May 15, 2025 • 32 mins
Back by popular demand, Action Network hosts Chad Millman and Simon Hunter welcome back their producer and colleague Matt Mitchell to discuss more great stories from gambling's wild history. How did lotteries help build America? How did horse racing give us one of betting's most enduring characters? And how did a life of endless suffering influence the betting of a Russian novelist? Is King Edward VII really a friend of the show? All these questions answered and so much more in this fast-paced episode. #Volume
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to The Favorites, the podcast part of the Volume
podcast Network. I am Chad Milman of the Action Network.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today. I'm joined as always by my co.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Host, my companion, Mike Cabadre, my BFF professional better Assignment hunter.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, sign in.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hello Chad.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Over the weekend, I heard from my doctor who I've
known for twenty years about.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Our Pope Show. That's how weird He liked it.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Yeah, even though after the fact, obviously, it just cracked
me up that my guy texted me again. He knows
what I've done my whole life, he knows what the
podcast and everything. It never hits me up about it.
He texted me, how much you enjoyed the Pope Show
and just how we brought a totally different look to
it and how we view the market. And yeah, we
got pretty lucky. We at least we mentioned the name.
(00:56):
We didn't give it out as a winner, but at
least the name was mentioned here on the show, So
shout out to Dubunda.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
You know what I feel like, I thought about this naturally.
I thought about it from the point of view of
me and the Pope market. That I was highest on
was the dude from France from Marseille, who had a
three percent chance, and my logic on him, if you remember,
(01:26):
was he's an outlier candidate. He has a lot of
experience with immigration, which is important to the church right
now and bringing together cultures from a lot of disparate
places where they need to grow the Catholic community. And
(01:46):
it's not going to be someone who's got the shortest dods,
because it's never someone who has the shortest dodds.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So my logic was one hundred percent right.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I just discounted my guy from Chicago, and I like,
I have been loving, loving, like the text chain that
I've had with my Chicago boys about the Pope and
the memes and the Annie Agar tweet where she immediately
sent out the post that Chicago has a pope before
(02:18):
it has a four thousand yard passer, and the t
shirts that sayd Pope, Like the video that someone did
of the Pope being introduced to Saint Peter's Square, to
the Alan Parsons project intro that used to be with
the Bulls and Michael Jordan. I'm here for all of it.
(02:39):
I freaking love it. I love his brothers who just
keep talking about him and like are having a blast,
Like everything about it is familiar. I had an uncle
who lived on the southwest side of Chicago in the
suburbs near where he lived, and they all sound alike,
they all look alike.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm just I'm loving the Pope lost.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
It was a smart move by then. Like we talked
on the show, I thought they've given up on the West.
Clearly they have not, and that's a market they're going after.
So what they wanted to do is working.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
He's becoming already a sensation here in America. And I
joked with a buddy who's a Roman Catholic like I am.
You know, he always goes to eleven o'clock Mass, usually
half empty. What do you think it was this weekend?
Check packed, packed, packed for Mother's Day. So yeah, I'm
excited to see what this is going to do going forward.
And you know, like we joked on the show, it's
(03:33):
such a niche market. It sucked that it didn't work out.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Where you know, we did the show an hour later.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I believe we got the text from Matt Mitchell like,
holy shit, white smoke. But the show, if you go
back and listen to it's it's an interesting market and
something that going forward, if me and Chack, Guy Luhn
or some together in twelve twenty years, I look forward
to our next Pope show.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Brother, Why wouldn't we be together? Simon?
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I have terrible health concerns for myself, not you. You'll
be fine. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
You know what, Simon, You and I are going to
be together in about two weeks because I'm coming down
to Philly and we're going to spend the day together.
Maybe we should go to Mass. Maybe we should go
to like an eleven am.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Massames as soon as I stepped through that, and we
will really.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Really pray a lapsed Catholic and a Jew walk into
eleven am Mass in South Jersey.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
What possibly could go wrong?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Next week, We're going to have a lengthy discussion about
the impact of the NFL schedule release, and I'm gonna
want to bring in some of the points that we
made in our show earlier this week that Evan noted,
and see if we can start to apply some of
these things and see if there are games that normally
we would be trapped into picking that are we changing
(04:46):
our thinking a little bit?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
So I'm excited for that.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We're also going to sit down with Jason Bennetti, the
broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers and nationally with Fox. Like
he's been on the show before. He is so freaking good.
He is so funny, He is so talented. He is
so smart at calling games and keeping you entertained without
it being intrusive, and understanding the really nitty.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Greedy details.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
He used to do back in the day when he
was at ESPN, they would do these analytics broadcasts and
he was brilliant at these. So I'm excited for Jason. Today,
we're going to bring in Matt Mitchell. We did this
show earlier in the off season and we got great response.
As you can expect, people love betting history on this show. Look,
(05:37):
my entire desk, you can't see it right now, is
piled with betting history paraphernalia. And I'm looking at a
picture right now the guy who was the original bookmaker
for the Mafia, and he's it's a picture of him
hanging out in Cuba with a jockey and like Meyer Lansky.
(05:57):
So it's I love this stuff. Matt Mitchell is gonna
come on. He's gonna tell us more of the things
he's unearthed from gambling's wild history.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Welcome back to the show, Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
Oh, you know, it's just an honor to shoehorn myself
into an off season episode chat.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You've been working so hard at becoming talent. You're really
you're getting close.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
I love on camera Mat. He's very tamed. I I
feel like he's nervous.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
He was like, am I about to say what I
should say? This guy? Are we taped right now? So
I love on camera Mat.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
You know what, I'll give a little look behind the curtain.
When we started one million years ago here, Chet was
very encouraging that I do more on camera stuff, become
more talent forward. That's right, I was. I wasn't as
interested in mostly as an exhausted parent of too at
the time incredibly small children. But more than that, I
don't enjoy shows where the producer tries to shoehorn themselves
(07:00):
into the show a lot. I appreciate that wherever our
beloved listeners are right now, on a yacht or a treadmill,
or at work, or in a subway or whatever the hell,
jumping on a trampoline, whatever they're doing, they're here to
hang out with their two friends, you know. Chad and
Simon and I can pop in once in a while,
but more importantly, if I need to kick somebody off
(07:20):
a show, not necessarily this one, but something else in
our network. It gets a lot harder to have those
conversations if you are on camera talent, because you by
definition of saying, I'm better than that. So it was
always easier to be someone whose impact was felt without
being seen, or whose flat rochestery accent wasn't heard on
(07:41):
these airwaves. So I appreciate.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
That funny because we know that his position has clearly changed,
because if you've been in one of the live shows,
you know, Matt just takes it over and Simon and
I become background noise for the entire event. Matt, we
just talked a little bit about betting the papacy. Did
you bet on who would become the Pope?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Well, you two jag offs we're talking in that episode.
