Lay the Favourite
A True Story about Playing to Win in the Gambling Underworld
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
The Lucky Charm. The Sure Thing. The Long Shot. The Jinx.
Beth Raymer came to Vegas to live the dream. Instead she winds up waiting tables in a low-rent diner and living in a fleapit motel.
Then she meets Dink, the King of Last Vegas sports betting. Dink introduces her to the testorsterone fuelled underworld of high stakes gambling a dog-eat-dog realm of grifters, and strippers, wise-guys and hardened cons.
New to the game but with big ambitions, Beth must get smart to get ahead. The real money is off-shore, where gambling regulations don't count. But nor do other rules. In the free-wheeling caribbean Beth discovers that the difference between winning big and losing everything comes down to how sharp you play.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It s hard not to like the breezy, ingenuous voice of this plucky protagonist who proves she s game for any kind of new experience. Hailing from Ohio, Raymer eventually made her way to Las Vegas when she was 24 and found a lucrative position assisting a Queens-born, Stuyvesant High School-educated gambling operator, Dink Heimowitz. The lovable, irascible, big-bellied Dinky had shucked life as a bookmaker back in New York, having run into trouble, for professional sports gambling; he put Raymer and the other motley staff on the phones setting up bets for all kinds of sports matchups (baseball, football, horse racing, hockey) in order to find a line that gave him an edge. Dinky referred Raymer to a high-flying bookie on Long Island, Bernard Rose, who had his own offshore network. As girl Friday Raymer fetched doughnuts, placed calls, and acted as a runner, making wads of dough, but mostly Raymer cherished working among the assortment of gambling types, the low-end hustlers and misfits she chronicles with evident tenderness.
