Vintage Vegas: Me, Myself, and The Castaways

I'll be using the "Vintage Vegas" columns to report on handicapping tales from days gone by. I've been doing this sports handicapping gig a long time, 40 years professionally to be precise. Since I'm old, I qualify as vintage, so a few of these reports will touch on things I've done that provide a modicum of credibility.

The "Bob Dietz's Integrity Sports" moniker has been around forever. For a brief snapshot of things I did "back in the day," I suggest heading to the internet archives via the wayback machine. Plug in my old Integritysports.com site and take a look. The accomplishments are real. In future Vintage Vegas entries, we'll examine historical sports handicapping publications and contests, some of which are mentioned on the old Integritysports.com site. We'll take a look at former Seattle Times reporter Mike McCusker's annual "Tipsters or Gypsters?" and an old "Who's Who in Sports Gambling" from Hall Publishing. Today, however, I'd like to talk about the football contest that was the direct ancestor of today's Westgate Las Vegas Superbook Contest. The contest was called the "Pro-Football Handicap," and it was held at the Castaways Casino, on the site where the Mirage now stands. Sonny Reizner designed and ran this competition.

For a nice retrospective on early Las Vegas handicapping competitions and what we called "The Castaways Contest," I recommend a July 19, 2018 Sportshandle.com piece by Robert Mann, a Gaming Today columnist. Mann does a fine job surveying the original contests. I just want to add a little detail from my personal experience.

The Castaways, directly across the strip from the Rat Pack hangout, the Sands Casino, wasn't posh like today's megaresorts, but it wasn't a dive, either. The Castaways was a small, classic-for-the-time casino with a great location. The contest made it a weekly destination for sports bettors and gave the Castaways a certain cachet.

The Castaways Contest, with its hefty thousand-dollar entrance fee, was the forerunner of today's Superbook Contest. There was one huge difference, however, between the current Westgate extravaganza and the Castaways' competition. While the Superbook requires five NFL selections against the spread each week, the Castaways contestants had to pick every NFL game ATS each week. Fourteen games a week, no byes, no breaks. Every single game counted on your record.

I had a client, a CPA from New York, who tasked me with entering the contest in my name and putting his selections in for him. The contest drew more than a hundred entrants. The top 20 contestants had both their selections and their records marked on an old fashioned white board under glass (on the wall) in the Castaways lobby. Those contest plays were quite the draw.

My client was doing pretty well, about six games over .500 after nine or ten weeks, but he got frustrated with his inability to move up in the standings. So he asked me to take the helm for the remainder of the season with the understanding that we'd split the money if I rallied to cash. I had no real interest in trying to pick all of the NFL games each week. Even as a young man, I was aware enough to not take a "pick every game" contest terribly seriously. It's a good way to go blind or mad. I agreed, however, to give it a shot. Although I'd like to share an exciting narrative of being into and out of the money and how I spent long hours analyzing and conquering the NFL schedule, that's not what happened.  There wasn't a drop of drama.We finished more than 20 games over .500, in a tie for 12th, I think. Just the top 10 cashed. Any other year of the contest, our record would have been good enough to cash, but not that particular season.

That was my first and last go at the Castaways Contest. The Castaways itself wasn't long for this world, and was soon demolished to make way for Steve Wynn's opening salvo in the Las Vegas revolution, the Mirage. The times, they were a'changin'.


Bob Dietz -- June 3, 2019