I was. I realized that the market would close at
the top of that that hour, so I need to
get my bets in and I'm going through and I
only wanted to bet, you know, twenty to one or
higher for all the reasons we outlined in that episode.
I'm doing foreign dudes, no Americans. That that felt ridiculous,
(08:21):
and I opened up Bob's odds. I'm trying to find
ages in locations. Oh sixty nine years old, Oh, Chicago, Illinois.
No way. I opened it up, could have bet it
and said, no way, make a couple more. I opened
up one more guy, Cardinal Burke. Oh, he's from Wisconsin.
I mean, well, I'll put ten bucks on this guy.
(08:42):
I threw away money on an American papal candidate that
wasn't the right one. Four minutes for the market closed.
I will be haunted forever, but at least we got
a pope who has ben and said my two favorite
restaurants Wah wah and Portillo's. So I feel like he'll
have my best interested heart despite not being a Catholic
(09:03):
at all. But yeah, I wish him the very best.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
My god, it's great, all right, Matt Mitchell subject number
one in How Sports Betting Explained the World, there's a
really famous book called How Soccer Explains the World.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The writer who's brilliant.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
His name is Franklin for and he writes for the Atlantic,
but in his previous years he has written for a
bunch of different magazines, and newspapers. At one point he
was the eder in chief of the New Republic and
it was a seminole book and sort of just the
title alone defines the framing of something really small explaining
(09:49):
something really big. And he wrote this book called How
Soccer Explains the World. So I think about this as
the how Betting Explains the World episode. Your first topic
America's lottery fever, Matt Mitchell, The flora is yours.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
Love that framing. Great job, great hosting, as always, Chad,
thank you well. As you can imagine from its very founding,
America has loved betting, and who couldn't. But one of
the hardest parts of having a new and pretty large
nation is collecting money, collecting tax revenue. We as Americans,
(10:27):
we would rather be throwing tea into a harbor than
paying our taxes. That hasn't changed. So within the first
couple decades of America's birth, if the government wanted to
finance a large public project, they did the smart thing.
They ran lotteries. They turned tax collection into gambling. And
if you've ever wondered how, like very old East Coast
(10:49):
cities like New York and Philadelphia, how they got so
nice even before eighteen hundred, those two cities alone, just
isolating those two they financed public projects using more than
two thousand state authorized lotteries. They were all over it.
So I've got a couple of my favorite lottery examples.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
You guys ready, I am ready, simon, are you ready?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Let's do it all right.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
So, when they were literally draining the swamp to build Washington,
d C. They financed a lot of that construction through
federal lotteries. And the first of these huge federal lottos
offered a big grand prize a building called Blodget's Hotel.
If you won this lottery, you would win this big
(11:37):
ass building. And the first ticket in that big lotto
was purchased by George Washington, so we know that he
gambled at least one time. In fun fact, twenty years later,
when those disgusting, filthy Brits burned down a lot of Washington,
d C. In the War of eighteen twelve, that building
(11:58):
bloge It's Hotel, and I would end up serving as
the temporary home of Congress And although Logit's Hotel that
would also eventually burn down years later, the Hotel Monaco
in DC stands there now in the shadow of Capital
One Arena where the Washington Capitals will be playing a
playoff game this very evening.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
How betting explains the world right there? You know, we
had David schwartz On who who wrote the book Roll
the Bones, that we get a lot of that we
steal a lot of these ideas from. I remember interviewing
him fifteen sixteen years ago in the library at UNLV
where the gaming research studies are done, talking about the
(12:45):
hypocrisy of state by state, everybody allowing lotteries but not
allowing sports betting. And honestly, it was in that moment
in the library where I realized this shit's going to
be legal. Like, at the end of the day, it's
too much money to leave on the table for every
state that needs more and more money every single year.
(13:09):
If we've been doing it since the beginning of the Republic,
it's just a matter of time. Lotteries to sports betting.
Nicely done, Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
Yeah, if we could just pay our federal state taxes
in the form of scratchers, I feel like we'd solve
a big part of our deficit right there. So here's another.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Example, by the way, did George Washington win the hotel.
Speaker 5 (13:29):
He did not. In fact, I think the guy that
fronted that scheme blotch it. I think that ended up
going belly up and he ended up in Debtors' prison.
But I can't remember the details of that one, but
we'll just celebrate it as a big victory USA number one.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Debtor's prison was a big thing.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
I just finished reading the book The Gambler, probably one
of my favorite authors. His name is Dostoevsky. In The Gambler,
Debtor's prison was a big thing. If you wrote an
iou you piece of paper like that was as good
as a contractor. If you cannot pay that, you went
into prison and you were there until someone paid your debt. Obviously,
(14:09):
The Gamblers a novel, but he was Debtor's prison in
that window of time seemed to be a really big thing.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
I feel like the Milwaukee Box and Cleveland Kevalis are
working as hard as they can to put me in
Debtor's prison this spring, so I can appreciate the feeling.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
What is the over under on the number of air udite,
potentially arrogant literary references I can make on the show.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Just Oh, just your Way there's so many more opportunities
for you. You'll do. You're very smart and handsome.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
All right. So we've discussed that lotteries became essentially the
first solution to any American problem. Here's another one. So
Thomas Jefferson is dying and he's got a han a debt.
Debts are super high. He had a lot of people
a lot money, and so they arranged a lottery to
raise money for his daughter Martha. And the three prizes
(15:06):
for this lottery were going to be three of Jefferson's properties,
and the grand prize was going to be Monticello, And
for those unfamiliar, if you have any loose change in
your pocket, that's the picture on the back of the
US nickel. It's a pretty fucking famous house. So that
was going to be the grand prize of top three
(15:26):
prizes in this lottery. But obviously Jefferson was incredibly famous
and had a lot of wealthy friends, and a lottery
for his property and belongings is pretty humiliating. So they
tried to pull their money together to buy it, and
that didn't work. And then the lottery that they arranged
sold sofie tickets. They basically canceled it, and eventually Martha
(15:48):
just sold the house for a fraction of its value.
And were these kind of lotteries? Were they above board?
