Many people have achieved success in the field of sports betting, but very few have been accomplished on both sides of the counter. One of the very few who has garnered the admiration of his peers both as a handicapper and as a sports book manager is the late Sonny Reizner. His thoughts on handicapping have been captured by the late Marty Mendelsohn in The Best of Sonny Reizner, a pamphlet published by the Gambler's Book Club.
Reizner covers a lot of bases in this spiral bound book. He begins by discussing a necessary topic, losing, before he discusses winning. Dealing with losing first indicates the centered, self-aware disposition that is required to become a winning sports bettor. He then moves on to cover, in turn, his experiences in betting basketball, baseball, and football. The first two are Reizner' s specialties, but because of the huge interest in football betting, that game is certainly worthy of coverage as well.
From the stories he tells it seems clear to me that Reizner was old-school when it comes to his handicapping. He seems to favor a qualitative approach, relying on his instincts and having superior information than the line makers. His tales are replete with situations where through his diligence Reizner managed to come up with some bit of information that his opposition either did not have or did not appreciate, and this would give him a considerable edge.
The problem is that gaining this kind of exclusive information became much more difficult in the media age, as Reizner acknowledged. In the present Internet age such opportunities are even more rare, although by no means impossible. While I greatly respect what Reizner was able to accomplish, I believe his qualitative, information-based approach just isn't terribly practical these days. Given that other books and successful handicappers are relying on detailed computer models and data mining techniques, I'm not sure anyone's instinct can keep up, no matter how well-honed it might be.
That doesn't mean that it's not worth listening to what a successful handicapper from the past has to say. Reizner's mental approach is still worth understanding, and many of the stories he tells are very entertaining. In fact, he had me laughing out loud at more than one of his tales. The bottom line is that The Best of Sonny Reizner isn't a great handicapping book, but it does contain some timeless wisdom and manages to be very entertaining, and that's not shabby.
I don't agree with everything Reizner says in this book, however. I have some problems with his thoughts regarding trends and streaks (in his nomenclature, apparently, trends are due to real changes in the way athletes perform, while streaks are due to luck.) He advises that one way to get an edge is to discover trends before everyone else catches on, but he doesn't give any advice on how to determine which are trends and which are streaks. Without an ability to distinguish between the two, this seems like a perilous strategy to me. Scientific researchers have done work in the area of trying to tell whether athlete's performance is susceptible to trends or not, the most famous of which is a 1985 paper from the journal Cognitive Psychology titled, "The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences". Without providing a rigorous way to tell trends from streaks, I'm afraid Reizner's advice may hurt bettors more than help.
The one aspect to this booklet that I found most annoying, though, is the copy editing. I'm not certain of this, but it looks to me like the book probably was originally issued in another format, and that book was scanned using OCR (optical character recognition) software before being republished in the present format. Unfortunately, it appears that nobody bothered to proof read the present edition of the book after it was scanned but before it went to press. As a consequence we get sentences such as, "It is almost tin-American [sic] not to back your learn [sic] in the Super Bowl." It's not hard to figure out what this was really supposed to say, but it's sloppy and annoying, and readers shouldn't have to deal with this.
Despite these flaws, I found The Best of Sonny Reizner to be entertaining overall. The methods by which Reizner earned his edge as a sports bettor will almost certainly be much less effective in this age than they were in Reizner's heyday. Nonetheless, his mind set is still valuable and his stories are entertaining, so I mildly recommend this book. By no means is this a must-read, and it doesn't contain anything ground breaking, but I liked it.
The Best of Sonny Reizner is an entertaining book that contains some good advice about how a successful sports bettor and sports book operator approached his craft. Reizner's success came in a different era, and many of his approaches to handicapping are not likely to be nearly as successful these days. I also have some minor problems with some of what Reizner has to say about trends and the book's typography, but I enjoyed reading this book. This isn't a must-read or anything, but it's not bad at all.
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