Biff Tannen's Sports Betting Success: A Dubious Proposition

‘What’re you lookin’ at, butthead?’

Well, Biff, we are looking at someone who is a little too good at sports gambling. So good in fact, that we find the alternate timeline a dubious proposal at best. Would simply handing Biff a sports almanac really drastically alter his future into a life of prosperity? Here are some other outcomes Biff would have faced in a world where he possessed a book proclaiming the future winners of every major sporting event.

A Crossover for the Ages

Let’s get the weirdest one out of the way first. In the alternate Back to the Future present, Biff helps repeal the 22nd amendment, which helps his idol, Richard Nixon, serve at least four terms. Does that sound familiar? Well, if you’re a nerd, it might. Another story that sees the 22nd Amendment repealed and also states that “Nixon ran at least four consecutive terms” is the most popular graphic novel of all time, Watchmen. Clearly, this is not a coincidence, as it is unknown how Biff managed to cover up the Watergate investigations, leaving the only plausible explanation: the investigators were murdered by The Comedian, and Back to the Future’s alternate present is actually in the Watchmen universe. However, if Rorshach were to catch wind of Biff’s unfair advantages in gambling, he would put an end to it pretty quickly. Not to mention the whole impending global nuclear war and giant squid attacks. It’s safe to say Biff would not find success for long in this reality.

The House Always Wins

Now, it’s time for a more probable scenario. Biff was a far cry from a genius, and it's clear in the alternate timeline of the movie that he did not shy away from placing large bets. Rather than quietly utilizing a few bookies or sportsbooks in order to win just enough money to pad an income and strategically losing here and there to avoid suspicion, Biff went all-in. Winning a cool million on his 21st birthday, Biff kept placing enough bets to build his own casino and hotel on top of his meddling in politics. The truth is there is absolutely no way Biff wouldn’t have been able to win all the time without attracting some very bad attention. From loan sharks and bookies looking to take him out all the way up to congressional hearings for a suspected widespread sports rigging operation, Biff would not have been able to achieve the high levels of success that he did. Who knows? Perhaps the attention would have uncovered and caused other high-profile sports investigations to happen sooner, such as steroids in baseball – leading to a further altered timeline with different outcomes and rendering Biff’s treasured almanac worthless.

Biff Can’t Read

As we’ve pointed out, Biff is very stupid. So stupid that it makes us wonder if he would not have been right at home at the Derek Zoolander’s Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too. The likelihood that Biff would have placed an all-in bet on an outcome that he misread is pretty high and that’s about as funny as a screen door on a battleship.

The Butterfly Effect

We sort of touched on The Butterfly Effect earlier, and no, we don’t mean the terrible Ashton Kutcher movie, which has an even more terrible ‘Director’s Cut’ version. We mean the chaos theory concept. Other time-traveling movies demonstrate its effect on sports gambling in extremely intelligent ways, such as in Hot Tub Time Machine when they go back in time a hungover Rob Cordry vomits on a squirrel and later when he attempts to make a wager on football game that he is familiar with, the same squirrel darts onto the field and disrupts the play leading to a different outcome altogether – brilliant. So that means that simply possessing the almanac has now altered Biff’s behavior, and his altered behavior will alter the behavior of all the people he interacts with, creating a ripple effect that leads to Dan Marino deciding he’d rather take up fencing than football. No matter what, it’s almost certain his almanac would become, at best, hit-or-miss.

The bottom line, the alternate timeline presented in Back to the Future 2 is a dubious proposition at best, and any of you who were counting on getting rich via a sports almanac that you receive from your future self should probably make other plans instead. Safe Online Gaming has a lot of great advice on how to place bets safely in your own timeline. Online casinos such as Sugar Shack, Caliente Casino and a few others are completely transparent in their online slots, poker, craps, roulette, blackjack and other exciting sweepstakes games.  Best of all, they protect your identity while you play.

Now it’s time to make like a tree and get outta here!