Sometimes sometimes not? For example, thirty years after that first
log It's hotel Federal lottery that I just mentioned, they
ran another one for a beautification project, and the manager
who ran it sold all the tickets. He announces a
(16:10):
winning number, does all the things he's supposed to do,
except he took all the money and disappeared. They I
don't believe they ever found him. And usually the attitude,
because it's America, was like, dah, you know what, what
can you do that? You pay your money and you
takes your chances, and sometimes you know that's life. Buyer
beware buy, hey, buyer, beware man. Sometimes you know it's
not a ticket I bought, it's just an old cracker
or whatever. But this time the guy that wins was
(16:34):
furious because the grand prize was one hundred thousand dollars,
which today would be two point seven million dollars. And
they said, hey, listen, you know we don't have any
of the money. The guy stole it. So this guy
files a lawsuit. He fights it for four full years,
and eventually the United States Supreme Court orders the City
(16:54):
of DC to pay him the money, so you can
fight city hall. And he did get his money. And
you'd think that that scandal would make people less interested
in lotteries, right, No. Shortly after that, one newspaper estimated
that the top eight cities alone sold almost seventy million
dollars worth of lottery tickets, which is five times larger
(17:18):
than the entire federal budget at the time. But unfortunately,
the fraud did worry a lot of regulators and state governments,
so within about ten years, state lottos were illegal in
almost every state. But that is the some of the
fun anecdotes from our early obsession with the.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Lottery country boats on gambling.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
The yingingyang of our puritanical values and our need to
risk it all to win big is a constant theme
throughout the building of our democracy.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
One of the best anecdotes they had from Did Schwartz,
author of Roll the Bones, fabulous book, was how many
blottery offices there were in New York, and they were
even more in Philadelphia, and even puritanical Boston had fifty,
Like there are still a few in Boston even though
they hated gambling there. You can't keep the gamblers down.
They're always going to crawl out of the woodwork.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
No one knows self loathing better than Bostonians. That's exactly right, Matt.
Can you please give us your next story?
Speaker 5 (18:26):
This week is the second leg of horse racing's Triple
Crown Preak Mistakes at Pimlico, and I want to give
another nod to the ponies and their crucial role in
the popularization of sports betting worldwide, because Chad, obviously on
a recent episode you referenced the origin of the term handicapping,
(18:46):
which comes from British horse racing in the seventeen hundreds,
before the establishment of odds based wagering, the performance of
a faster horse was literally handicapped by placing weights on
them during a race to kind of even things out.
You know, the bigger the perceived favorite, the heavier the weights,
the kind of quote bigger the handicap. I want to
(19:07):
talk about another phrase. So after odds making on horses
was common in the early eighteen hundreds, that paved the
way for establishments known as commission offices or racing banks.
But what we hear on the show would call the
OTB off track betting. If you've never been to an OTB, Chad,
(19:27):
how would you describe it?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I would describe it as a gloriously sad, dingy, dirty
for Micah floored, fluorescent lit single room that if you
walked by it on the street, as I have many
(19:52):
many times in New York, you might think it was
a storefront that was for lease because there's so little
signage and it's so sort of uninviting inside.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
That sounds rich. Simon, you've been doing OTB.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Right, Yeah, never an America, only in England. It's equally
as depressing. In both places.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
It's a magical place and they are there is a
ubiquity to them. It is a great place if you
have six dollars to lose, but want to make that
take an hour and a half. So otbs are springing
up all over the place, and it's where betting on
the Ponies started to transition from this like sportive kings
and wealthy elites to something that like ordinary people could
(20:37):
finally participate in. So it used to just be guys
that like if you closed your eyes and said, like
picture the King of England or Chad Milman, it was
guys like that that used to be the only people betting,
and thanks to otbs, it could finally include people that
looked more like Bert the Dick van Dyk character from
Mary Poppins, or Simon and his ancestors Jim Jimminee, Jim Jimminee,
(21:03):
Jim Jim Cheru.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I does what I likes, and I likes well I do.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
There was an egalitarianism to being able to wager away
from the track, and some of these locations were big,
sharp operations, and of course some of these were very dodgy,
called you know, mayfly operations, because in some of these
shittier places, you know, they might need a heavy favorite
to lose a race, to quote Bob Scucci, fur their lungs,
(21:32):
and if that favorite ended up winning, they might just
shut down, not open the next day and just leave town.
But in both places they're quickly emerged another character that
the three of us know even better today than they
did then, the tout. This was the creation of the
tout the tipster, because basically as soon as these British
(21:56):
otbs opened in the early eighteen hundreds, they offered print
cuvere of the races, and as soon as there was coverage.
There were guys advertising subscription tallet services that guaranteed gambling
profits the Victorian era. Bretts Chad just like us.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Listen, Matt.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I think for everyone listening, they should know that there
will be a third of the final exam will be
on horse racing, the importance of the daily racing form,
in the interconnectivity of the OTBS, the formation of the OTBS,
and how that led to broader sports betting throughout the country.
(22:36):
All of that, there's going to be an essay on
that that everyone can write in their blue books.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
I was gonna say, I had my blue book ready.
I'll be ready to go, King.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Simon and Matt, can you remember the name of the
person who owned the daily racing form that helped propel
the information economy around sports betting?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
I mentioned it in a previous show.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Oh I can't do that, Mo and No.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Former owner of the Philadelphia in Choir.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
I believe.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Film throughout the causes throughout the city of Philadelphia actually unions.
The train station in Philly might be like the Annenberg
Hall or something. I'll figure it out when I'm there
in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you when I
get out of the train.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
I gotta say, check from this show.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
The most amazing thing I'm going to take away from
is the fact that our fraud government was less corrupt
back then it is today. I can't imagine if our
government owed some guy in the news making bad headlines
about them two million dollars, that guy would just disappear
back then.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
They paid him. I'm so shocked by that. So yeah,
as always loved Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
I think this is a good example of something we
talked a lot about a couple of weeks ago, which
is that there's this idea, especially in America, that these
betting phenomena are like a newer thing, when in fact
they're very, very old. Like check this out. The lawnmower,
the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, refrigeration, all of these
(24:04):
are newer inventions than the subscription tout service. Like these
are very old ideas. And one final thing on this
before we move off. Victorian era Britain, named for the
reign of Queen Victoria, who's queen for like the last
sixty years of the eighteen hundreds, one of history's preeminent haters.
