In Rockefeller Center, hemmed in amongst the exorbitant nail salons and extortionary delis, there is a storefront, above which there is a sign, proclaiming in curvaceous lettering: OFF-TRACK BETTING. Off-track betting (OTB, for short) is exactly what it sounds like. It is a City-run venue for hardy souls to place bets on the outcome of horse races. The OTB by Rockefeller Center is derelict. Overturned boxes with garbage bags spill out onto the foyer, which transitions seamlessly into a seating area ringed by garbage cans and surveilled by dormant TVs. The aesthetic is a bilious yellow. It is an anachronistic pocket of squalor in a jungle of gilded steel. The door is locked, and a sign proclaims that this OTB is closed on Sundays-but there’s another OTB open just a few blocks away, at 37th and 7th.
Passing through the bustle of Midtown, the towering glass monoliths and waxing national debt sign on 44th serve as grim reminders of the 21st century. (How much lower would our debt be if every city had OTBs?) Ten blocks later, we’ve arrived at 37th and 7th. The door flies open, assailing us with a burst of warm air redolent of bygone cigarettes.
Jets beanies and Giants windbreakers outnumber scarves and dead minks by a ratio of infinity to zero, but you wouldn’t know it from the palpable yet ambient odor. We’re the youngest people in the place by at least a decade, maybe two. The only women are manning the betting kiosks, positioned behind a sheet of glass like tellers at a bank. Signage alternately declares “no reserved seating,” dictates “no smoking,” and advertises “1-800-GAMBLER” next to the OTB logo (inside of which is inscribed the motto for the Off-Track Betting Corporation of New York: “Bet with your head, not over it.”)
Next to the entrance there is an ATM, a Coke machine, and a vending machine. In the back there is a men’s bathroom that gets cleaned at regular intervals of thirty minutes, and a women’s bathroom that probably never gets cleaned at all. Coming back around again to the front, past the tellers, one sees a pair of automatic betting machines, then the windows, then the street.
The clock hits the hour, and the dull roar of suppressed conversation comes to a close for a minute. The horses are off on ten different tracks on ten different televisions. “Come on!” yells a guy with a vermilion jacket and a napkin up his nose. The yelling builds to a passionate climax, then subsides again into the ambient rumble of murmured mantras. “Oh man, get the fuck outta here, man!” says the man in the vermilion jacket. Others express similar sentiments. The mood is one of shared weltschmerz, the camaraderie of shared suffering. It’s kind of like high school.
Reflecting on this point, my confidence swells, so I walk over to the automatic betting machine and attempt to place a dollar bill in the credit card slot. A man with flowing locks of black hair, a gold tooth, and a beanie spots my error. “Baby!” he says kindly. “Put it in here!” He feeds the dollar bill into the hungry maw of the slot marked “insert bill in any direction.” Two minutes later, he’s guided me through the entire process, and I have a dollar on the 6-2 exacta at Aqueduct. Another guy dressed incongruously in a Raiders hat and a Giants jacket accosts me and asks, “do you got the 2-6 as well?” I take this as expert advice, thank him, and return from the betting machine with a one-dollar stake in the 2-6 as well. My friend follows suit.
Twenty minutes later, they’re off. Neither of our horses places or shows. This seems to be a common state of affairs. “It’s a fuckin’ disgrace,” grumbles an Asian man. A dreadlocked Black man frantically feeds his receipts into the betting machine, hoping in vain that at least one of them will cash. I take notes. “Look, that kid has a fuckin’ paper in his hand!” observes the Asian guy.
I saunter to the back, where a guy in a green jacket and backpack is scrutinizing a stack of papers academically. His blue eyes are sunken into a stubbly white face. There is an air of expertise and wine about him.
“Come here often?”
“Yeah,” he laughs, “I’m here a fair bit.”
This guy-he introduces himself as Keith-is one of the more knowledgeable bettors at the OTB today. He congenially responds to my interrogation-a furlong is a British unit equal to one-eighth of a mile, “WPS” on the betting card means “win/place/show.”
“OTBs were really endangered,” he declares ambivalently, “because Bloomberg wants to cut down on things that are bad for you.”
“I usually go to the track,” he explains. “It’s great. You guys’d have fun. There’s young people, there’s numbers, there’s pretty girls, there’s numbers, and it can be lucrative.” Emphasis on the can: he estimates that 85 to 90 per cent of the patrons lose money over time; he is not one of them.
“Well, it’s just like sports betting,” he says when we ask him the secret to his success. He’s just won $200 betting the 6-2 exacta; we’ve lost $3. “There’s these spreadsheets you can download and print for 50 cents a copy-you should be getting these, instead of the racing guide-and you can kind of analyze them, for trends.” The horse near the rail on Aqueduct usually loses; the odds-on favorite almost always wins. “You can make a spreadsheet or just do it by hand.” For the next few minutes he’s shuffling and conferring his spreadsheets, making markings, engaging himself in a stream-of-consciousness odds-making monologue. When he’s done, he goes over to the machine, buys a few tickets, and returns. We ask him if he’s placing a bet on either side of the upcoming Super Bowl.
He laughs. “Why would I bet even money on a football game?” he asks. “There are so many variables. The bookies in Vegas are very good. In other sports Vegas makes the odds; the public does here.” (He means that the odds that bettors get on a horse are directly proportional to the amount of money other bettors have put on it.) “It’s hard to beat the bookies,” he continues; “it’s not so hard to beat the public.” He surveys the room. “Hey, have you guys gone upstairs yet?”
Upstairs is around the corner, on 37th Street, past a narrow entrance into a cramped antechamber furnished solely with a teller kiosk and populated solely by its attendant. “That’s five dollars for each of you,” she says to us, and we fork over the money, thereby doubling our losses for the day. Up a staircase an expansive room, with customers sitting on upholstered chairs watching horses race on larger televisions. The tacky green tiling of the main floor has been transmuted into a plushy aesthetic of shimmering emerald. The mood is more subdued and less nervous. The customers seem happier and more dapper; a man dressed in a suit with a haircut out of American Psycho sips a martini; another man bedecked in a sweatshirt and slacks flips contentedly through a stack of five-dollar bills.
We occupy a table by the bar. We order calamari and a burger with Swiss, done medium. A TV is inlaid into the wall next to our table; it automatically turns to one of the horse racing networks that surely exists only for the purpose of serving OTBs. We turn it to the Knicks game. They’re down by 20. It seems as if all of New York City is losing.
Fifteen minutes later, the waiter comes by with the food. We leave $10 each, doubling our losses again.
CHRISTOPHER MORRIS-LENT, Columbia College ’10, is an English major. He always figured that when he got older, God would sorta come into his life somehow. And He didn’t. He doesn’t blame him. If he were Him he would have the same opinion of he that He does. His preference for milkshakes, as Nesquiks, is chocolate over strawberry.