Borgata sportsbook director Thomas Gable told VSiN that he reported the unusual betting activity on Thursday’s UAB-Temple college basketball game to a national sports betting monitoring service and, at one point, took the game off the odds board.
In an appearance on VSiN’s Sharp Money on Friday with hosts Patrick Meagher and Dustin Swedelson, Gable explained what happened at the Atlantic City-based sportsbook and why he ended up reporting the big line moves to U.S. Integrity.
Excerpts of his interview:
Most sportsbooks opened this game with UAB as a 2 or 2 ½-point favorite and that was the overnight line for Wednesday night into Thursday. It pretty much stayed at that number through the morning. We took some limit bets at 2.5 probably around noon, moved it a point and took some more limit bets.
At around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, that’s when we really saw this game steam on the odds screen. It got to a point where we took it off the board here probably about 15 minutes later, around 1:45. It got to 8 in a very short amount of time.
On March 7th for an American Athletic Conference game, there is not going to be a line movement of six points unless there’s some major injury news or some news about players being ruled ineligible, sickness, whatever.
When I started seeing this game really get steamed, I started looking into what we could find on Temple and UAB. There was nothing out there. There was nothing as far as injury news on Temple, nothing as far as a UAB adding anybody. There was nothing. So extremely, extremely odd line movement.
I’m sure with the way this story is blowing up in the media, there probably will be an investigation. You don’t want to say anything nefarious is happening, but when you see wagers coming in that don’t make any sense, you have to report these.
If you look at previous Temple games, you are seeing big moves, whether it’s first halves or totals. But when you see full-game spreads move that much, people are going to stand up and take notice. You may be able to get some first-half bets in, but when you are trying to get down big amounts for a full game . . . it’s going to stand out.
Those are the things that are going to tip off sportsbooks. You are going to report it and let the agencies who handle these things look into it.
When there isn’t buyback from respected play, that’s also a sign. Sharp players are going to look at that and if they are staying away, they know something doesn’t look right to them. That’s what happened here. You didn’t see much buyback on Temple at 8. That is a pretty telling sign.
Asked how Gable will handle Temple’s next game, Sunday vs. UTSA, he replied: “Low limits.”