Not a barrel of laughs and Britain would make otbs
(24:27):
illegal in eighteen fifty three. They just basically became a
giant black market. But I want to shout out her
oldest son very much, a friend of the show, who'd
become King Edward the Seventh when she died in nineteen
oh one. This guy loved betting, and he said that
because horse racing was quote a manly sport that is
popular with englishmen of all classes, there was no reason
(24:50):
to restrict gambling on it. And so he may have
looked a little bit weird, maybe because his parents were
first cousins. It's none of my business, but friend of
the show, the people's king, shout out to him.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
All right, Matt, last one, you have a story that
involves a famous Russian gambler. Gosh, I wish I had
read the script, because now is where I could have
dropped in my Dostoevsky reference.
Speaker 5 (25:17):
I do want to again stress to any listeners how
little Chad prepares that how much of this show is
the work of people you don't see or hear, Because
obviously I'm going.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
To talk about we're seeing him constantly. Now he can't.
He doesn't want to be on the show yet. We
can't get him off the show, so you know, take
that for what you will.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Wow, if only the listeners of the podcast would hear
the sarcasm that I'll so surely cut out of this episode.
Ah all right, So a lot of very famous Russians
love to gamble. There's one thing that they know a
lot about, and that's suffering. So obviously they're special to
gamblers of all nationalities. For example, Leo Tolstoy, the writer
(26:00):
in Peace, he once lost a fortune at the German
spa town of Bodenboden. But Tolstoy can't compare to our friend,
renowned Russian novelist Theodor Dostovsky. To my credit, incredible.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
It doesn't say Dustyevsky in the script that I got,
It just says Russian gambler.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Story.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Full credit to you, Shame on me. You're doing a
great job and are very smart and handsome. So, to
make a long story short, when Theodor Dostovski was in
his thirties, he was pretty critical of the Russian government,
which I wouldn't recommend really then or now. And he
gets sentenced to death by firing squad. But he gets
(26:43):
that sentence commuted and instead, he's got to do eight
years of hard labor and then military service in Siberia.
It's a step up from a firing squad, but obviously
not not a barrelo laughs. While in Siberia he does
what we would do, and that's gamble a lot with
the fellas, and obviously that was, you know, to helped
(27:04):
you pass some of the time. But he also does
what every good Russian you know has always done, suffer
and suffer and suffer some more. He's now a gambling
enthusiast and long suffering. And to connect it back to
earlier in the show, once those eight years in Siberia
are over, if you look up a portrait of Dostovsky,
like if you just go to his Wikipedia page, he
(27:26):
looks a lot like all of the guys you run
into at any otb. It's like, exactly if you, like,
I have never been to one, what of the guys
look like? Just look up Theodora Dostavski. Anyway, after he's
out of Siberia, he makes his first visit to one
of those fun German spa towns like Tolstoy had been too.
And at first, stop me, if you've heard a story
(27:47):
like this before. At first he wins a bunch of money,
but once he gets to baden Baden, he loses a
ton of money. And there's this great description of his betting.
I think this will sound familiar to lots of people.
To quote Roll the Bones, he played in a state
of grim agitation, his creative mind exponentially magnifying every win
(28:10):
and every loss. This guy sounds like a riot.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
You should read The Gambler. I just read it literally
two weeks ago. It's slims, so you should be able
to handle it quickly.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
I can actually tell you how many fucker words it is.
Sixty thousand words. It's exactly half as many words as
crime and Punishment. But we'll get to that. So the
next year, more suffering his wife dies than his brother dies,
and because of debtor's prison and those regulations, he inherits
all of his brother's debt. So he needs money, so
(28:42):
he signs a publishing deal and he has to deliver
a book in the next eighteen months, and if he doesn't,
he's going to get a huge fine, and he's going
to lose the rights to all of his other books.
And he's in the middle of writing Crime and punishment,
but it won't be done in time because Chad, as
you know, it's like ten billion pages long. Yeah, So
our boy fyodor he's backed into a corner and then
(29:03):
he feels like he's been set on fire, and he
gets a great idea. He hires a twenty year old
stenographer named Anna. Great idea. Then in just four days
he dictates that entire novel to her, which spoiler alert
would become the classic novel The Gambler, and it gets
him out of his jam, and then he marries Ana
(29:25):
the stenographer. Hey, great job. Game balls all around for Fyodora,
but he's still a gambling addict and he still owes
all of his brother's debts. So he does the right
thing here and he skips down. He heads out on
a promotional tour, and soon he winds up in and Boden,
the casino town in Germany. I wonder what's gonna happen there, guys.
(29:45):
He starts betting like a complete fucking maniac. He sits
down and wins forty times his money at roulette. Almost
right away, Anna the stenographer wife is like, hey, why
don't we get the fuck out of here? And he
knows he has to get out of here. He does not.
He loses all of the money that he won than
all the money that he has. Then he sells his clothes,
(30:06):
makes his wife sell all of her shit. They lose
that money total, washed out, degenerate situation, and then he
continues later traveling betting more strains his marriage. But our
story here has a very nineteenth century Russian solution. A ghost.
When he's fifty years old, Theodor's dead father appears to
(30:28):
him in a dream and scares the absolute shit out
of him and warns him of impending doom. And it works,
It actually works, he writes to his wife, He apologizes,
He promises to focus only on writing. He promises to
never gamble again, and thanks to the spooky ghost of
his dead Russian father, he never gambles again.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Matt, you are our very own Dostoevsky. A life eventless suffering, Chad,
That's exactly what I was thinking. Brilliant, brilliant storytelling, suffused
with long, simmering, gestating suffering, My pleasure to serve and.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
A good lesson for kids.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Chad, You'll never be a winning gambler if you eventually quit.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
Jesus, there's not enough ghosts. There's not enough ghosts to
visit the three of us.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Oh my god, that is too funny. Matt Mitchell, that
was great. I'm so excited for you to go back
to producing and then find a way to wiggle your
way on the show.
