Odds are this trio will make you think

(Correction: Because of reporting error, a review of the book ''The Odds" in Sunday's Sports section misstated that professional gambler Alan Boston was a college dropout and spent time in Maine tending to his boat. Boston graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and owns a house, not a boat, in Maine.)

The Odds
Chad Millman
DaCapo Press, 250 pp.

Even with its Mob funding fathers effectively purged, Las Vegas -- that shimmering citadel of desert hedonism -- can't shake its image as Sin City. But the Chamber of Commerce needn't fret about one label. Vegas never will be accused of being Sane City.

There's one jackpot no sports bettor has ever cashed: peace of mind. It's the all-time sucker's bet, because no reward is lucrative enough, no loss crushing enough, to persuade the degenerate gambler (now there's a redundancy) to employ that dreaded four-letter word: Stop.

Yet still these rogues flock to Vegas like lemmings, their adrenal glands howling, their delusions guaranteeing that they'll be the ones to beat the system. One drawback -- there is no system. That's why, Damon Runyon mythology aside, Vegas is the Mecca of Misery.

Chad Millman sheds a neon light on this bipolar panorama in ''The Odds," his rambunctious scorecard of a college basketball betting season as seen through the prism of three men whose self-esteem and solvency rest on whether some knock-kneed 18-year-old will hit (or miss) the free throw that will validate the spread.

Joe Lupo, who runs the sports book at the Stardust Hotel and Casino, is a devoted family man. His marriage nonetheless dissolves as he valiantly, and obsessively, tries to keep his business viable amid encroachments from that infinite legal cybervoid, the offshore Internet gaming industry. He has no downtime, mostly just down times. Not even Christmas is off the board in this secular universe, and an isolated instance of gunplay is a mere nuisance to the possessed waiting in line for their turn at the window. Lupo must be as vigilant and prescient as Alan Greenspan in gauging each bet; one large play can create a seismic shift -- which means a half-point this way or that way -- in his carefully constructed line.

Rodney Bosnich is a rookie from Indiana who believes he's ready to graduate from Munster to the Monster. Who cares if his parents are disgraced or his girlfriend keeps carping that he'd better get (pardon the expression) a real job? This is the life for him: sitting in his ramshackle apartment, tracking his modest bets on his laptop, surrounded by the detritus of Chinese takeout, relaxing only long enough for a toke on a joint (in Vegas, that qualifies as a pot-luck supper).

Alan Boston is, relatively speaking, a wagering wizard. An Ivy League dropout, he rides the roller coaster of chance for six months a year so that he can spend the rest of it tending to his boat in Maine. But don't let his intellect fool you, as it has him. A recovering cocaine addict, Boston has simply traded one pathology for another. He finds no joy in the lap of luxury, often violating his own tenets of self-discipline to take one last stab at the illusory sure thing. No matter how often he's been burned, he still becomes apoplectic when his meticulously plotted strategy is sabotaged by some rotten kid who can't make the three. And when he loses, Boston unleashes a torrent of invective so vile that it would have been censored by Lenny Bruce. But Boston isn't mad at the world; his diatribes are directed at only one miscreant. Himself.

His behavior could serve as the book's subtitle: Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas.