Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it’s now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or “trading,” if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race. Betting, like cannabis and cabaret before it, has shed its reputation as a vice, and the nation has eagerly forgotten that sportsbooks exist to turn a profit. Even the addiction hotline 1-800-GAMBLER suddenly sounds like the number you’d dial to start gambling.

A new memoir by the retired bookmaker Art Manteris, “The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode,” helps us to understand how we got here, and to glimpse the industry in its fledgling form. Manteris spent decades running sportsbooks in Vegas, presiding over such fabled dens of iniquity as Caesars Palace and the Hilton; the industry he left in 2021 bore little resemblance to the one he’d entered. That was thanks to the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which had restricted sports gambling largely to Nevada. Manteris had hoped that PASPA’s demise would wipe away “a hundred years’ worth of fierce opposition and moral outrage to sports betting.” But he concedes that the new regime has done more harm than good—by lowering the barriers to underage bettors, encouraging cheating among athletes, and making the industry vastly impersonal. Things were more manageable, he says, in his day, when he ran a good, clean shop.

One might have a hard time believing him, at first. Born in Pittsburgh, Manteris followed his Uncle Jack to Sin City in 1978 and never left. Vegas was small then; you could wave to Robert Goulet at a traffic light or chat up Tony Curtis at the grocery store. The city was well in the palm of organized crime, and Manteris was soon surrounded by the kinds of characters who were later portrayed, under aliases, in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” “The Bookie” is so rich in Franks (Mastroianni, Regina, Fertitta, Rosenthal), Johnnys (Avello, Tocco), Tonys (Taeubel, Spilotro), and Jimmys (McHugh, Newman, Vaccaro) that I lost track of who was mobbed up, who was down-and-out, and who was genuinely having a good time. Skimming was endemic among bookmakers, enforcement was brutal, and several of Manteris’s early acquaintances met violent ends. He dispenses with these stories quickly: “Tony Spilotro was beaten to death in a cornfield in Illinois that summer.”

Bookmaking in those days was an artisanal craft, practiced by hand on elaborate legal-paper charts. Horse-race results came in on ticker tape. Setting the odds for a game was more a matter of delicate intuition than wonkish number crunching. By the end of the book, the mechanics of odds-making were still as arcane to me as Ptolemaic tax codes, but Manteris found that he was a statistical savant. “Odds, point spreads, and probabilities constantly floated around inside my brain,” he writes, tapping into the mystical appeal of risk management. “Numbers embedded themselves into my consciousness . . . maddening, wonderful, and addictive.”

Beating the odds, too, required grit and determination. Reliable information about injuries, coaching decisions, and the like was hard to come by, so bettors went to absurd lengths to gain an edge on the books. One of them hired a private eye to tail a finicky N.B.A. referee for an entire season just to know in advance which games he’d be working. The same gambler had an inside line to the Detroit Pistons’ timekeeper, who would manipulate the length of the game to eke out some extra points.

It helped to have technology on your side, too, no matter how primitive. Manteris’s nemesis, Billy Walters, one of the winningest sports bettors of all time, belonged to a syndicate called the Computer Group, which must’ve sounded fearsomely futuristic in the eighties. Walters and his crew were armed with a predictive algorithm developed by a math whiz whose day job was developing nuclear-submarine tech. Picks in hand, they would spread their gospel through a network of beepers or earpieces; his disciples, or runners, crowded sportsbooks around town and placed bets on his behalf totalling millions of dollars a week. They sometimes set up smoke screens so that the odds moved in the wrong direction, sending his competitors off course. Walters’s wagers were so successful that one casino hired a pair of mathematicians to deconstruct them.

To guard against runners and other forms of malfeasance, Manteris maintained a cutting-edge surveillance system. He’s still proud of the panopticon he helped develop at the Hilton SuperBook (home of the SuperContest), which boasted “upward of eight hundred VCRs” and a console manned by three or four people, “maneuvering the hundreds of cameras stationed throughout the casino, plus the forty pointed at and monitoring the sportsbook.” While the bettors were busy screaming at televisions or enjoying a comped round of Jameson, he could watch the beepers beeping and the symphony of cash changing hands—this if he wasn’t “returning from a light workout and rubdown at the Hilton Health Club on the third floor.” Surveillance cameras notwithstanding, Manteris got quite an eyeful over the years. He witnessed the “360 degrees of porn” wallpapering the Stardust boardroom; Rodney Dangerfield at a boxing match, snorting coke from a spoon during the national anthem; and early U.F.C. fights that convinced him the sport was “too brutal to go mainstream.” Still, he writes, “Through it all I loved my profession.”

It does seem that he approached his work with a measure of solicitude unusual in his field. Even so, “The Bookie” gives the impression that Vegas, even at its most corporate and aboveboard, runs on animosity and despair. (It must be said that plenty of other industries do, too.) The memoir shows little interest in the gambler’s psychology or the keening dramas of the floor. Manteris’s job, as he saw it, was “to create an entertainment experience to keep the ‘preferred customers’ coming back.” Those customers were the sort who could drop six or seven figures on a bet and still feel, after they’d lost, that they’d had “an entertainment experience.” Manteris allows that he “saw loved ones hurt by overindulgence,” and his own brother was consumed by a betting addiction, but there’s no flop sweat in his sportsbooks as he describes them—no one is gambling away the kids’ college funds just to feel alive. When he writes that he “always encouraged parlays”—bets that combine multiple wagers, becoming increasingly unwinnable every step of the way—because “the odds against them were so high,” we are not meant to dwell on the fact that he urged his customers toward suckerdom. We should assume they wanted to be pushed.

