Vegas Casinos May Soon Take Real Bets on Oscars, 'DWTS'

LAS VEGAS -- Vegas bookie Johnny Avello shows up across the media this time of year providing his odds for the Oscars, stressing that his numbers are "for recreational purposes only." But it's entirely possible that by this time next year he'll be able to take real bets.

In fact, he may even be able to take bets on the winner of the upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars," which starts in March.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board earlier this month changed its regulations to, for the first time in the United States, allow the possibility of legal gambling on non-sporting events. The next step will be for a sports book director like Avello from Wynn Las Vegas to submit a proposal for specific bets that gaming authorities will accept.

"If you have something you want to pursue, you need to bring it to them, show it to them, show them how the event's judged, how they get the winners," Avello said. "If they believe that it is something that would be good for the business and you can show there's no funny business going on, I believe you'd be able to get those sorts of things.

"The first one I may take a shot at is 'Dancing With the Stars,' but we'd love to do the Oscars next year if we can figure out how."

The challenge is to show state authorities both that the outcome can't be influenced by betting and that insider information can't give bettors unfair advantages.

In the case of the Oscars, Avello suspects he would have to stop taking bets when the deadline for submitting ballots passes, which is several days before the Academy Awards ceremony. Otherwise, tabulators will know the results and could, theoretically, leak them or use the information to place wagers.

Vegas sports book directors have long eyed these sorts of bets not as a major profit stream but as an amenity that could introduce wagering to new segments of the population. The demographics of people who adore "American Idol" or "Dancing With the Stars," for instance, may be different than that of the typical football or horse-race enthusiast.

"I think there's a market out there for certain events," said Jay Kornegay, vice president for sports book operations at the Las Vegas Hilton. "The ones that come to the top of the list are the Oscars, the Cy Young Award, the MVP of baseball, the Heisman, the World Series of Poker, something like that. And on a bigger scale, maybe presidential elections, possible reality shows."

Wagering on elections is forbidden both under Nevada and federal law, and Avello believes setting such odds could also be divisive.

"My boss Steve [Wynn] could be thinking one way and I could make somebody else the favorite and it could be more heartburn than anything else," he said.

Avello, whom Kornegay deemed "the king of the Oscar odds," is probably in the best position to know what the public wants. He's been creating odds on the Oscars since 1994 and has put "The King's Speech" as a runaway favorite for this year's best picture after initially predicting "The Social Network" in December.

In 2000, Avello drew up some numbers for the first season of "Survivor" at the request of TV Guide, and soon Rolling Stone wanted odds on the Grammys and US Weekly wanted odds on whether a certain celebrity couple would get married.

He also has created just-for-fun odds sheets on everything from "Top Chef" to the Westminster Dog Show and presently has Neil Patrick Harris as the most likely, at 10-to-1, to replace Regis Philbin on Philbin's daytime talk show with Kelly Ripa. (Betty White is 200-to-1.)

Most of those odds would still remain for recreation only because they can be easily corrupted and the outcome isn't determined in a proper field of play where the results unfold in real time the way they do, sort of, for "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars." Most other reality shows are shot in advance and unspooled throughout a season, with many people involved already knowing who won.

Requests for comment from ABC and Fox went unanswered this week, so it's unclear what the studios think of the prospect of wagering on their shows. But Hollywood bigwigs became very uncomfortable when efforts to create a futures exchange on the prospects of film box-office grosses came close to being actualized, so it's likely this, too, could bother them.

Avello and Kornegay noted that betting already takes place on the Oscars on the Internet via offshore outfits and there's never been any scandal. And Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor tourist newsletter, said it's in the casinos' interest to only take wagers if they can ensure their fairness.

"The books will protect themselves, both with due diligence and low limits," Curtis said. "They're not going to take big bets on anything that has any chance of being vulnerable to inside knowledge. The combination of having to implement this precaution along with the hoops they'll have to jump through with [the Nevada Gaming Control Board] will probably served to make this a small-scale situation for quite a while."

For Avello, the prospect also has another downside: He'd have to write odds based not just on his own predictions but on how the public bets. When the public wagers a lot on one side of the equation in sports, for instance, he changes the odds to balance out the casino's potential wins and losses.

Right now, his odds are based on his own research, which includes seeing all the movies or watching all the shows, reading what bloggers and other experts have to say and asking his staff and family for advice.

But public sentiment can enter into wagering in peculiar ways. Avello suspects he would have had to give Bristol Palin the best odds to win "Dancing With the Stars" near the end of the past season if only because her intense popularity among conservatives would have led them to place wagers on her despite her dancing proficiency.

"I have to look at it in different ways when I start taking bets for wagering purposes with the odds I put out," Avello said. "I have to get into customers' heads to see what they actually think and base it on that, plus other things that go into making odds.

"This right now, all the entertaining stuff, is what do I think is the best and what do I think will win. Right now I put 'True Grit' down as an underdog at 100-to-1. Maybe I wouldn't put it that high if I was actually taking a bet on it."