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.