Wanna bet?
The stakes are high, the wagering has never been easier and everybody's got a chance to win. It's madness, all right. Place your bets
JAMES MIRTLE
March 15, 2008
Globe & Mail.com

TORONTO -- If something big's going on and it's during business hours, the TVs are going to be on it."

He only gave a first name - Brad - and said the words with a chuckle. He had spent plenty of time on Bay Street, years ago before the Internet Age when there was still a physical trading floor at the Toronto Stock Exchange, and had seen papers fly and funds exchanged as they did every year right around now.

And come Thursday, it'll happen all over again.

It's March Madness.

Employed in the financial industry by day, Brad (who declined to give his real name) started out as a run-of-the-mill pool master in the early 1990s on the floor, but over time, the bets went online and eventually blossomed into a website that now sees $1-million in prize money given out.

"It's really just an office pool that has run amok and gotten too big," he said. "This is not my business - I'm going to call it a hobby."

Football is the website's big draw, but the NCAA's annual men's basketball tournament - an event analysts say tops the Super Bowl in terms of wagers - ranks up there, too, with hundreds of bids in the $200 range placed well in advance of tomorrow's seedings announcement.

Depending on the event, winners stand to potentially take home more than $50,000 a play.

Those taking part are generally relative high rollers who have extra cash to spend on wagering online. "A lot of them are successful business men, as opposed to some guy from Woodbridge," the webmaster said.

March Madness has become a cash cow for both the NCAA and broadcaster CBS, exploding in popularity in recent years, and many point to online gambling as a major reason why.

This year's tournament projects earnings of $545-million in ad revenues alone for CBS, more than double the $239.1-million it generated 10 years ago according to a TNS Media Intelligence report. Advertising rates for the championship game, seen by 40.3 million people last year, are roughly three times greater than those during the NBA finals or the World Series.

Free online streaming of all tournament games has also helped increased the pull, as 1.4 million visitors watched a total of 2.6 million hours of video in 2007 via CBSSports.com. That's up from just 25,000 online subscribers in 2003, when the service cost $10.

But all of those figures are dwarfed by the bets.

Estimates of how much cash changes hands worldwide during the tournament by way of office pools and sports betting range from $2.5-billion to more than $5-billion, with only a small fraction of that money passing through legitimate Las Vegas sports books in the United States.

"March Madness is one of the busiest times of the year," said bookmaker Richard Gardner from Bodoglife.com, one of the largest online gambling sites.

"The madness really starts with the conference tournaments that precede the NCAA tournament ... [and] the March Madness period actually doubles the amount Bodog sees wagered on the Super Bowl as the sheer volume of games in such a condensed period lead many to believe this is the best time of the year for bettors."

"We've seen a good level of interest in the tournament in the past and we're expecting so again this year," said Don Pister, spokesperson for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, whose Pro Line and Point Spread setups take bets on almost every tournament game.

Pister said the OLGC had $3.4-million in sales on the tournament last year, or about $20,000 per game, which is double what an average NCAA football and basketball game receives the rest of the year.

By way of comparison, the average NHL game on Pro Line averages close to $50,000 in sales.

Despite that spike in government-sponsored gambling, the majority of March Madness betting worldwide is spent online through what are considered illegal channels.

The controversial big fish of the industry such as Bodog, for instance, are based in exotic offshore locales such as Antigua and Barbuda where North American gaming laws don't apply. (Not that they don't have Canadian connections. Bodog, for one, was founded in 2000 by Calvin Ayre, who grew up on a pig farm near Lloydminster, Sask., and attended the University of Waterloo.)

Office pools such as the March Madness brackets in workplaces across North America this time of year, however, are technically legal in this country as long as organizers do not profit from their proceeds. There are also several high-profile free-entry websites where fans of the tournament can compete, including bracket-based pools run by CBS, ESPN and Yahoo.

It's estimated that more than 10 per cent of Americans 18 and older participate in an office pool during the tournament. Canadian figures have never been compiled.

"It's a great tournament in that you don't need any expertise to pick the winner," said one Toronto lawyer who runs a 200-plus person pool at a large downtown firm. "That's why you tend to get people who have no interest in sports whatsoever into the pool; here you get a lot of assistants, a lot of wives, girlfriends, et cetera.

"It's pretty easy to get people involved."

Even those in the Canadian basketball fraternity credit office pools with expanding interest in the tournament.

