Gambling in the US of A and the UK

We had a homework problem today where we used our statistical knowledge to test how good the Las Vegas spread is at predicting Basketball game winners. But in the UK, and Europe in general it seems, people aren't familiar with the concept of the spread. This led to an ever lengthening tangent on sports gambling by a wild haired english professor.

You see, in America, he explained, the rules of our sports are set up by people in charge to maximize scoring. Basketball games will often end with one team winning 95-85, whereas soccer matches will often be 0-0 or maybe 3-2 in a great game. Also, in America, it's often known beforehand with a reasonable degree of certainty which team will win. So instead of giving odds, like in horse racing or in UK gambling, we bet on spreads to keep things interesting.

Fair enough. I'm getting lots of looks though, from everyone in the course. "For real?!" they ask with their eyes.

The professor kept going though and started talking about the football (soccer for us) pools established in the UK in the 1920's. There was all sorts of debate about whether betting on football was legal or not - it was illegal to bet on games of chance, and so the matter hinged on whether a football match was a game of chance. In the end the experts of the day decided it was not and a great UK institution was born.

But this was before the national lottery, so people basically used it as a lottery, guessing winners at random, even if they did not have any real expertise in the matter. It became such an industry that one particularly snowy winter bets were taken even though no matches could be played due to the weather. Football experts then met and decided who would have won, if the game had actually been played.

The professor then started thinking about the United States again and noted that our laws are also problematic, having been established in the time before phones and internet. For instance, a recent case decided that the law forbidding gambling over the phone applied to internet gambling as well. In the United States, gambling is only legal in Las Vegas and on Indian Reservations which had the class in stitches. I heard someone remark, "what a funny country!"

The punchline was that a lot of gambling took place on riverboats because border rivers are not technically part of any state!

Hey shut up guys! America #1!