Speaker 5 (31:35):
Oh it's just a pleasure to share a zoom screen
with someone so smart and handsome. Thank you so much
for having me on.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
See you're saying it with sarcasm, but I internalize it
and think, huh he could.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Be right, and so so many good ideas as well. Incredible, Yeah,
and well read. So literate.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
That's right, so literate, the most literate sports betting podcast
in America.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
And you know what.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
We will return with our next episode of The Favorites
Tuesday on the Action Network YouTube page. Download us from Spotify,
Apple podcast, wherever you get your pods, rate review, subscribe,
We with spotstars say whatever you want, feedback is you
get Until next time, Love you.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
Action Network reminds you please gamble responsibly.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem,
help is available twenty four to seven at one eight
hundred Gambler
Welcome to The Favorites, the podcast part of the Volume
podcast Network. I am Chad Milman of the Action Network.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today. I'm joined as always by my co.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Host, my companion, Mike Cabadre, my BFF professional better Assignment hunter.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, sign in.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hello Chad.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Over the weekend, I heard from my doctor who I've
known for twenty years about.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Our Pope Show. That's how weird He liked it.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Yeah, even though after the fact, obviously, it just cracked
me up that my guy texted me again. He knows
what I've done my whole life, he knows what the
podcast and everything. It never hits me up about it.
He texted me, how much you enjoyed the Pope Show
and just how we brought a totally different look to
it and how we view the market. And yeah, we
got pretty lucky. We at least we mentioned the name.
(00:56):
We didn't give it out as a winner, but at
least the name was mentioned here on the show, So
shout out to Dubunda.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
You know what I feel like, I thought about this naturally.
I thought about it from the point of view of
me and the Pope market. That I was highest on
was the dude from France from Marseille, who had a
three percent chance, and my logic on him, if you remember,
(01:26):
was he's an outlier candidate. He has a lot of
experience with immigration, which is important to the church right
now and bringing together cultures from a lot of disparate
places where they need to grow the Catholic community. And
(01:46):
it's not going to be someone who's got the shortest dods,
because it's never someone who has the shortest dodds.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So my logic was one hundred percent right.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I just discounted my guy from Chicago, and I like,
I have been loving, loving, like the text chain that
I've had with my Chicago boys about the Pope and
the memes and the Annie Agar tweet where she immediately
sent out the post that Chicago has a pope before
(02:18):
it has a four thousand yard passer, and the t
shirts that sayd Pope, Like the video that someone did
of the Pope being introduced to Saint Peter's Square, to
the Alan Parsons project intro that used to be with
the Bulls and Michael Jordan. I'm here for all of it.
(02:39):
I freaking love it. I love his brothers who just
keep talking about him and like are having a blast,
Like everything about it is familiar. I had an uncle
who lived on the southwest side of Chicago in the
suburbs near where he lived, and they all sound alike,
they all look alike.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm just I'm loving the Pope lost.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
It was a smart move by then. Like we talked
on the show, I thought they've given up on the West.
Clearly they have not, and that's a market they're going after.
So what they wanted to do is working.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
He's becoming already a sensation here in America. And I
joked with a buddy who's a Roman Catholic like I am.
You know, he always goes to eleven o'clock Mass, usually
half empty. What do you think it was this weekend?
Check packed, packed, packed for Mother's Day. So yeah, I'm
excited to see what this is going to do going forward.
And you know, like we joked on the show, it's
(03:33):
such a niche market. It sucked that it didn't work out.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Where you know, we did the show an hour later.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I believe we got the text from Matt Mitchell like,
holy shit, white smoke. But the show, if you go
back and listen to it's it's an interesting market and
something that going forward, if me and Chack, Guy Luhn
or some together in twelve twenty years, I look forward
to our next Pope show.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Brother, Why wouldn't we be together? Simon?
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I have terrible health concerns for myself, not you. You'll
be fine. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
You know what, Simon, You and I are going to
be together in about two weeks because I'm coming down
to Philly and we're going to spend the day together.
Maybe we should go to Mass. Maybe we should go
to like an eleven am.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Massames as soon as I stepped through that, and we
will really.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Really pray a lapsed Catholic and a Jew walk into
eleven am Mass in South Jersey.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
What possibly could go wrong?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Next week, We're going to have a lengthy discussion about
the impact of the NFL schedule release, and I'm gonna
want to bring in some of the points that we
made in our show earlier this week that Evan noted,
and see if we can start to apply some of
these things and see if there are games that normally
we would be trapped into picking that are we changing
(04:46):
our thinking a little bit?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
So I'm excited for that.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We're also going to sit down with Jason Bennetti, the
broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers and nationally with Fox. Like
he's been on the show before. He is so freaking good.
He is so funny, He is so talented. He is
so smart at calling games and keeping you entertained without
it being intrusive, and understanding the really nitty.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Greedy details.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
He used to do back in the day when he
was at ESPN, they would do these analytics broadcasts and
he was brilliant at these. So I'm excited for Jason. Today,
we're going to bring in Matt Mitchell. We did this
show earlier in the off season and we got great response.
As you can expect, people love betting history on this show. Look,
(05:37):
my entire desk, you can't see it right now, is
piled with betting history paraphernalia. And I'm looking at a
picture right now the guy who was the original bookmaker
for the Mafia, and he's it's a picture of him
hanging out in Cuba with a jockey and like Meyer Lansky.
(05:57):
So it's I love this stuff. Matt Mitchell is gonna
come on. He's gonna tell us more of the things
he's unearthed from gambling's wild history.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Welcome back to the show, Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
Oh, you know, it's just an honor to shoehorn myself
into an off season episode chat.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You've been working so hard at becoming talent. You're really
you're getting close.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
I love on camera Mat. He's very tamed. I I
feel like he's nervous.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
He was like, am I about to say what I
should say? This guy? Are we taped right now? So
I love on camera Mat.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
You know what, I'll give a little look behind the curtain.
When we started one million years ago here, Chet was
very encouraging that I do more on camera stuff, become
more talent forward. That's right, I was. I wasn't as
interested in mostly as an exhausted parent of too at
the time incredibly small children. But more than that, I
don't enjoy shows where the producer tries to shoehorn themselves
(07:00):
into the show a lot. I appreciate that wherever our
beloved listeners are right now, on a yacht or a treadmill,
or at work, or in a subway or whatever the hell,
jumping on a trampoline, whatever they're doing, they're here to
hang out with their two friends, you know. Chad and
Simon and I can pop in once in a while,
but more importantly, if I need to kick somebody off
(07:20):
a show, not necessarily this one, but something else in
our network. It gets a lot harder to have those
conversations if you are on camera talent, because you by
definition of saying, I'm better than that. So it was
always easier to be someone whose impact was felt without
being seen, or whose flat rochestery accent wasn't heard on
(07:41):
these airwaves. So I appreciate.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
That funny because we know that his position has clearly changed,
because if you've been in one of the live shows,
you know, Matt just takes it over and Simon and
I become background noise for the entire event. Matt, we
just talked a little bit about betting the papacy. Did
you bet on who would become the Pope?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Well, you two jag offs we're talking in that episode.
