Final Four Picks - 2011 March Madness

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

I woke up at 4am this morning, an hour that I'm usually winding down the night with, to watch the finals of the Cricket World Cup. I'm not a fan of cricket, but amazing things happen the moment you place a wager on it. It's sort of like a religious revival without the gospel music and all of the Jesus references.

Action is action. I feel the holy ghost in my loin, nevertheless.

The championship match between India and Sri Lanka was slated for Saturday in Mumbai. It began at 2am PT for me I wanted to sweat the last six hours of the eight-hour long match between India and Sri Lanka, so I crashed early and woke up at 4am to sweat a bet.

Cricket is one of the most crooked organized sports in the world and has been historically plagued with fixing scandals. Bookies and betting syndicates have a tremendous influence on players/teams Some players reveal inside info to the bookies (who take financial advantage of the info) while other dirty players take cash for a dive.

I get tips all the time but I rarely act of them, with the exception that the silver market is rigged and the World Cup is fixed in India's favor. One was tough to prove, the other made sense. Sure, I'm an action junkie at heart, but I'm also a sharp bettor. If there's an edge in my favor, then I'm going to hammer it. The World Cup gave me the best of both worlds and appealed to both contrasting aspects of my personality -- betting on something that is mostly foreign to me, and an opportunity to get on the right side of the fix.

Betting on cricket? A leap of faith for sure. I waited until 9:30am to mix an eye-opening cocktail. The moralists might judge me for drinking so early, but in my defense, I had been awake for at least 5+ hours (and in that time... I ate breakfast, chatted with Kat about the cover design for Jack Tripper Stole My Dog, read a chapter of the 'Gods of Money', squeezed in 90 minutes of writing). I waited until India scored 200 runs before I finally cracked open a bottle of rum. Besides, it's not like I was slurping up a Zombie (a California-created concoction with 7 to 8 ounces of liquor according the original recipe), instead, I had a rather subdued glass of pineapple juice with a mere splash of rum to take the edge off. It's not like I was eating pills and pounding drinks -- I was waiting until the 3pm tip off of Butler/VCU before I kicked the partying into high gear.

After all, it's the Final Four.