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This Article Says it All About Lane and More

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  • This Article Says it All About Lane and More

    The real story behind the sports tout in Two for the Money.
    (I got this from another forum):
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    The real story behind the sports tout in Two for the Money.



    The movie Two for the Money shines a light on the murky world of sports touts, men who make their living picking the winners of sporting events and selling those picks to gamblers. The main character, Brandon Lang (played by Matthew McConaughey), is modeled after a real tout named Brandon Lane. How do we know this is true? Log onto brandonlane.com and he makes it clear:

    THE MOVIE ABOUT MY LIFE



    In case you have some concerns about the different spelling of the last name, Brandon sets the record straight: "Funny thing—they changed my name to Brandon 'Lang' for 'artistic' purposes. Damn if I know what that means, but it's still me no matter how they spell my last name!"



    As the movie opens, Brandon is a washed-up college quarterback living in Las Vegas and shilling on a 900 line for a Jessica Simpson fan club. Luckily, the call center also doles out sports picks. When Brandon gets his opportunity to shine (the regular guy is out sick one day), he displays an uncanny knack for making correct picks, calling more than 75 percent of his games correctly. In no time, Lang is discovered by Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), a former gambling addict who runs a large sports-tout service in New York. Abrams wants to build an industry around Lang because he's "a fucking mutant." Apparently mutants do very well at gambling, which may explain why I've done so poorly. Under Abrams' tutelage (which includes flat-screen TVs, a Mercedes, a few nice suits, and some hair gel), Lang routinely picks 80 percent and even goes 12 for 12 on one fated NFL Sunday.

    The movie makes Brandon out to be a kind of sports idiot savant, with little more than a premonition about football games. There is no computer system or numbers analysis at work, no algorithm that helps him determine the over/under for the Monday Night game. He's just a cocky kid who does nothing but "work out and pick winners." If you're a cocky kid who does nothing but work out and pick winners, you certainly don't leave Las Vegas, the one place in America where sports gambling is legal. You wander down to the nearest casino and put your life savings on the New England Patriots at -6. Second, you don't become a tout: Why be a commentator when you can play the game?

    Picking winners is a difficult proposition, in any sport. I know this firsthand, as does my bookie. A gambler, in order to break even, must win 52.38 percent of his bets (this just covers the vigorish, the extra fee paid to the bookie). If you pay an additional amount to a sports tout, you'll need to win even more. Most gamblers are lucky if they do better than flipping a coin; professional gamblers do well when they get close to 60 percent. Let's be clear, nobody picks 75 percent to 80 percent, especially over any considerable length of time—like a season. I have, occasionally, paid someone to pick winners for me. And every tout has put me further into debt. It could be that I've just gone to the wrong people. Or it could be that people like Lang just don't exist.

    If, after seeing the movie, you think that the real Brandon Lane is the answer to your gambling woes, you'll be mistaken. He claims, like every other sports tout, that he's the best handicapper in the business. This, of course, cannot be verified. Short of providing potential clients with his record, his site provides inducements more in the realm of PR hackery. "Listen," he writes, "they only make movies about winners—and that's me!" Apparently, he hasn't rented Leaving Las Vegas.

    According to The Big Green Machine, a service for which Lane is one of a handful of handicappers, he was 9-14 in NFL games through last weekend. That's not exactly winning. "This movie is about me, the very guy who made his clients a fortune last year," Lane writes on the site, "and will be making you money this year." In college football, he's a tawdry 18-37-1. The producers of Two for the Money might want to rethink that "true story" business. In the movie, Brandon Lang's cockiness ("It's a Scud attack, and I am shelling your bookmaker") brings about his collapse. He learns a lesson about the unpredictability of sports, the fickleness of bettors, and the sheer randomness inherent to gambling. As the audience, we see that winners can be losers. But we don't see how underhanded and conniving tout services usually are.

    There are upward of 1,500 tout services in the United States today, unlicensed and largely unmonitored, that offer tips over the phone, on the Internet, and by mail. They usually sell their advice on a subscription basis for several hundred to several thousand dollars a season, or by single picks for $10 to $100 per game. Often, the prices go up for games they claim are "locks," or "can't miss opportunities." On Brandon Lane's Web site, he lists the games as 25, 50, 100, 300, and 1,000 dime releases. This is a rating system for how much he believes in a particular bet, but it also refers to an actual amount of money. A frightening amount of money. In gambling parlance a dime is $1,000, so a 300 dime release is a recommendation to bet $300,000. Other handicappers will occasionally tout a "blank check release," which is insane. Open up USA Today and you'll see ads for tout services offering stats that are incredible. They are appealing to people who are likely already losers—you're not going to pay if you're already winning—searching for a way to get themselves out of a hole.