I was. I realized that the market would close at
the top of that that hour, so I need to
get my bets in and I'm going through and I
only wanted to bet, you know, twenty to one or
higher for all the reasons we outlined in that episode.
I'm doing foreign dudes, no Americans. That that felt ridiculous,
(08:21):
and I opened up Bob's odds. I'm trying to find
ages in locations. Oh sixty nine years old, Oh, Chicago, Illinois.
No way. I opened it up, could have bet it
and said, no way, make a couple more. I opened
up one more guy, Cardinal Burke. Oh, he's from Wisconsin.
I mean, well, I'll put ten bucks on this guy.
(08:42):
I threw away money on an American papal candidate that
wasn't the right one. Four minutes for the market closed.
I will be haunted forever, but at least we got
a pope who has ben and said my two favorite
restaurants Wah wah and Portillo's. So I feel like he'll
have my best interested heart despite not being a Catholic
(09:03):
at all. But yeah, I wish him the very best.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
My god, it's great, all right, Matt Mitchell subject number
one in How Sports Betting Explained the World, there's a
really famous book called How Soccer Explains the World.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The writer who's brilliant.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
His name is Franklin for and he writes for the Atlantic,
but in his previous years he has written for a
bunch of different magazines, and newspapers. At one point he
was the eder in chief of the New Republic and
it was a seminole book and sort of just the
title alone defines the framing of something really small explaining
(09:49):
something really big. And he wrote this book called How
Soccer Explains the World. So I think about this as
the how Betting Explains the World episode. Your first topic
America's lottery fever, Matt Mitchell, The flora is yours.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
Love that framing. Great job, great hosting, as always, Chad,
thank you well. As you can imagine from its very founding,
America has loved betting, and who couldn't. But one of
the hardest parts of having a new and pretty large
nation is collecting money, collecting tax revenue. We as Americans,
(10:27):
we would rather be throwing tea into a harbor than
paying our taxes. That hasn't changed. So within the first
couple decades of America's birth, if the government wanted to
finance a large public project, they did the smart thing.
They ran lotteries. They turned tax collection into gambling. And
if you've ever wondered how, like very old East Coast
(10:49):
cities like New York and Philadelphia, how they got so
nice even before eighteen hundred, those two cities alone, just
isolating those two they financed public projects using more than
two thousand state authorized lotteries. They were all over it.
So I've got a couple of my favorite lottery examples.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
You guys ready, I am ready, simon, are you ready?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Let's do it all right.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
So, when they were literally draining the swamp to build Washington,
d C. They financed a lot of that construction through
federal lotteries. And the first of these huge federal lottos
offered a big grand prize a building called Blodget's Hotel.
If you won this lottery, you would win this big
(11:37):
ass building. And the first ticket in that big lotto
was purchased by George Washington, so we know that he
gambled at least one time. In fun fact, twenty years later,
when those disgusting, filthy Brits burned down a lot of Washington,
d C. In the War of eighteen twelve, that building
(11:58):
bloge It's Hotel, and I would end up serving as
the temporary home of Congress And although Logit's Hotel that
would also eventually burn down years later, the Hotel Monaco
in DC stands there now in the shadow of Capital
One Arena where the Washington Capitals will be playing a
playoff game this very evening.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
How betting explains the world right there? You know, we
had David schwartz On who who wrote the book Roll
the Bones, that we get a lot of that we
steal a lot of these ideas from. I remember interviewing
him fifteen sixteen years ago in the library at UNLV
where the gaming research studies are done, talking about the
(12:45):
hypocrisy of state by state, everybody allowing lotteries but not
allowing sports betting. And honestly, it was in that moment
in the library where I realized this shit's going to
be legal. Like, at the end of the day, it's
too much money to leave on the table for every
state that needs more and more money every single year.
(13:09):
If we've been doing it since the beginning of the Republic,
it's just a matter of time. Lotteries to sports betting.
Nicely done, Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
Yeah, if we could just pay our federal state taxes
in the form of scratchers, I feel like we'd solve
a big part of our deficit right there. So here's another.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Example, by the way, did George Washington win the hotel.
Speaker 5 (13:29):
He did not. In fact, I think the guy that
fronted that scheme blotch it. I think that ended up
going belly up and he ended up in Debtors' prison.
But I can't remember the details of that one, but
we'll just celebrate it as a big victory USA number one.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Debtor's prison was a big thing.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
I just finished reading the book The Gambler, probably one
of my favorite authors. His name is Dostoevsky. In The Gambler,
Debtor's prison was a big thing. If you wrote an
iou you piece of paper like that was as good
as a contractor. If you cannot pay that, you went
into prison and you were there until someone paid your debt. Obviously,
(14:09):
The Gamblers a novel, but he was Debtor's prison in
that window of time seemed to be a really big thing.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
I feel like the Milwaukee Box and Cleveland Kevalis are
working as hard as they can to put me in
Debtor's prison this spring, so I can appreciate the feeling.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
What is the over under on the number of air udite,
potentially arrogant literary references I can make on the show.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Just Oh, just your Way there's so many more opportunities
for you. You'll do. You're very smart and handsome.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
All right. So we've discussed that lotteries became essentially the
first solution to any American problem. Here's another one. So
Thomas Jefferson is dying and he's got a han a debt.
Debts are super high. He had a lot of people
a lot money, and so they arranged a lottery to
raise money for his daughter Martha. And the three prizes
(15:06):
for this lottery were going to be three of Jefferson's properties,
and the grand prize was going to be Monticello, And
for those unfamiliar, if you have any loose change in
your pocket, that's the picture on the back of the
US nickel. It's a pretty fucking famous house. So that
was going to be the grand prize of top three
(15:26):
prizes in this lottery. But obviously Jefferson was incredibly famous
and had a lot of wealthy friends, and a lottery
for his property and belongings is pretty humiliating. So they
tried to pull their money together to buy it, and
that didn't work. And then the lottery that they arranged
sold sofie tickets. They basically canceled it, and eventually Martha
(15:48):
just sold the house for a fraction of its value.
And were these kind of lotteries? Were they above board?
