How to Become a Bookie

With the dozens of Pay Per Head businesses now operating offshore, many sports betting aficionados are now asking how they can become a bookie.

It’s easy, the folks from RealBookies.com suggest.

Understanding that the customer who wagers only $100 a game will lose $3,000 to $4,000 over the course of any given season should give you plenty of incentive to hit the bricks. If you use your time wisely, reaching a customer base of 200 or so (a little better than average) should be no problem.

If you are considering opening your own sportsbook operation, odds are you know people who gamble on sports. Some of them are probably looking for a new outlet to wager. I always told potential customers who already had a bookie that if they would try me just one weekend, they would never go back to their previous bookie, and in the 8 1/2 years I was in the business, none ever did.

You can start a football season with as few as 10 customers, and by the time bowl season has arrived, word of mouth recommendation should swell your pay sheet to 50 or 60.

At that level, even if the customers are small time, you should be employing an office clerk and a fax clerk while still leaving yourself a profit of $100,000 or so for six months of semi-work. Another way to increase customers as a bookie is to spend your leisure time where gamblers spend their leisure time.

If you follow the guidelines on this page and conduct your business based on the information here, you will create many ex-customers for other bookies around your city.

The folks from RealBookies.com suggest, among other options, spending time on the golf course.

Whether it is a $1-a-hole or $500-for-closest-to-the-pin wager, money changes hands when buddies get together on the links. Visit a golf warehouse or discount store, and the clerk there should be able to provide you with the names of several local private clubs you can join.

Go to bars:

Select a few bars in different parts of your city and become a regular. This does not mean you also become an alcoholic, as ginger ale or cranberry juice is usually what I order.

When we say select a few “bars,” I am not talking about a T.G.I. Fridays or Chilis. I am talking about real bars. You know, the kind where when you walk in you can’t see anything for a minute or two until your eyes adjust. Real bars don’t have 143 televisions. They usually have one above the bar and one in the back room where the card tables are.

Find a few establishments like this and you have also just found a couple more customers. Go in, sit at the bar, and begin watching television. When you curse a basketball player for missing a free throw when his team is up by 17, the gamblers in the joint will know why you are upset. Most likely, they will be the ones to bring up sports wagering. “Who ya’ got?” is a common opener. When you reply, “I’ve got something on every team,” the conversation is started, and pretty soon you have another reason to visit the bar.

Probably the best way to get a lot of customers on your ledger in one motion is an arrangement where another bookie becomes a “sub-book” to you. It works like this:

Almost without exception, small to mid-size bookies will shut down after the NCAA basketball tournament is over and not reopen until football season starts in August. You should have no problem finding a player who, toward the end of basketball season, is looking for a new place to play so that he can bet on baseball.

The truly amateur bookie will think only of adding one new customer and, while taking on the new guy, will promise not to tell his regular bookie that he has gone somewhere else. What you should be doing in situations like this is not only have him tell his regular bookie about you, but ask that he put you in touch with his regular bookie.

At this point, you can present a no-risk offer to the bookie who is planning to stop taking action for a while. What you propose is that he tell all his current customers that he will be shutting down for baseball, but that if any of them want to get action on the games, he can recommend someone who is staying open.

Explain to the bookie that you will keep a separate record of whatever money, as a group, his customers wind tip collecting as a net winner or paying as a net loser. If they finish the season on the plus side (they won’t), you will pay out every penny. If they finish the season on the negative side (they will), you and he will split the profits 50-50.

All he has to do is meet with you each Tuesday morning to get the figures and then go pay or collect from the guys he put on. It will cost him nothing. He will have to do almost no work. He will make money.

Make sure the bookie realizes that in no way are you trying to snake his customers, just make money for both of you. He is planning on being closed anyway and, if he does it his way, he makes zero dollars for the summer.