    The office where Lang works in Two for the Money is essentially a high-class boiler room, filled with motormouth salesmen pushing the wares of men with God-given sports-picking talent, and it's all perfectly legit. Rooms like this do exist—minus the fancy brownstone office and the plasma screens—as do the tactics the salesmen use to entice their prey. Berating the gamblers with a mixture of cockiness and scorn is part of the hook: "If you can't bet two dimes, you're not worthy of this pick." "Get on the bus with me to the promised land, or don't waste my time." Touts are famous for hanging up on callers, knowing the gambler will call back to get his pick.

    Sports touts are not illegal, but the business is full of cheats, cons, and scams akin to the Psychic Friends Network (which was started by a former sports tout). Few gamblers, after losing their money while gambling illegally, are likely to complain. These sports services promise sacrifices (one tout, Jack Price, offered to "blow his brains out" if his predictions were wrong) and connections of unbelievable repute (the inside scoop on a game that's been fixed in advance) that are worth about as much as their recommendations. Some convince subscribers to switch to a new service without telling them that both are owned by the same company, and others will sell both teams to two different sets of callers, knowing half their clientele will think they are geniuses. An Atlanta-based 900-number service once advertised your money back if the picks lost, which didn't happen since $25 was already taken once a call was made. It also claimed to be the top-rated site by a monitoring service, which turned out to be owned by the same company.

    But the oldest trick is not really a trick at all: If you sell yourself as a winner, people will pay to hear what you have to say, even if you're wrong. In the early 1990s, a businessman in California, David James, set up a 900 number, advertised in a sports paper, and earned tens of thousands of dollars doling out picks that turned out to be made by his 4-year-old son. And the more James charged for the picks, the more legitimacy the callers ascribed to the choices. Right or wrong, the risk is always left up to the squares—the amateur sports bettors—who are putting their money on the line. But they're likely to lose whether they pay a tout service or not.


    Jacob Lewis is the managing editor of The New Yorker.

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    #2 Today, 01:55 PM
    BadCo
    Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2005
    Posts: 591



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    He lures Brandon Lane played by Matthew McConaughey from another infamous tout service in Las Vegas to become his sole creation as “the million dollar man” for Abrams’ storied and ruthless sales marketing purposes.

    These are about the only two facts that purportedly happened in the real life screenplay adaptation of sports handicapper Brandon Link during all his excellent boiler room adventures. However, Paramount Pictures, a sports book in Costa Rica—and especially Brandon Link/Lane/Lang and everyone connected with this film—want us to believe that everything portrayed on the big screen was actually true. The real Brandon Link touts his sports picks daily—for purchase—from his website and, in the same breath, encourages the public to put all gaming deposits in an offshore sports book here in Costa Rica, a sports book that has been supporting Link and the film. The glaring conflict of interest is self-evident. Win or lose, Link gets paid in full while in every press release or interview, before and after the picture’s release, he relentlessly runs with stories to unimaginable heights and full of inconsistencies.

    The reasons for these deceptions are calculated and manipulative. A far more interesting and compelling story—that of connecting the players in Vegas, Hollywood and Costa Rica who were involved in this manipulation—is better than the movie itself. How did this movie ever see the light of day, when the script was turned down and told to “take a seat” by all the major studios for the better part of a decade?

    Passing on the script was easy: Studio execs understood that America wasn’t going to stand in line to see the underbelly of a sports handicapping tout service, even with all of its verbal flare and pyrotechnics.

    The movie portrays Brandon Lane as a former college football player who is so clean living that when he first gets into the business, he can’t even say the “f” word? Pacino’s character lures him into a life of bombastic and fraudulent sales pitches to sell sports picks, providing Lane with $1,000 suits and prepaid hookers.

    In reality, this movie is nothing more than an unrepentant, cheesy ad for the real Brandon Link/Lane/Lang to sell sports picks and entice gaming deposits to a sport book here in Costa Rica. Hollywood advertising in this form today costs somewhere between $60 and $70 million.

    Check out this press release on the sports book’s website, published on the very weekend the movie was released: “Summer may be over, but things are just heating up at Bodog, starting with a unique partnership Bodog has formed with Brandon Lang, one of America's top sports handicappers. In an exclusive deal just signed (and I'm telling you the ink is still wet on this one), Lang and Bodog will work together to build a dynamic Bodog presence on his website. We couldn't be more excited to be working with one of the most successful handicappers in the world. If you don't know who Brandon Lang is, you soon will."

    Yes, I hope you will, after reading this article.

    First of all, let me say at the outset that I don’t claim to know everything about Brandon Link/Lane/Lang or every piece of the puzzle regarding how this movie came together—but neither do several people I talked to who were involved in the film. However, being in the music and entertainment business all my life and in the gaming industry for the last 11 years, the real life story of Brandon Link is an easy one to sus out from my contacts in Los Angeles, Vegas and here in San Jose, Costa Rica. Everyone I talked to has known Brandon for a minimum of eight years.

