘expert’ status on sports gambling related matters by writing a book called ‘The Odds’ which purported to go inside the Las Vegas handicapping and bookmaking community.  It had its moments, but tried to make points that really weren’t valid–the subtitle of the book ominously pronounces the ‘death’ of serious sports betting in Nevada and while much of the money has moved offshore there’s still more top sports gambling minds per capita in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the world.  It’s a recurring joke in serious sports gambling circles that many of the ‘insiders’ he interviewed for his book ‘worked’ Millman–telling him things that were outlandish to anyone that knows the real score.  That’s a recurring fact with any sort of gambling related journalism such as the monthly features in Cigar Aficionado.  Writers can make up whatever they want about the gambling subculture and the general public won’t know the difference.  At the same time, those in the know aren’t talking.

Millman’s analysis is part common sense and part misguided nonsense that makes even the lowest parlay card playing degenerate in a downtown Vegas ‘grind joint’ look like a genius.  He frequently previews games and sports without actually providing any useful information or even taking a stand on a proposition.  The nadir of his work was a column today that purported to explain to the unwashed masses ‘How Carolina covered’ against the New England Patriots this weekend.  Uh…Carolina was a +7 home underdog and they won outright.  That, my friends, is how they covered and it doesn’t require any sort of analysis from Captain Obvious.

I’ve got nothing personal against Millman, but he’s no more qualified to be a sports betting expert based on writing a book about it than I would be qualified to perform major surgery had I written a profile of the graduating class of Harvard Medical School.  For a serious sports handicapper, the mainstream sports media–of which ESPN is the most mainstream–is by and large the worst place to get information.  The mainstream media likes to operate in a world of generalization and labels–certain teams are “bad” and other teams “good” and these sort of preconceived notions completely obfuscates the world of nuance that serious sports handicappers operate within.

This would be bad enough if ESPN was just featuring Millman as an expert, but his commentary and their other quasi-handicapping offerings are part of the ‘ESPN Insider’ package, meaning that you’ll need to fork over $7 a month to gather the pearls of wisdom emanating from his keyboard.  As a rule, I’m pretty laissez faire on people trying to profit from their expertise and to be sure there’s plenty of equally clueless wanna-be handicappers charging a lot more for similarly bad information.  Still, the combination of ESPN’s half hearted commitment to sports gambling and the gall of charging for the blathering of a dilettante is especially galling.

It’s worth noting than in addition to “The Odds” Millman has also penned a biography of former UFC light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell.  By ESPN’s dubious logic, Millman is a perfectly qualified cage fighter ready to climb into the octagon and mix it up with the pros.  With the insane number of injuries to top fighters that the UFC has experienced lately, maybe we’ll see Millman challenging Lyoto Machida for the belt that Liddell once held.

Related posts:

1. NBA Betting Free Picks For Thursday: Mavs vs. Suns
2. Aaron F. Boone Retires, Joins ESPN
3. Gilbert Arenas and how not to deal with gambling debts