Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling
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An eye-popping and hilarious joyride through the underworld of sports betting Beth Raymer arrived in Las Vegas in 2001, hoping to land a job as a cocktail waitress at one of the big casinos. In the meantime, she lived in a $17-a-night motel with her dog, Otis, and waited tables at a low-rent Thai restaurant. One day, one of her regular customers told her about a job she thought Beth would be perfect for and sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc. Dink was a professional sports gambler—one of the biggest in Vegas. He was looking for a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, 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 betting—a period that saw the fall of the local bookie and the rise of the freewheeling, unregulated offshore sports book, and with it the elevation of sports betting in popular culture. As the business explodes, Beth rises—from assistant to expert, trusted and seasoned enough to open an offshore booking office in the Caribbean with a few associates, men who leave their families up north to make a quick killing, while donning new tropical personas fueled by abundant drugs and local girlfriends, and who one by one succumb to their vices. They lie, cheat, steal, and run, until Beth is the last man standing.Beth Raymer is a natural storyteller: funny, charming, and fully awake to the ironies around her. But she is also a keen and compassionate observer of the adrenaline-addicted, rougish types who become her mentors, her enemies, her family. Raymer brings to life a world that teems with pathos and ecstasy in this wild picaresque that also tells the story of a young woman’s crazy, sexy, most unlikely coming-of-age. The Barnes & Noble Review Some memoirs read as if their authors courted trouble for something to write about. Lay the Favorite reads like Raymer did so for something to do, and that has made all the difference. Her book is a tribute to what she calls "getting the best of it," strong-arming every thin dime out of life, and having experiences worth remembering at the expense of stability or, at times, respectability. Then again, if Raymer’s employment history won’t make her respectable, at least her prose will. "I only learned at [Columbia’s MFA program]," Raymer told Publishers Weekly, "what a metaphor was and how to structure a paragraph." I’ll buy that for a dollar -- but the fact remains, for a debut, by a self-described non-writer, Lay the Favorite is a hell of an achievement. It’s entertaining, funny, and boasts unforgettable images, like a hooker whose "large, dark nipples shone through her white lace unitard like coffee stains on a tablecloth." Best of all, Raymer never tries to force an insight where wonder will suffice. The slang-laden chatter of Raymer’s characters is great fun to read, and critics with no way of knowing it will doubtless tell us she has a pitch-perfect ear for the argot of . . . Whatever. Only an insider can vouch for her accuracy. But any rube can see that she’s got an eye for the main chance, and in this case it’s paid off big.