    He did come from a small town in Michigan and, right out of high school, he moved to Las Vegas, where he attempted to become a walkon player for UNLV’s basketball team. Instead, he played only in recreational league pick-up games at the sports club, where he blew out his knee. To anyone’s knowledge, he never played football or any other sport on a college level. It was at this point that he went to work for Jim ***** in Las Vegas. ***** employs between 40 and 60 full-time salespeople during the football season to sell sports picks of his many handicappers. Brandon became a tout for *****'s 900 Score phone line.

    Brandon Lane was on a hot streak, selling sports picks on *****'s 900 Score phone number when Stu Finer (Pacino’s character Walter in the movie ) recruits him to New York to be marketed as John Anthony, the “Million Dollar Man.” Finer wanted Brandon to develop his 900 number service the way he had for Jim *****—and Brandon did. Sometime after that, he became discontent with the amount of money Finer was paying him and left—not, as he claims in his interviews, to reclaim the small town boy in him.

    Link moved to Los Angeles and became a caddie at the Rivera Country Club to pitch his movie idea, he claims; however, in talking to the personnel department at the Rivera

    Country Club, while they were familiar with his name, they have no applications or official employment records for caddies. Caddies, they said, are temporary employees, so they have no idea of how long Link was actually there. I called several times to try to reach someone working at the course familiar with him, and I was told someone would get in touch with me who knew, but no one called back.

    This is where Link claims that he met up with Dan Gilroy, a struggling screenwriter who’s heavily baggaged career had been carried around for years by the star power of his wife, Rene Russo, who also just happens to play Al Pacino’s wife in the movie. What an amazing coincidence.

    When the script was passed on by all the studios, Link returned to New York to work for Finer. Apparently, he wasn’t impressed with that small town boy he had just rediscovered, and Link continued to work for Finer.

    Enter into the mix, years later, Calvin Ayre, CEO and founder of Bodog.com, one of the most prominent sports books here in Costa Rica. Whether Ayre was approached directly or was just schmoozing at one of his celebrity events in Los Angeles, no one that I talked to knows for sure, but he not only loved the idea of having the main character in the movie tout his sports book after the movie’s release, but would help back the film.

    If Bodog were not all over this film, then why did they pay for the premier party in Vegas? The entire production was shot on location in Vancouver, British Columbia (home of their marketing and customer service offices), and a featured scene in the movie was filmed at the Quay Lounge, owned by the Bodog Entertainment Group.

    The domain name of Brandonlane.com wasn’t purchased until March of 2004 when the movie deal was finalized, and Brandonlang.com wasn’t created until September of 2004

    when the movie went into production. Then the very week the film was released, Bodog announced to the world that they are so proud to have just signed an exclusive deal with Brandon Link/Lane/Lang.

    Bodog goes down gambling on a movie that, the second week of release, did only half the box office that it did in the first. The DVD is coming to a cutout bin near you.

    Finally, Your Honor, the real crime here is not just the out and out lies, fabrications, inconsistencies and exaggerations of a handicapper telling you to bet everything you have—including your children’s children—on his opinion of a game, but rather a sports book and his many willing accomplices in the movie industry that enable him to do so.

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    #3
    Last edited by savage1; 01-25-2006, 02:36 PM.

  • #2
    Thanks Savy for posting that. One of my buddies was over on Sunday talking about how great the movie was and how it was a "true story". I told him that if a guy was picking 80% winners he wasn't broadcasting it all over the world. He simply would be laying low and cashing in small at 100 different casinos. Hadn't known the BoDog aspect of the movie. Makes me hate the scum bag even more. I had never even heard of Brandon before the movie!

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    • #3
      You know Tony-I am older than most and have been following sports services since they began in the late 1970's, and I also have never heard of the guy.
      Believe me if this guy had had any success at all, he or someone else would have been raving about him long before they even began to make the dumb movie, and I and other veterans surely would have heard of him.
      In all due respect to your buddy, in my humble opinion the movie is pure fabrication, and very little if any of it is true;
      the great article shows that.
      Mr. Lane,Lang, Linc or whatever th fu-k he wants to call himself is a truly pathetic excuse for a capper.
      His plays are posted night after night on another forum, and they are so bad they are laughable.
      I would put up my 11 year old daughter(who as posted here got both pieces right on sunday)up against him or even a coin flip, and there would be no doubt as to who would win;hint-it wouldn't be him.
      ps The way he raises his units right after he loses to try to get into the plus column also shows that besides being a loser, he is also a scammer.
      Last edited by savage1; 01-25-2006, 04:10 PM.

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