I’m Wayne Allyn Root. I’m both a nationally-syndicated conservative talk show host and a Las Vegas oddsmaker. Long before politics, I was dubbed by the media, “The King of Vegas Gambling.” I was good enough to be the first oddsmaker ever awarded a 180-pound granite star on Las Vegas Blvd on August 15th, 2006. It was “Wayne Allyn Root Day” in Vegas and the state of Nevada. You can see my star in front of Paris Resort & Casino.

Wochit News – Las Vegas Oddsmakers say that gamblers placing bets on olympic events are sticking to mostly to American athletes. Despite not making the playoff at the British Open, Vegas oddsmakers have put Jordan Spieth at the top of the betting books for the 2015 PGA. Free Odds & Lines from Las Vegas and Global Sportsbook provided by VegasInsider.com, along with more information for your sports gaming and betting needs. 'It would make the Superbowl look like a high school game.'

Yes, I’m a gambler. I’m darn good at it. And I just made the biggest bet of my life on Trump to win re-election on November 3rd. No, I’m not crazy. I’ve been here before!

Democrats don’t realize it, but they’re starring in two famous movies. This situation is a combination of “Groundhog Day” and “Rocky.”

Why “Groundhog Day”? Because this is all an exact repeat of 2016. Back then every poll showed Trump would lose by a landslide. He was down by double digits in polls. And that was before the infamous “Access Hollywood” videotape leaked of Trump saying he grabbed adoring female fans by their privates.

Yet I never wavered. I knew Trump would win. And I said so repeatedly on TV and radio in the months leading up to Election Day. The reason I knew was “the whisper vote.” No one would say it out loud, but tens of millions of average middle-class Americans (otherwise known as “the Silent Majority”) were supporting Trump. They just wouldn’t say it out loud.

I made literally thousands of media appearances for Trump and was the opening speaker at many Trump rallies. Everywhere I went, I met people who leaned over and whispered in my ear “I’m with you. I’m for Trump.” It happened so many times a day, I named it “the whisper vote.” It was like “the secret handshake” of an exclusive club for patriots.

But there was another significant sign for me. My friend drove a taxi in Vegas in those days. She asked every customer who got in the cab, “I’m taking a survey. There are no hidden cameras. No one will ever know what you said. Who are you voting for?” She kept a running score. Close to 100% of her cab customers told her “Trump.” This, of course, didn’t match anything we heard from the pollsters. My gut told me this amateur cab driver poll was more significant than all the pollsters combined.

Knowing all this, I made the biggest bet of my life on Trump. I got 6 to 1 odds. Hillary was given a 99% chance of winning only three days before the election. We all know how that turned out.

Guess what? It’s Groundhog Day. It’s happening all over again.

The same exact pollsters have Trump losing by double digits again. The media is gloating. Democrats are already measuring the curtains at the White House. What a mistake.

Trump is a real-life Rocky Balboa. Trump is screaming “Hit me, c’mon, hit me, I dare you.” He gets hit, but he never goes down. Trump has failed a hundred times in business. He’s lost his entire fortune. At one point he was worth negative $4 billion. And of course, we all know he was counted out a thousand times during the 2016 election campaign.

But just like Rocky Balboa, you can never count Trump out. He’s relentless. I like to give this priceless advice: No one has ever gotten rich betting against America, or Donald J. Trump.

It’s all happening again- except on steroids. The polls are crooked- again. And of course, if anyone thought it was dangerous to announce your support of Trump in 2016, that was a picnic compared to today. Today you can be beaten to death for wearing a Trump cap. Today you can be firebombed for putting a Trump sign on your lawn. Today you will lose your job for saying “All Lives Matter.”

Today the liberal mob is destroying George Washington and Abraham Lincoln statues. They’re setting fire to the Virgin Mary. They’re looting and burning police stations. Democrat Governors are preventing you from going to church. Democrat Mayors are painting taxpayer-funded streets with “Black Lives Matter.” Here’s the best one of all: Museum curators are being fired for buying art pieces from white artists.

Today you’re taking your job, career, business and life in your hands to admit anywhere, to anyone, you support Trump.

You still think those polls are accurate? You don’t see it coming? This is Groundhog Day. And Trump is Rocky Balboa.