Sometimes sometimes not? For example, thirty years after that first
log It's hotel Federal lottery that I just mentioned, they
ran another one for a beautification project, and the manager
who ran it sold all the tickets. He announces a
(16:10):
winning number, does all the things he's supposed to do,
except he took all the money and disappeared. They I
don't believe they ever found him. And usually the attitude,
because it's America, was like, dah, you know what, what
can you do that? You pay your money and you
takes your chances, and sometimes you know that's life. Buyer
beware buy, hey, buyer, beware man. Sometimes you know it's
not a ticket I bought, it's just an old cracker
or whatever. But this time the guy that wins was
(16:34):
furious because the grand prize was one hundred thousand dollars,
which today would be two point seven million dollars. And
they said, hey, listen, you know we don't have any
of the money. The guy stole it. So this guy
files a lawsuit. He fights it for four full years,
and eventually the United States Supreme Court orders the City
(16:54):
of DC to pay him the money, so you can
fight city hall. And he did get his money. And
you'd think that that scandal would make people less interested
in lotteries, right, No. Shortly after that, one newspaper estimated
that the top eight cities alone sold almost seventy million
dollars worth of lottery tickets, which is five times larger
(17:18):
than the entire federal budget at the time. But unfortunately,
the fraud did worry a lot of regulators and state governments,
so within about ten years, state lottos were illegal in
almost every state. But that is the some of the
fun anecdotes from our early obsession with the.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Lottery country boats on gambling.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
The yingingyang of our puritanical values and our need to
risk it all to win big is a constant theme
throughout the building of our democracy.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
One of the best anecdotes they had from Did Schwartz,
author of Roll the Bones, fabulous book, was how many
blottery offices there were in New York, and they were
even more in Philadelphia, and even puritanical Boston had fifty,
Like there are still a few in Boston even though
they hated gambling there. You can't keep the gamblers down.
They're always going to crawl out of the woodwork.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
No one knows self loathing better than Bostonians. That's exactly right, Matt.
Can you please give us your next story?
Speaker 5 (18:26):
This week is the second leg of horse racing's Triple
Crown Preak Mistakes at Pimlico, and I want to give
another nod to the ponies and their crucial role in
the popularization of sports betting worldwide, because Chad, obviously on
a recent episode you referenced the origin of the term handicapping,
(18:46):
which comes from British horse racing in the seventeen hundreds,
before the establishment of odds based wagering, the performance of
a faster horse was literally handicapped by placing weights on
them during a race to kind of even things out.
You know, the bigger the perceived favorite, the heavier the weights,
the kind of quote bigger the handicap. I want to
(19:07):
talk about another phrase. So after odds making on horses
was common in the early eighteen hundreds, that paved the
way for establishments known as commission offices or racing banks.
But what we hear on the show would call the
OTB off track betting. If you've never been to an OTB, Chad,
(19:27):
how would you describe it?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I would describe it as a gloriously sad, dingy, dirty
for Micah floored, fluorescent lit single room that if you
walked by it on the street, as I have many
(19:52):
many times in New York, you might think it was
a storefront that was for lease because there's so little
signage and it's so sort of uninviting inside.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
That sounds rich. Simon, you've been doing OTB.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Right, Yeah, never an America, only in England. It's equally
as depressing. In both places.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
It's a magical place and they are there is a
ubiquity to them. It is a great place if you
have six dollars to lose, but want to make that
take an hour and a half. So otbs are springing
up all over the place, and it's where betting on
the Ponies started to transition from this like sportive kings
and wealthy elites to something that like ordinary people could
(20:37):
finally participate in. So it used to just be guys
that like if you closed your eyes and said, like
picture the King of England or Chad Milman, it was
guys like that that used to be the only people betting,
and thanks to otbs, it could finally include people that
looked more like Bert the Dick van Dyk character from
Mary Poppins, or Simon and his ancestors Jim Jimminee, Jim Jimminee,
(21:03):
Jim Jim Cheru.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I does what I likes, and I likes well I do.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
There was an egalitarianism to being able to wager away
from the track, and some of these locations were big,
sharp operations, and of course some of these were very dodgy,
called you know, mayfly operations, because in some of these
shittier places, you know, they might need a heavy favorite
to lose a race, to quote Bob Scucci, fur their lungs,
(21:32):
and if that favorite ended up winning, they might just
shut down, not open the next day and just leave town.
But in both places they're quickly emerged another character that
the three of us know even better today than they
did then, the tout. This was the creation of the
tout the tipster, because basically as soon as these British
(21:56):
otbs opened in the early eighteen hundreds, they offered print
cuvere of the races, and as soon as there was coverage.
There were guys advertising subscription tallet services that guaranteed gambling
profits the Victorian era. Bretts Chad just like us.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Listen, Matt.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I think for everyone listening, they should know that there
will be a third of the final exam will be
on horse racing, the importance of the daily racing form,
in the interconnectivity of the OTBS, the formation of the OTBS,
and how that led to broader sports betting throughout the country.
(22:36):
All of that, there's going to be an essay on
that that everyone can write in their blue books.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
I was gonna say, I had my blue book ready.
I'll be ready to go, King.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Simon and Matt, can you remember the name of the
person who owned the daily racing form that helped propel
the information economy around sports betting?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
I mentioned it in a previous show.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Oh I can't do that, Mo and No.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Former owner of the Philadelphia in Choir.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
I believe.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Film throughout the causes throughout the city of Philadelphia actually unions.
The train station in Philly might be like the Annenberg
Hall or something. I'll figure it out when I'm there
in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you when I
get out of the train.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
I gotta say, check from this show.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
The most amazing thing I'm going to take away from
is the fact that our fraud government was less corrupt
back then it is today. I can't imagine if our
government owed some guy in the news making bad headlines
about them two million dollars, that guy would just disappear
back then.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
They paid him. I'm so shocked by that. So yeah,
as always loved Matt Mitchell.
Speaker 5 (23:42):
I think this is a good example of something we
talked a lot about a couple of weeks ago, which
is that there's this idea, especially in America, that these
betting phenomena are like a newer thing, when in fact
they're very, very old. Like check this out. The lawnmower,
the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, refrigeration, all of these
(24:04):
are newer inventions than the subscription tout service. Like these
are very old ideas. And one final thing on this
before we move off. Victorian era Britain, named for the
reign of Queen Victoria, who's queen for like the last
sixty years of the eighteen hundreds, one of history's preeminent haters.
