A recent unauthorized biography of professional golfer Phil Mickelson chronicles gambling losses over a five-year period beginning in 2010 of more than 40 million dollars. The report also links Mickelson’s public statements on supporting the new Saudis golf association to his need for money in part to cover his massive gambling losses.
Another negative report on the evils of gambling.
Add Mickelson’s gambling losses to those that have kept Pete Rose out of the Baseball’s Hall of Fame or marred the life of Larry Howard of Three Stooges fame. In addition to public reports of celebrities suffering from gambling addictions that leveled their otherwise successful financial lives, we have the millions of individuals who lose their rent money or funds required to care for their families to local bookies.
All this can lead to giving my life’s work a bad name.
While I deal in handicapping and investing in professional sports, I am the first to cite the problem with gambling. Gambling, by definition, leads to long-term losses. Webster defines gambling as “To take a risk in the hope of gaining an advantage.”
The same dictionary defines investing this way; “To commit money or capital in order to gain profit.”
The key words that distinguish the two terms are that gambling relies on “hope” and investing “in order to gain.” I submit that gambling adds another layer that is most likely to separate the participants from their money. Gamblers routinely wager more when they are ahead until they’re not, and more when they are behind in an attempt to get even until they are in over their head.
If a person is investing in stocks or real estate, they are a lot less likely to double-down on another stock because they made money on one earlier in the day. The Sunday night game offers a chance to erase all the mistakes from the prior seven days, while Monday Night Football is played the day after most bookie phone accounts close for the week.
Forty years ago, Monday Night Football was an event most watched. Television ratings were astronomical for the weekly feature, for years seven or eight of the top ten watched shows were various Monday Night Football matchups. The trio of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith was entertaining all on their own and was only enhanced by the banter between Meredith and Cosell during an NFL game. Even contests that got out of a competitive balance had the benefit of knowing Meredith was at some point going to sing, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
Meredith was first to break up the trio, taking a job with NBC in 1974. The Monday Night Football booth was never the same. A preseason experiment with Fred Williamson was deemed such a failure that on the eve of the first regular season Monday night telecast Roone Arledge hired Alex Karras to fill the seat vacated by Meredith. The hiring was controversial, because National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle had suspended Karras for gambling and sidelined him for the 1963 season. It was not so much that Rozelle didn’t admire Karras, but that he’d prefer ABC hire someone other than a former athlete he had suspended.
Karras was great, and the show survived with high ratings.
By 2022, Sunday Night Football has replaced Monday Night Football as the most watched NFL game of the week.
Why?
Monday Night Football ratings continued a decline when they moved from network to cable, shifting their telecasts from ABC to ESPN. Sunday Night Football is aired on the NBC network. There is another reason that Sunday Night Football has gained in popularity, it offers gamblers a last opportunity to get even for the week. Sunday night offers a chance to erase seven days of mostly losing wagers. To be up for the week, all that is required is one big winning bet on the Sunday night game. It is a lure that entices gamblers to wager more on Sunday night, sometimes on games that offer no conclusive evidence for one team or the other.
Bookies that allow their clients to wager on credit have a measurably higher profit margin than those casinos that require payment for a wager before the contest is played. The difference between having the capital after a long week of negative results to make a big “get even” bet on Sunday night and being able to add it to an account that will be settled up on Tuesday, further separates the gamblers from their money.
For most, gambling is recreation. No different than drinking beer and playing cards with your buddies. That is a lot more fun than having to adhere to a business plan, even if the strategies offered consistently churn out bottom line profits. A typical NFL season employing the Basic Strategy to the Qoxhi Picks selections will generate a profit margin of 30 to 60 percent. Four other available strategies offer various risk versus return ratios while emphasizing the weekly Top Pick. In seasons where the weekly Top Pick wins at or above its nearly 70% lifetime winning percentage, extraordinary returns can be gained while utilizing the Aggressive, Top Pick Aggressive, Top Pick Double or Top Pick Exclusive money management methods.
For those looking for maximum action, the site offers point spreads for the first quarter, first half and final score with the results of this method chronicled as Triple Play. This action calls for three wagers on every rated selection. The first two years these results were chronicled on the Qoxhi Picks site they resulted in 38% and 35% gains, last season, they suffered their first losing record while down nearly 30%.
Phil Mickelson was gambling when he got into Billy Walters and his friends for 40 million dollars in losses and a reported outstanding debt of two-million-dollars. It prompted some bad behavior on the golfer’s part. Mickleson was implicated in an insider trading investigation that resulted in Walters sentenced to jail time and Mickelson needing only to repay the nearly one-million-dollars in profits from the ill-gotten transaction. Now Mickelson is looking for more money from a foreign country that seems at odds with the principles the United States purports to advocate.
Nope. I’m not a fan of gambling.
But making profits from NFL games with the benefits of Qoxhi Picks and the Account Manager, on that count me all in.