Beating the March Madness Odds

March 12, 2007 — -- "It's like a Super Bowl every day for four days."

That's how one of the top bookmakers in Las Vegas describes the madness that takes over millions of people every year -- March Madness, that is.

With the field of 65 teams set for the 2007 NCAA men's basketball tournament, office workers everywhere are scribbling out tournament brackets and Vegas is bracing for an influx of gambling basketball fans.

"The first weekend of the NCAA tournament is the biggest of the year," said Mike Fay, the specialty games manager at the Imperial Palace Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas strip.

In big sports books like the one Mike operates, and in offices, car pools, diners and dives all across America, more people will place bets during the tournament than any other time. For bettors, there is no bigger event than March Madness.

In the Imperial Palace alone, Fay says that the bettors will line up by the hundreds and place bets by the thousands, and that the casino's sports book will do about 20 to 25 times the amount of business it does on any average day any other time of year.

And of course, the same thing is happening on a smaller scale with individuals and office pools and private bets. It is estimated by betting professionals that about $2 billion will change hands during the next week as fans put their money where their brag is.

Of course, not all teams are created equal. To make up the difference, there is something called "the point spread" or "the line" on the final score -- a technique oddsmakers use to make the betting more competitive.

The way point spreads work is pretty simple. If one team is clearly better than the other, as is usually the case in the early round games, when top-ranked teams like the University of Florida play much smaller schools, the oddsmakers will not take a bet for the better team to simply win. The favored team must win by a certain minimum number of points, and that number is referred to as the point spread.

So, if UCLA is, let's say, a 12-point favorite over the Kentucky Wildcats, but it wins the game by less than those 12 points, the person betting on Kentucky wins. That's what it means when you hear the experts talk about "beating the spread" in a game. Bettors all around the world rely on the point spread to determine whether they will wager.