Not a barrel of laughs and Britain would make otbs
(24:27):
illegal in eighteen fifty three. They just basically became a
giant black market. But I want to shout out her
oldest son very much, a friend of the show, who'd
become King Edward the Seventh when she died in nineteen
oh one. This guy loved betting, and he said that
because horse racing was quote a manly sport that is
popular with englishmen of all classes, there was no reason
(24:50):
to restrict gambling on it. And so he may have
looked a little bit weird, maybe because his parents were
first cousins. It's none of my business, but friend of
the show, the people's king, shout out to him.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
All right, Matt, last one, you have a story that
involves a famous Russian gambler. Gosh, I wish I had
read the script, because now is where I could have
dropped in my Dostoevsky reference.
Speaker 5 (25:17):
I do want to again stress to any listeners how
little Chad prepares that how much of this show is
the work of people you don't see or hear, Because
obviously I'm going.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
To talk about we're seeing him constantly. Now he can't.
He doesn't want to be on the show yet. We
can't get him off the show, so you know, take
that for what you will.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Wow, if only the listeners of the podcast would hear
the sarcasm that I'll so surely cut out of this episode.
Ah all right, So a lot of very famous Russians
love to gamble. There's one thing that they know a
lot about, and that's suffering. So obviously they're special to
gamblers of all nationalities. For example, Leo Tolstoy, the writer
(26:00):
in Peace, he once lost a fortune at the German
spa town of Bodenboden. But Tolstoy can't compare to our friend,
renowned Russian novelist Theodor Dostovsky. To my credit, incredible.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
It doesn't say Dustyevsky in the script that I got,
It just says Russian gambler.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Story.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Full credit to you, Shame on me. You're doing a
great job and are very smart and handsome. So, to
make a long story short, when Theodor Dostovski was in
his thirties, he was pretty critical of the Russian government,
which I wouldn't recommend really then or now. And he
gets sentenced to death by firing squad. But he gets
(26:43):
that sentence commuted and instead, he's got to do eight
years of hard labor and then military service in Siberia.
It's a step up from a firing squad, but obviously
not not a barrelo laughs. While in Siberia he does
what we would do, and that's gamble a lot with
the fellas, and obviously that was, you know, to helped
(27:04):
you pass some of the time. But he also does
what every good Russian you know has always done, suffer
and suffer and suffer some more. He's now a gambling
enthusiast and long suffering. And to connect it back to
earlier in the show, once those eight years in Siberia
are over, if you look up a portrait of Dostovsky,
like if you just go to his Wikipedia page, he
(27:26):
looks a lot like all of the guys you run
into at any otb. It's like, exactly if you, like,
I have never been to one, what of the guys
look like? Just look up Theodora Dostavski. Anyway, after he's
out of Siberia, he makes his first visit to one
of those fun German spa towns like Tolstoy had been too.
And at first, stop me, if you've heard a story
(27:47):
like this before. At first he wins a bunch of money,
but once he gets to baden Baden, he loses a
ton of money. And there's this great description of his betting.
I think this will sound familiar to lots of people.
To quote Roll the Bones, he played in a state
of grim agitation, his creative mind exponentially magnifying every win
(28:10):
and every loss. This guy sounds like a riot.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
You should read The Gambler. I just read it literally
two weeks ago. It's slims, so you should be able
to handle it quickly.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
I can actually tell you how many fucker words it is.
Sixty thousand words. It's exactly half as many words as
crime and Punishment. But we'll get to that. So the
next year, more suffering his wife dies than his brother dies,
and because of debtor's prison and those regulations, he inherits
all of his brother's debt. So he needs money, so
(28:42):
he signs a publishing deal and he has to deliver
a book in the next eighteen months, and if he doesn't,
he's going to get a huge fine, and he's going
to lose the rights to all of his other books.
And he's in the middle of writing Crime and punishment,
but it won't be done in time because Chad, as
you know, it's like ten billion pages long. Yeah, So
our boy fyodor he's backed into a corner and then
(29:03):
he feels like he's been set on fire, and he
gets a great idea. He hires a twenty year old
stenographer named Anna. Great idea. Then in just four days
he dictates that entire novel to her, which spoiler alert
would become the classic novel The Gambler, and it gets
him out of his jam, and then he marries Ana
(29:25):
the stenographer. Hey, great job. Game balls all around for Fyodora,
but he's still a gambling addict and he still owes
all of his brother's debts. So he does the right
thing here and he skips down. He heads out on
a promotional tour, and soon he winds up in and Boden,
the casino town in Germany. I wonder what's gonna happen there, guys.
(29:45):
He starts betting like a complete fucking maniac. He sits
down and wins forty times his money at roulette. Almost
right away, Anna the stenographer wife is like, hey, why
don't we get the fuck out of here? And he
knows he has to get out of here. He does not.
He loses all of the money that he won than
all the money that he has. Then he sells his clothes,
(30:06):
makes his wife sell all of her shit. They lose
that money total, washed out, degenerate situation, and then he
continues later traveling betting more strains his marriage. But our
story here has a very nineteenth century Russian solution. A ghost.
When he's fifty years old, Theodor's dead father appears to
(30:28):
him in a dream and scares the absolute shit out
of him and warns him of impending doom. And it works,
It actually works, he writes to his wife, He apologizes,
He promises to focus only on writing. He promises to
never gamble again, and thanks to the spooky ghost of
his dead Russian father, he never gambles again.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Matt, you are our very own Dostoevsky. A life eventless suffering, Chad,
That's exactly what I was thinking. Brilliant, brilliant storytelling, suffused
with long, simmering, gestating suffering, My pleasure to serve and.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
A good lesson for kids.
Speaker 4 (31:15):
Chad, You'll never be a winning gambler if you eventually quit.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
Jesus, there's not enough ghosts. There's not enough ghosts to
visit the three of us.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Oh my god, that is too funny. Matt Mitchell, that
was great. I'm so excited for you to go back
to producing and then find a way to wiggle your
way on the show.
Speaker 5 (31:35):
Oh it's just a pleasure to share a zoom screen
with someone so smart and handsome. Thank you so much
for having me on.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
See you're saying it with sarcasm, but I internalize it
and think, huh he could.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
Be right, and so so many good ideas as well. Incredible, Yeah,
and well read. So literate.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
That's right, so literate, the most literate sports betting podcast
in America.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
And you know what.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
We will return with our next episode of The Favorites
Tuesday on the Action Network YouTube page. Download us from Spotify,
Apple podcast, wherever you get your pods, rate review, subscribe,
We with spotstars say whatever you want, feedback is you
get Until next time, Love you.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
Action Network reminds you please gamble responsibly.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem,
help is available twenty four to seven at one eight
hundred Gambler
Hosts And Creators
Colin Cowherd
Jason McIntyre
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