"I know people that don't watch any basketball games throughout the year, but they'll get involved in the NCAA tournament pool," said Windsor Lancers head coach Chris Oliver, who plans on attending games across the river in Detroit. "It's not really formal gambling where they go through a Pro Line type of thing or Vegas or their bookie, it's just the fact that 'hey this is a neat kind of thing, I'll guess and see how I do.' The informal pools have created more and more interest from different people."

Part of the fun is in following along during office hours, using the online streaming coverage to keep abreast of how your bracket turns out. A study released this week by Chicago-based job firm Challenger, Gray and ******mas, Inc., said the tournament could cost American employers "as much as $1.7-billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament."

That's something that carries over across the border.

"Now that CBS has made the games all streamed online, here at the office you'll find people watching the games during the day," said the Toronto lawyer. "I've got the games on all day. I'm a big fan."

The considerable Canadian interest in an American college tournament is all part of the March Madness phenomenon, and many hoops nuts from across the country travel to tournament games in border cities such as Buffalo and Detroit. The Score television network will broadcast March Madness this year, and Canadian television in the past has averaged roughly 60,000 viewers a game, with a similar number watching the games on CBS's feed.

The Score, the exclusive Canadian broadcaster of March Madness through 2010, had 113,000 viewers tune in for last year's final between Ohio State and Florida, a number that is comparable with what Toronto Raptors broadcasts have drawn on the cable station this season.

The Score's website, part of a multiplatform approach to its coverage, also set a record with 6.3 million page views last March.

One of the tournament's unique draws has been the ability of relatively unknown schools to go on a run, something the George Mason University Patriots, an 11th seed, did when they went all the way to the Final Four in 2006. Those stories are easy to relate to for audiences in any country.

"I think as Canadians, we to a certain degree view ourselves as an underdog in a lot of sporting activities," the lawyer said. "It's an easy tournament to really start rooting for the underdog. It's a great tournament for that."

"Clearly, the top 25 to 50 programs, the teams from the power conferences, have the money and the advantages that come with it," Oliver said. "But I think that's more the point. When you get some of these teams from some of the lower conferences, they are true underdogs in that sense.

"There are obviously a lot of good teams in the U.S., and I think that's what evens it in the end. When it comes down to one and done, truly any team can win sometimes."

The underdogs also receive plenty of support when it comes to betting, something Gardner calls the 'bandwagon jumper phenomenon.' "Players tend to like backing the Cinderella story," he said.

Despite its prevalence, however, betting on March Madness is also a fairly clandestine activity, one which few businessmen and high-level execs are willing to attach their names to. The webmaster, Brad, says he has taken the time to ensure his site is above board - but he also wanted to keep the domain name and his identity under wraps to avoid flaunting the high-stakes gambling taking place. "We're not looking for publicity," he said.

"It's one of those things ... where we're structured so it's technically not [illegal], but you know, if it looks like a duck and smells like a duck.

"If somebody wanted to argue with you, you could have an argument."

Standard office pools shouldn't have that problem. "I don't think it really concerns anybody," said the lawyer, who donates a portion of his pool's proceeds to charity and doesn't take a cut for himself. "We don't associate it with the workplace at all, it's clearly not a work-sanctioned activity."

The stakes are pretty low, and the entry fee for anybody is not a substantial amount of money.

"Really, at the end of the day, it's just fun."

HOW TO PICK A WINNER

The Globe and Mail talked to one Toronto lawyer who had only one wrong pick in the first two rounds and won his office pool last season. The self-professed March Madness junkie suggests how to win your office pool:

Ride the favourites early

"One of the things, clearly, is there's never been a situation in the first round where a 16 team has beaten a No. 1 seed. There's only been four instances in history where a 15 has beat a two [seed], so it's pretty safe to pick ones and twos."

Know your conferences

"It's very rare to have more than one school from the same conference playing in the Final Four. You usually only see one school from a particular conference there."

Go with the big dogs

"Usually schools from the power conferences, the ones with the more difficult schedules during the year - the ACC, the Big East, the Pac 10 - they're the ones that make it the farthest in the tournament on a year-to-year basis."

How to pick an upset

"The only ways to really gauge an upset well, other than sheer luck, is actually knowing a lot about the teams themselves and doing some background research. Really look at the matchups and do a little bit of reading."

Ultimately, anyone can win

"At the end of the day, it really comes down to luck. It's a one and done tournament."

James Mirtle

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