Job title: Oddsmaker
 
Companies that hire them: internet gambling sites, Las Vegas sports books—the casino rooms where sports bets are accepted—and casino consultants.
 
How to find out about openings: Hang out at a sports book and get to know the business.

How much you can earn: The salary for a midlevel oddsmaker is around $60,000, while the lead oddsmaker at a casino can make in the low six figures.
 
Useful skills: Availability on weekends, affinity for numbers, and an endless appetite for watching sports.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: Probably around 200 to 300, with the vast majority located in Nevada, the only state where sports betting is legal.

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Kenny White is hoping 14 will be his lucky number this Sunday. That’s the recommended opening spread for this week’s Super Bowl that White and his fellow oddsmakers at Las Vegas Sports Consultants came up with after hours of number-crunching and analysis.

As co-owner, chief operating officer, and lead oddsmaker of L.V.S.C., White supplies Nevada casinos with the opening betting lines for professional football, basketball, baseball, and most any other sport you can think of. These lines are then modified by individual oddsmakers at each of the casinos, based on the betting patterns they see.

But the Super Bowl line is a notoriously difficult one to calculate, says White.

“[It] should be the easiest number to make all season, because there are so many games that have already been played, but it’s really not,” he says.

The problem for White and his colleagues is that teams play differently in do-or-die situations like the playoffs (as opposed to regular-season games). So, while an oddsmaker will typically begin to make better predictions based on watching a team play through its 16-game regular season, the playoffs are, in some sense, a whole other ball game.

And with the extra money being bet on the championship game—this year it’s expected to top $100 million in Nevada casinos and $1 billion worldwide—casinos stand to lose loads of cash if oddsmakers are significantly off with the opening line.

Ideally, the casino would like the betting to be equally spread on both sides of the line. That way, the casino reduces risk and safely collects the commission taken by the house for each bet, known as the vig, which is usually set at 10 percent.

To come up with the magic number for this ideal situation, oddsmakers like White first rely on so-called power ratings, a mathematical calculation that inputs factors like strength of schedule, momentum, and offensive and defensive capabilities and then churns out an overall team rating. The difference between two teams’ power ratings gives the oddsmaker an initial sense for the line. For this weekend’s matchup, White’s power ratings had New England as 10.5-point favorites.

The next step in adjusting that number is to use past experience and intuition about how the general public will bet. Since the average bettor typically puts money on the favorite, White moved the line up to 13 to make it more enticing to bet against the Patriots. Then, after meeting with the four other oddsmakers at L.V.S.C. who independently came up with their own, higher spreads, White moved the line up to 14 and shipped out to clients. For the record, in the conference championship games, White and his colleagues had the Patriots as 14-point favorites against the San Diego Chargers, and the New York Giants as 7-point underdogs against the Green Bay Packers. (Neither favorite managed to cover L.V.S.C.’s spread.)

For this Sunday, Vegas oddsmakers reduced L.V.S.C.’s 14-point spread to between 11 and 12.5 points, in reaction to bets made by the “smart money”—seasoned sports-betting veterans who are usually the first to place bets. Oddsmakers at the casinos make these adjustments in hopes of moving the amount of money bet closer to the fifty-fifty ideal. The contraction in the spread probably reflects the Patriots’ inability to cover the spread in six out of their last eight games.

“Anybody that’s backed the Patriots [recently] has lost money on them,” says White.

But he thinks the chances are good that the Patriots will cover the spread in the comfortable confines of the domed University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

His reasoning?

In the first eight games of the season, when the weather was mild, the Patriots covered the spread every single time.

White, 44, was introduced to the business by his father, a sports bettor who in 1968 moved his family from Florida to Nevada to pursue a career as a sports gambler. He was among the first to publish football-betting guides.

“In the ’70s and even into the ’80s, sports bettors were looked at as outcasts and even a little bit as degenerates, so his books didn’t go over real big,” White says.

White helped his father put some of the guides together and became enamored with the profession when his father correctly forecast Notre Dame as the 1977 college-football national champions in his book that year.

“I thought it was really cool that you could know the future six to eight months in advance,” White says.

It also helped that White had an affinity both for sports and math in high school.

“Math was the one subject I liked going to every day and had no problems getting A’s in. Every other class was a little bit of a struggle,” says White.

A multisport athlete who played tennis, football, basketball, and baseball in high school, White subsequently played minor league baseball for independent leagues in Utah and Iowa, but a career-ending injury dashed his hopes of becoming a professional athlete.

On his 21st birthday, White got his first job at a sports book and began working his way up the ladder, eventually starting his own small oddsmaking consultancy in 1989. The company, called Nevada Sports Executives, eventually came to provide betting information to 15 casinos in Nevada.

In 2003, White was part of a group that bought L.V.S.C., which had been the dominant oddsmaking firm in the 1980s but had seen its reputation slip after its founder, Roxy Roxborough, sold the company in 1997.

White was able to restore L.V.S.C.’s supremacy by improving customer service and employee morale. The consultancy now provides opening betting lines to 90 percent of Nevada’s 190 sports books.

Because sports betting doesn’t have a built-in advantage for the house, like such games as blackjack and roulette, White is fully aware of how important the initial odds are that he delivers to casinos.

“Sports wagering is the only game in the casino that the bettor can win at,” White says.