Sports betting: Timing essential to great odds

Way back in March, when a high school buddy of mine threw down some money on the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the National League pennant in the major-league baseball playoffs, the rest of us laughed in his face. We were in Vegas at the time to bet on college basketball, and there was this dude, going all national pastime on us.

"Yo," the friend said, "look at the odds." He shoved the ticket in our faces. Then the number stared out at us: 40/1.

In the moment, the wager suddenly seemed like genius. We all started fantasizing about how one lightning-in-a-bottle type season could turn $20 into $800 overnight. Fast forward seven months, and the bet seems even smarter: The Pirates won the NL wild card and played the St. Louis Cardinals to the wire for the right to advance to the NLCS. (At press time, it was unclear who would win the series.) The lesson: Sometimes, it really pays to embrace big odds and gamble on a long shot.

(You can't legally bet on sports in California. You can, however, head into Nevada and bet in a sports book there. You also can place these kinds of wagers at a variety of websites based outside of the United States.)

In the past 10 days, there have been a number of examples of epic sports bets:

-- Earlier this month, Ohio State eked out a cover on the final play of a game against Northwestern, costing Vegas sports books an estimated $100 million in the process. (Roughly 80 percent of the money on the game was for OSU to cover.)

-- Last weekend, a bettor in Vegas put down $282 on a (mostly money-line) 18-team parlay that spanned sports and leagues. Some of the contests were blowouts. Some were nail-biters. One of the 18 games was on the University of Toledo to win outright. When every single one of this guy's picks hit, he turned his $282 investment into more than $54,000. Dan Shapiro of Gambling911.com says the chances of such a parlay hitting are 0.00000381469 percent, meaning the guy literally had a better chance of getting struck by lightning.

-- This weekend, sports bettors are in for another piece of history: The opening 28-point spread in Sunday's Denver Broncos/Jacksonville Jaguars game was the largest spread in NFL history. With Peyton Manning having an MVP-type season and going up against the worst team in the league, the Broncos likely will do it. Consider this free betting advice.

Matt Villano is a freelance writer in Healdsburg. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mattvillano

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Price of fame: Performers and sports stars die younger

By Belinda Goldsmith

LONDON | Wed Apr 17, 2013 7:18pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The price of fame can be high with an international study on Thursday finding that people who enjoy successful entertainment or sporting careers tend to die younger.

Researchers Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein said the study, based on analysing 1,000 New York Times obituaries from 2009-2011, found film, music, stage performers and sports people died at an average age of 77.2 years.

This compared to an average lifespan of 78.5 years for creative workers, 81.7 for professionals and academics, and 83 years for people in business, military and political careers.

The Australian-based researchers said these earlier deaths could indicate that performers and sports stars took more risks in life, either to reach their goals or due to their success.

"Fame and achievement in performance-related careers may be earned at the cost of a shorter life expectancy," the researchers wrote in their study published in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine.

"In such careers, smoking and other risk behaviors may be either causes of effects of success and/or early death."

Britain's most high-profile celebrity publicist, Max Clifford, said the pressure that celebrities and sports stars put on themselves to succeed had to play a part, and even at the top they were always worried about who could replace them.

"People assume that fame and success is all about riches and happiness but as someone who has worked with famous people for 45 years I know that is not the case," Clifford told Reuters.

"The success becomes like a drug to them that they have to have and they are always worried about losing it so they push and push and work harder and harder. You have to be competitive in these fields otherwise it will not work."

WARNING TO ASPIRING STARS

For the study the researchers separated the obituaries by gender, age, and cause of death as well as by occupation, with anyone involved in sports, acting, singing, music or dance put into a performance category.

Others were split into creative roles such as writing and visual arts, into a business, military and political category, or a group of professional, academic and religious careers.

The study found that the list was heavily skewed towards men who accounted for 813 of the obituaries and the main causes of earlier deaths were linked to accidents, infections including HIV, and cancer.

Lung cancer deaths - which the authors considered a sign of chronic smoking - were most common in performers.

Richard Epstein, a director at the Kinghorn Cancer Centre at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, acknowledged that the one-off analysis could not prove anything but raised interesting questions.

"If it is true that successful performers and sports players tend to enjoy shorter lives, does this imply that fame at younger ages predisposes to poor health behaviors in later life after success has faded?" he said.

He suggested maybe psychological and family pressures favouring high public achievement could lead to self-destructive tendencies or that risk-taking personality traits maximized the chances of success, with the use of cigarettes, alcohol or illicit drugs improving performance output in the short-term.

"Any of these hypotheses could be viewed as a health warning to young people aspiring to become stars," he said.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith)

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