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.)