You’ve checked the injury reports, combed through the statistics, even studied the weather forecast – now you’re ready to place your wager. You may be making a huge mistake. What’s the one thing you’re forgetting? Checking the Vegas Odds On Sports.

Let’s say your betting on the NFL. The fact is, Vegas Odds on Football change from minute to minute and can make a huge impact on your payouts if you don’t know the latest line. If you haven’t got the latest information, you may as well just go an play the lottery at your local convenience store.

Because of the lockout, Vegas Odds on Basketball will be incredibly important to check once the season begins. Players that spent the time off working out and those that spent it as a time to party will greatly affect the performance of their respecitve teams. How will you as on outsider know the impact his will have? I’ll tell you this, your local bookie isn’t going to give you any insights. The fact is that you have to check the Vegas odds. I know this sounds like obvious advice, but you’d be surprised how many people fail to take it to heart when it’s time to lay down a wager.

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This week, Businessweek gives us a fascinating look inside a London-based sports bettting hedge fund. I highly recommend reading the entire article.

The Galileo Managed Sports Fund, which launched in April under the umbrella of the nine-year-old Centaur Group, is the world’s first sports-betting hedge fund. The idea has been knocking around for a while. Six years ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Assn.’s Dallas Mavericks, proposed a similar fund, only to see his idea crash on the shoals of American prohibitionism. While the NBA forbids anyone involved with the league from betting on its games, there was a larger problem: Outside of Nevada, Delaware, and Oregon, betting on sports is largely illegal.

There are some interesting comments from a technical perspective over on Hacker News and there is a nice writeup of the financial dimensions at Hedge Fund Lounge.

The Feds have struck back and struck back hard! This story has everything – domain names seized, executives arrested, and billions of dollars in fines agains the three largest online poker companies. Keep in mind these companies operate completely legally in most of the world and are even publicly traded. This is almost the equivalent of Saudi Arabia arresting the executives of the American movie studios because their movies are on the internet and accessible to citizens of that country who are legally prohibited from viewing them. Things are going to get ugly folks…

via the LA Times

The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted by the FBI on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to the thriving industry.

Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the executives were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others.

Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By Friday afternoon Full Tilt Poker’s site displayed a message explaining that “this domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.”

The online gambling industry has taken off over the last decade, drawing an estimated 15 million Americans to bet online.

In 2006 Congress passed a law prohibiting online gambling. Most of the leading sites found ways to work around the law using foreign banks, but prosecutors allege that in doing so they broke the law.

“These defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.

Read more…