Book Review: ‘Lay the Favorite’ by Beth Raymer

Lay the Favorite

A Memoir of Gambling

Beth Raymer

Spiegel & Grau: 240 pp., $25

One thing I’ve learned from working at an Indian casino is that appearances can be deceiving. If the stereotype is that gamblers are overweight, stogie-chewing men in sharkskin suits or young men in designer T-shirts and $500 sunglasses, such images are fallacious. Nine times out of 10, the so-called big spender who pulls up to the casino in a fancy car wearing flashy jewelry will gamble much less than the middle-aged Filipina in Old Navy sweatpants and knock-off Louis Vuitton fanny pack.

In her memoir of sports betting, “Lay the Favorite,” Beth Raymer gleefully shatters the myth of the modern gambler. Her story begins in Naked City, a seedy North Las Vegas neighborhood where she moves to be with a boyfriend. They break up almost immediately and Raymer soon finds herself living in a motel and working in a Thai restaurant. She has no contacts, no prospects — nothing but a determination not to return to Florida, where she worked at a halfway house and moonlighted as an in-home stripper. “It was 2001 and Vegas was the fastest growing metropolitan area in America,” she writes. “Fifteen hundred people were moving into the city each week. Everyone I met was very much like me.”

Then along comes Douglas “Dink” Heimowitz, a middle-aged man from Queens who loves baseball too much. Convicted of running an illegal bookmaking operation, he moves to Las Vegas to start over as a professional gambler. Dink may stand 6-foot-4 and weigh 280 pounds, yet he is anything but imposing. “He dressed like the mentally retarded adults I had met while volunteering at a group home,” Raymer tells us. “His Chicago Cubs T-shirt was two sizes too small for his expansive frame. Royal blue elasticized cotton shorts were pulled too high above his belly button.”

Dink offers Raymer a job at Dink, Inc. as an apprentice handicapper, teaching her how to read betting lines and place wagers. He indoctrinates her in the art of getting “the best of it,” which refers to the never-ending quest for point spreads that offer the greatest value. To Raymer, this doesn’t seem like real gambling. As she puts it, “It seemed like we were bargain hunting for luck.”

Raymer’s adventures take her from Las Vegas to New York to Costa Rica. As the Internet changes the way people gamble and the off-shore sports betting operations begin to rake in millions, she is faced with one elemental question: Is it legal? Her instincts tell her no. But the allure of easy money proves too strong, so she heads to Curacao to work for Bernard Rose at ASAP — All Serious Action Players.

Raymer is adept at bringing to life the rogue’s gallery of people she once called colleagues. In Curacao, we meet Wladimir, a murderous clerk/drug dealer with a strong distaste for white people. Then there’s Raymer’s boss, Bernard, a “harmless maniac” with a genius for numbers and a weakness for chocolate éclairs. Wherever Bernard goes, he is followed by an entourage of Genos, Jimmys and Vinnies, drawn to a life of “inexpensive, high-quality cocaine and hookers.”

Attracted to their unconventional lifestyle yet repulsed by their flaws, Raymer vacillates between admiration and disgust for these men. Although they see themselves as mavericks and talk like gangsters, they are thoroughly neurotic. They trust the wrong people, misplace enormous sums of money and cave in to their basest instincts. Whether vanity, paranoia or greed, their compulsions ultimately get the best of them.

Throughout “Lay the Favorite,” Raymer means to give up the high-risk/high-reward life of professional gambling. Yet every time she tries to get out, she gets pulled back in. She’s good at what she does and willing to put in long hours, but what she loves most is the lifestyle: white sand beaches, beachfront villas, wads of cash in her purse.

If she were a close friend or family member, we’d urge her to take the next flight home. But seduced by her stories, we long for this strange, sleazy and alluring landscape, even as the stakes get higher and Raymer’s search for “the best of it” turns into a worst-case scenario.

With a film adaptation in the works, it’s a safe bet that Raymer’s memoir will find a wide audience. In fact, her engaging voice makes her a shoe-in for a sequel. I’m setting the odds at 3 to 1.

Ruland is an employee at an Indian casino and the author of the short-story collection “Big Lonesome.”