By Jared Sugerman, News Staff

There is one weekend a year when the people having the best time in Las Vegas are those who rise the earliest.
‘There are so many people here that you have to wake up at the crack of dawn to get a seat,’ said communications studies associate professor Alan Zaremba, citing the greatest difficulty he encountered while doing research for his newly published book, The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas.
In 2001, Zaremba traveled to Las Vegas to watch the first two rounds of games played during the NCAA basketball tournament. What he found was the impetus for a book that describes the first weekend of March Madness, a four-day experience unlike any other in Vegas, and the people who make it that way. Zaremba has been making the trip annually since 2003, partially to work on his book, but also because ‘it’s just plain fun to be on the sports book floor during the first four days of competition,’ he said.
‘My experience is that this is a lark.’ Zaremba said. ‘This is something that people enjoy. That’s why so many people come back annually to rendezvous with their friends, people who have graduated from college maybe 15 years before, and enjoy four days of watching college basketball games and cheering for teams that they’ve wagered on.’
Zaremba said he regularly moved from one casino to another, hoping to portray the difference in atmosphere depending on where he happened to be watching a game.
In addition to chatting with bettors, he spent time with three sports book directors as well as David Schwartz, the head of the Center for Gambling Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
‘Some people might think that people who go to Las Vegas are seedy characters, and I’m sure there are seedy characters. But the people I interact with are fans more than anything else,’ Zaremba said of the dozens of gamblers he interviewed at various casinos.
Zaremba said he has made wagers himself, but they are generally low-stakes, and are typically for academic purposes, as well.
‘In order to make the claim, which I make in the book, that you really can’t win, I wanted to show that if you bet on every single game, you’re going to lose,’ Zaremba said, ‘I’m not a big better. I don’t really get a kick out of it, and I never bet outside of Las Vegas.’