Software operations

What the bookie is renting

A per-head office gives a local bookie, called the agent, a betting site and an app under a plain name, with an account for each of his players. The players log in, see the lines and bet. The agent logs in to a different screen and sees everything they did.

The office is paid a fee for each player who bets in a given week, and it carries none of the risk: winners are paid by the agent and losers pay the agent. If you want the short version first, read What is pay per head?

The lines are what you're buying

The office puts up the numbers (sides, totals, moneylines, props, live betting, usually a racebook and a casino as well), and its line movers follow the market and change the prices through the day.

For the agent this is the most important thing he is buying and the hardest to judge from a sales call. A line that is slow to move gets hit by any sharp player who finds his way into the package, and it is the agent who pays that player, while the office gets its fee either way. If I were shopping for an office, this is where I would spend my questions.

Most packages let the agent adjust what his own players see: shade a team his customers always bet, charge more juice on a market, or switch a sport off.

Taking and grading bets

The software takes the bet, checks it against the player's limits and balance, and writes the ticket with a time stamp. Many offices also keep clerks on the phone for players who won't use a screen.

When the game ends, every ticket is graded from the official result and each balance is updated, with parlays, teasers, pushes and scratched pitchers handled by the house rules loaded into the system. For anyone who has graded a stack of tickets by hand on a Sunday night, this alone is worth the fee. I'd have paid it gladly. It also ends the arguments, because the ticket shows what was bet, at what price and when.

The agent's settings

Each player has settings, and the agent controls them.

• Credit limit. How far the player can be down before the account stops taking bets.
• Maximum bet. By sport and by type of bet. A player can be allowed $500 on an NFL side and $50 on a prop.
• Settle figure. The balance at which the agent pays or collects.
• What he can bet. Parlays, teasers, live betting and the casino can each be turned on or off.

These are the agent's risk management. The software will enforce any limit he sets and will not set a sensible one for him.

The reports

The one that matters is the weekly figure: what each player won or lost, and the net for the package. That is the sheet the agent settles from. Beside it he gets a list of open bets, everything still pending, so he can see what he needs tonight, and each player's history, every bet he has made, which shows who is beating the number and who is just running good. A bookie who has other people bringing him players can give each of them a login as a sub-agent and see each group's figures separately.

What it costs

Offices charge by the head, a fee for each player who had action that week. Prices differ a good deal between offices, and so does what you get for them, so I won't quote one as current.

To see how the sum works, take a made-up fee of $10. An agent has 60 players and 40 of them bet this week, so he owes the office $400. At the theoretical hold on straight bets at -110, 4.55 percent, those players have to bet $8,800 between them before the fee is covered. Anything he holds beyond that is his, if he collects it.

The cheapest office is not always the cheap one. A few dollars a head saved is lost quickly if the lines are slow and one sharp player works them over for a month.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't find players, and it doesn't pay or collect. That part of the business is the same as it ever was, and it is where bookies fail. The software will tell an agent to the dollar what he is owed; getting it is his job.

It also doesn't make the business legal. Whether you may take bets at all depends on where you live, and a rented website changes nothing about that. If you are thinking about it, start with how to become a bookie and the pay-per-head section.

Before you sign with an office

Ask these, and listen to how quickly the answers come:

• Who moves the lines, and how quickly after the market moves.
• Whether you can set limits by player and by sport.
• How a disputed grade is handled, and by whom.
• What happens to your players' accounts if the site goes down on a Sunday.

And keep a bankroll that covers a bad week. Your players can all win at once (they will pick the week you're least ready for it), and the fee is due regardless.