Billy Walters, the author of another recent insider’s account, “Gambler,” didn’t need any pushing. As a self-described “former degenerate gambler,” he never met a massive bet that he wasn’t willing to take—provided, of course, that he could convince himself the odds were on his side. Walters once wagered on which direction a robin would fly when it departed a phone line it was sitting on; as a young man, he made a bet on his own life expectancy. (The over-under was thirty-five, and he won.) Casinos would seem to depend on men like him. When Manteris writes, then, that “the rich history of Las Vegas is not written by the likes of Billy Walters,” it’s easy to object, not least because “Gambler” includes a rich history of Las Vegas. Intriguingly, it mentions Manteris not once.

Maybe that’s because Manteris was exactly the kind of bookie that Walters couldn’t stand: one who wasn’t interested in his business. Sports betting, for Walters, amounts to “psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game.” The best bookies relish that fight, no matter how dirty it may become or what sort of arms race it compels. He laments “the unwritten code of casino misconduct: beat us, and we’ll ban you.” When, in 1997, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tightened its regulations against “messenger” betting—professional networks of runners like those that Walters relied on—he felt that it was the work of “shortsighted sportsbook operators who were trying to put pro handicappers like me out of business.”

Walters had a hardscrabble upbringing in Munfordville, Kentucky. He moved to Louisville, where, by age thirty, he’d had three marriages, three kids, and a vasectomy, which he paid for with a set of used golf clubs. Though he’d found employment as a foundry worker, a custodian at a tobacco factory, and a car salesman, his penchant for drink and dice kept him in the red. In 1982, after state police broke up his illegal bookmaking operation, he moved to Vegas, where he crossed paths with the same sordid mobsters and two-bit hustlers that Manteris did. (Walters, too, shed nary a tear when Spilotro’s body turned up in that cornfield.)

Linking up with the Computer Group taught Walters that, if he stayed sober and disciplined, he could turn the boom-and-bust cycle of his addiction into a profession. At this point, he ceased to resemble the recreational gambler as we know him. An ordinary bettor may be guided by team loyalty, intuition, or emotion—Walters was governed by dispassionate information. An ordinary bettor might lay down money just to increase the pleasure of watching a big game—Walters was betting so much, so frequently, that spectatorship only reminded him of potential insolvency.

He didn’t mind: losing, according to an old adage he cites, is the second-greatest thrill in gambling. Plus, Walters had defanged chance by acquiring something close to sports omniscience. He spent his days immersed in the minutiae of games. A deal with cleaning crews at McCarran International allowed him to collect the crumpled newspapers that passengers left on airplanes, granting him access to sports pages from around the world. These, along with handicapping newsletters like GoldSheet and his intelligence from the Computer Group, gave him a competitive edge on bookies. Considering “S-factors (special situations), W-factors (weather), and E-factors (emotional),” he made careful calculations for home-field advantages, the amount of rest a team had had, the number of days they’d been on the road, the number of time zones they’d changed, dramatic shifts in climate or temperature, and “motivational factors such as revenge.” More than a gambler, he was a kind of athletic actuary.

Were his efforts strictly on the up and up? Manteris has his doubts: “Until the day I die,” he writes, “I will probably question how Walters had important player injury information first.” Bookies weren’t the only ones who wondered. The Computer Group was twice raided by the F.B.I., though agents never turned up enough evidence to make a winning case. In 1992, a federal jury acquitted Walters and his associates of charges of conspiracy and the illegal transmission of wagering information. His next company, Sierra Sports Consulting, faced allegations of money laundering following a raid by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; a judge later dismissed the charges. On the advice of his lawyers, Walters moved his operation to Panama, where his office had “the look of a CIA operation,” with legions of employees placing bets from afar using “two-ton Vonage boxes” to disguise their locations. They could bring in millions of dollars on one football game alone.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Walters wound up behind bars, though it was a more legitimatized form of gambling—the stock market—that ultimately did him in. In 2017, having curiously avoided losses on his shares of Dean Foods stock, he was federally convicted of insider trading; President Trump commuted his five-year prison sentence in 2021.

“Gambler,” thus, has an air of reputation management to it. Walters maintains his innocence, presenting himself as a man with no secrets left to hide; he even includes a raft of “charts and numbers that [he’s] never shared before” to help aspirant bettors partake of his expertise. Where Manteris is leery of the era of DraftKings, Walters believes that PASPA’s fall has fuelled job creation, generated tax revenue, and minimized the criminal element in sports gambling. Maybe it’s telling that the bookie prefers more regulation, whereas the gambler enjoys playing fast and loose; clearly, Walters’s brand of widespread “psychological warfare” is best practiced with minimal government oversight. Both memoirs prepare the lay gambler for a world of gruelling, bruising defeats and unglamorous back-of-the-envelope calculus. I’ve seldom met a vice I don’t like—and yet these stories incline me to stay away from the sportsbook, be it onscreen or on the Strip. It’s not just that the house always wins. It’s that I can imagine sharing in Walters’s quest for perfect prediction, his desire to tame uncertainty, and I fear where that obsession might lead. If I started wagering on Polymarket’s natural-disaster odds, for instance, would I develop a deeper interest in geology, or the megalomaniacal desire to cause an earthquake? The latter, of course. You can bet on it. ♦