Diary of a Football Handicapper

About the Book

This journal captures the day-by-day, week-by-week excitement of a fall season spent challenging the sports books of. Reno as the author tries to beat the point spread betting college football. While basically the story of one man, armed with a system, going head to head against the oddsmaker, it is also an ethnography of the sports books of Nevada.

The author, a professional anthropologist, presents the mo detailed account ever written of just how sports books operate.

How is the point spread made? By whom? How does it change, game by game, in response to the money bet? All this and more is revealed. .. . . .

But beyond that here is a very human story of an avid football fan, indulging his passion and his hobby, trying doggedly to outsmart the oddsmaker. Moreover; the book catches the flavor of the gambling scene in Reno, as well as reflecting the color and pageantry of college football.

About the Author

Robert L. Carneiro is an anthropologist who has worked for many years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He has done ethnographic field work with three different tribes in the Amazon, and has published extensively in the field of anthropology. He grew up in New York and went to the University of Michigan, where he received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees and watched many good football games. He combined his passion for football with an interest in numbers to generate a system for predicting winners, which he employed during his visits to Reno. Besides following college football and basketball and major league baseball, his hobbies include reading, traveling, cartography, and chess. He is married and has one son. A previous book of his, a novel also published by AuthorHouse, is entitled In Solemn Conclave.