Pinnacle is an offshore sportsbook regarded and preferred by professional sports bettors for its discounted juice (vig or vigorish) and competitive sports betting odds on football, basketball and baseball games – not to mention VERY HIGH betting limits – they will take a $5k bet without batting an eyelash.

However, this morning – the professional gamblers received a shocker when they were greeted with a SHOCKING message on the site.

Player balances are not a concern though. Aside from Pinnacle ready to return balances, other Internet sportsbooks have already lined up offers to abandoned sports bettors - dangling bonus incentives as high as 25%!

The question on industry pundits minds and mouths are WHY and WHO’S NEXT? Which US-facing sportsbook will bow out of the US market next? Will BODOG kowtow to the pressure? And where the hell is Calvin Ayre?

Read More » Top Sportsbook exits USA. Will Bodog follow suit?

Now we know why Indians are good in business.

We see trouble, they see opportunity. We see a shrink, they see the humor in it. We see disaster and donate to Oprah, they see disaster and let the betting begin.

In north India over the weekend, a boy aged 5 going on 6 fell into a pit too deep and narrow for easy rescue. His name is Prince, and his pit fall happened two days before his birthday. Neither television nor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could pass up the human drama in that, and soon enough, had the entire nation on their knees, praying for this boy’s life.

Elsewhere in India, the bookmakers were equally busy, and not on cricket betting picks. Will Prince survive? How long before his rescue? What are the odds, and how could any good bookie ignore them? Well, they didn’t. Bookmakers received US $33 million in bets (26 million euros or 1.5 billion rupees) surrounding the boy’s survival.

Prince fell into a 60 foot-deep (18 meters) irrigation shaft on a Friday in his neighborhood, the remote village of Kurushetra in Haryana. The pit’s opening could not fit an adult, and local police did not have the equipment to extract him.

The army stepped in, and lowered down a…

Read More » Boy trapped in pit, triggers $33M betting

Embattled, jailed and incommunicado David Carruthers - erstwhile high flying and highly visble CEO of BetOnSports PLC has been dismissed, fired, "made redundant" by the Board of Directors.
In a terse statement to the London Stock Exchange, the company said the contract under which he acted as chief executive was terminated and that as a […]

Read More » David Carruthers made redundant

Will Lady Luck be on your side for  Saturday night’s big Powerball drawing?

The jackpot is up to a whopping 365-million dollars – a new U.S. Lottery record. Your odds of winning are 1 in 146,107,962 so you’d have better chances of getting struck by lightning or having a one-night stand with Paris Hilton.

Winning the Powerball drawing is a longshot, but believe it or not there are even longer shots in life. For instance, your odds of being hit by a meteor are one-in-ten trillion! Spending time outside can be a gamble. Your chances of freezing to death are one-in-three-million. The odds of getting hit by lightning are one-in-seven-hundred thousand.

Here are some…

Read more Powerball

Read More » Let the insanity begin: Poweball jackpot grows to a record $365M!

Makybe Diva won the Melbourne Cup yesterday, earning the seven-year-ole mare her third straight victory in one of Australia’s biggest races. How’d the bookies make out with a heavy favorite crossing the line first? The Electric News says "not good:"

"One (bettor) was daring enough to even place A$1million ($1.26m) on the seven-year-old mare.

Read More » Aussie Bookies Going Broke

We remember sitting in our high school counselor’s office after taking one of those tests that was supposed to determine career aptitude. He was puzzled that things like "Tobacco Company Executive" and "Beer Commercial Jingle Writer" popped up, but we knew what to make of that. We’ve always been in the business of encouraging dubiously bad habits. Maybe we should have been a bookie. Washington University’s Student Life Newspaper glamorizes our true calling:

"I used to just bet and I was losing my ass; then I became a bookie. I realized that in the long run it is set up for the bookie to win. That’s just how the system works," said Jerry.

Read More » Be All That You Can Be

Good morning. Welcome to the start of the NFL season. And with professional football, there comes mountains of money to be won, lost, burned, buried, and snorted up noses. It’s a glorious time of the year. And who better to remind us that football season is really about then USA Today, who at midnight this morning, ran a long-ass story about sports betting, casinos, and Bob Scucci. Yes. Bob Scucci again. It’s a remarkably interesting story for a newspaper read by people in McDonald’s and airports and gets us right in the mood for what lay ahead for us this fall. And it also lets us know that the bookmakers are always in control of the situation:

So goes the parallel world of sports betting in Sin City, where "wise guys" or professional bettors battle "bookies" for supremacy.

Read More » Great Day To Be a Gambler

· Tiger Woods proves that he is everything the Just Do It commercials have propped him up to be and more. Woods won the British Open , despite a little push from Jose Maria Olazabal and Colin Montgomerie. [SLAM!]
· Jermain Taylor upsets reigning middleweight champ Bernard Hopkins in split decision and lets the world know […]

Read More » Other Events People Won Money On This Weekend…

Nothing makes the Oddjack more sad than seeing good illegal bookmakers thrown into the clink. But with all the government scrutiny(and budget crunches and police quotas around the country), well fellas named Louie, Petey, and Victor are usually the first to go.

Man gets 21 months for illegal gambling business [Las Vegas Sun]

Read More » Busted Bookies

From sports betting forum on Professional Hockey:
Anyone know where I can get the odds for the Memorial Cup games? I bet with Bowmans and they don’t seem to have anything. At least not yet.
Quite surprising considering they are always yapping on the Fan590 about how big their Canadian clientele is.
Thunderbuck.
Hockey Forum […]

Read More » If a tree falls in a hockey rink and no one is there to hear it…