SOURCE: The Edmonton Journal

Has the government-sanctioned Sport Select lottery stacked the odds in its own favour?

You bet, especially when you compare the government's profit margin to the profits in Las Vegas, where bookmaking is legal.

Last year, Las Vegas sports books returned 94 per cent of the money wagered on sports back to bettors. Sport Select returned a scant 53 percent.

"You can't win, but you can lose," grumbled Ron McLaughlin, one of several frustrated local sports bettors interviewed by The Journal.

The government's response to such criticism is to argue that Sport Select is meant for entertainment and not for serious gamblers.

"It's a recreational game to add excitement to watching sports," explains Brad Wiebe, director of marketing for the Western Canada Lottery Corporation, which runs Sport Select for the three Prairie provinces and the northern territories.

"If it is supposed to be entertainment then why not give people a chance? Vegas seems to do OK with their five per cent," counters Garry Smith of the Alberta Gaming Research Institute at the University of Alberta.

How do the Sport Select games Pro-Line, Point Spread and Over/Under manage to take such a big piece of the gambling pie?

Simple. In Canada, you can't bet on a single game. Instead you must make parlay bets in which the original wager plus any winnings are all risked on second, third and fourth chances.

On top of that, the government's parlay payouts are considerably lower than what legal and illegal bookmakers pay.

In Vegas, a typical sports book will pay you 6 to 1 if you correctly pick three games, 11 to 1 if you pick all four games right and 20 to 1 if you hit a five-team parlay.

Sport Select, however, pays four times the wager on a three-team parlay, eight times the wager on a four-game parlay and 15 times the wager of a five-team parlay.

The worst "sucker" bet is Pro Line baseball. Take a three-team parlay picked at random from this past Major League Baseball season as an example.

If the underdog Chicago Cubs, New York Mets and Houston Astros all won, Pro-Line would have paid $94.80 for a $10 bet. But since you already gave your $10 to the WCLC outlet, the profit would only have been $84.80.

The same parlay in Vegas would have given you $137.20.

If instead the bettor had picked the favourites and they had all won, the profit on a $10 Sports Select bet would have been a mere $19.10. In Vegas the gambler would have received $43.30 -- more than double the same bet on the same teams on the same day.

"They've made baseball so unplayable that, unless you are completely nuts, nobody would play it," says McLaughlin.

"It's a joke. If they tried to pull this crap in Las Vegas they would burn all the casinos."