Trump’s not just going to win. It’s going to be an electoral landslide. The Silent Majority isn’t just angry this time around. We’re out for blood. We want revenge for what liberals have done to our country and economy. We won’t forget or forgive. We’re silent now. But we will speak LOUDLY on November 3rd.

I’m betting on it.

In part one of this series, we discussed how taxes affect NHL salaries. I never believed taxes were the reason the Tampa Bay Lightning and Vegas Golden Knights have signed so many sweetheart contracts in the past few years. The hypothesis was slightly more simple. Players love winning, and good teams are the ones that generally sign players at below market value. So, this allowed for the idea to check for a correlation between player salaries and the quality of the team to see if players do tend to take less money to play for good teams.

NHL Salaries

Defining a Discount

To see if players tend to take discounts on good teams, we need a definition of “discount”. Again, this post will use Matt Cane’s and the Evolving Wild contract projection models. They forecasted the salaries for each contract in the 2018 and 2019 offseasons. Using their numbers, we will define how much a discount a player took by a metric called “cap hit as a percentage of expected”.

For an example of “cap hit as a percentage of expected”, take Artemi Panarin‘s $11,642,857 per year contract last summer. Evolving Hockey forecasted Panarin’s most likely contract as an 8-year, $11,172,683 per year contract. On a 7 year deal, they forecasted him at an AAV of $10,482,359, so that’s the number we’ll work with. Given this forecast, take Panarin’s actual $11,642,857 AAV, divided by his projected $10,482,359. This shows us we see Panarin earned about 11% more than was expected, meaning his cap hit as a % of expected AAV is 111%.

If players take discounts to play for good teams, there should be a negative correlation between the quality of the team signing the contract and cap hit as a percentage of expected.

Team Quality

Next, we need some way to define team quality. There are various ways to do this, however, let’s keep it simple. Hockey Reference stores the pre-season Vegas betting lines for each season, and this post will use where bookies set a team and it’s over/under betting line as a proxy for team quality. Using preseason data is not perfect since some things can change during the offseason after the contracts are signed, but it’s an assumption that most players, especially those good enough to move betting lines, have a good guess as to what the team signing them will look like by October.

Do Players Take Discounts on Good Teams?

What does the data show us? It looks like players really do tend to take less money than expected when signing with good teams.

As the number of points Vegas oddsmakers expected teams to earn increases, players AAV as a percentage of expectations declines. While the downward trend may not look extreme, it is a “statistically significant” relationship. This means good teams like Tampa Bay have generally gotten discounts on their players. Then the flip side is that bad teams like the Ottawa Senators have paid premiums to sign their contracts. Just like taxes, this effect was especially strong among higher-income players.

When we split players up and examine the effect among those whose total contract was above $10 million and those whose contract was smaller, we see expensive players have generally been the ones driving this effect.

Vegas Oddsmakers Salary Nfl

How Big of a Discount Do Good Teams Get?

All this begs an important question. If good teams tend to get their players to sign for cheaper than expected, how much cheaper? Running a regression weighted by the total size of the contract we can find out. Note that this means the largest contracts are weighed the most heavily. Holding the team’s tax rates constant, we can see there’s an incredibly large difference between the best and worst teams.

Our model coefficients imply that players tend to sign for about 3.5% less for every 10 additional points their team is expected to earn that season. Note that top cup contenders generally have their over/under line around 105 points, while bottom feeders have their line set around 70 points. So, at the most extreme, the best teams got a 12% discount relative to their inferior peers. In a salary cap league, it is almost hard to overstate how meaningful this is. Nine teams are over the salary cap right now, and 27 teams are within $10 million of it. Given how tight to the cap almost every team is, this is a huge competitive advantage for the good teams.

It is also worth noting that the effect of team quality on NHL salaries is much larger than the effect income taxes have. So while it’s hot right now to explain away every good contract in a low tax city as a function of the income tax rate, if you’re trying to get players to take a discount, the data suggests its better to be good than lucky (enough to have your team in a low tax city). Taxes do matter, team quality just explains a larger percentage of the variance in NHL salaries above/below expectations in the NHL.

Who Are Vegas Oddsmakers

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