Download Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling AudioBook Free
An eye-popping and hilarious joyride through the underworld of sports activities gambling
Beth Raymer found its way to NEVADA in 2001, expecting to land a job as a cocktail waitress at one of the best casinos. In the meantime, she resided in a $17-a-night motel with her dog, Otis, and waited desks at a low-rent Thai restaurant. One day, one of her regular customers told her about a job she thought Beth would be simply perfect for and sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc. Dink was a specialist sports gambler—one of the biggest in Vegas. He was buying a right-hand man—a person who would arrive promptly, who experienced a mind for volumes, and who didn’t steal. She got the job.
Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth Raymer’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety world of sports activities betting—a period that saw nov the neighborhood bookie and the rise of the freewheeling, unregulated just offshore sports book, and with it the elevation of sports activities gambling in popular culture. As the business explodes, Beth increases—from associate to expert, respected and seasoned enough to open up an offshore arranging office in the Caribbean with a few affiliates, men who leave their own families up north to produce a quick getting rid of, while donning new tropical personas fueled by numerous drugs and local girlfriends, and who one at a time succumb with their vices. They lie, cheat, steal, and run, until Beth is the previous man standing.
Beth Raymer is a natural storyteller: funny, enchanting, and completely awake to the ironies around her. But she actually is also a keen and compassionate observer of the adrenaline-addicted, rougish types who become her mentors, her foes, her family. Raymer brings to life a world that teems with pathos and ecstasy in this wild picaresque that also explains to the story of a young woman’s crazy, sexy, most unlikely coming-of-age.
