"I was a front for the largest sports-betting syndicate in America."
He deadpans it, as if it were a minor role in a forgotten movie, so one is tempted not to take it seriously. When asked to elaborate, when pushed, Kutcher cracks the story right open around an explanation of the forces at work: "In football, you're basically looking for numerical anomalies. Handicappers have to handicap X number of games every week, which is why the sport college football in particular is really good for this, because there's such a broad array of games happening at one time. The handicappers can only handicap so many games really well. And all they're really trying to do, as the house is, is to keep an even number of people on either side of the bet, so they get the juice, right?"
Now he's elbows on knees, leaning forward into the story he's telling. "So if you can find the anomaly where the assumption is they're going to get heavy on one side, when the line moves it can actually move favorably as it pertains to the potential outcome of the game. So you set a margin of error against the line. If they've set it inaccurately, too hard to one side, you gauge that and play the other side of the line. You can gain probably a 40 percent statistical advantage on them. It's really complicated. You gotta know a lot of data points how this team played on various surfaces, in different weather a lot. But these guys could do it."
He sits back.
"So, generally these types of individuals aren't allowed to gamble, but they know how to handicap the house. So they sent me in. I basically just placed the bet."
How long did that go on?
"One season," he says. "Well, half a season."
They got on to you that fast?
"We were clearing, like, $750,000 in four weeks of college football. It was pretty fun. Then they caught on. The hypothesis had been that the house would just assume that I was a dumb actor with a lot of money who liked football."
So, dumb actor playing dumb actor? Kutcher was born a dumb-actor savant: the good looks purposefully blanketed by obtuseness, the wincing stare from under the bill of a ball cap, the glassy-eyed amazement, the vague mouth breathing. He demands that you not take him seriously, which is, of course, exactly what he needs from the world, because it allows him to take the world and its machinations very seriously.
