alai

All Jai Alai needs is a promotional anime series, and it'll be back in business.

All I know about jai alai was the three seconds from the intro to the Miami Vice series.

Wait, jai alai is your go-to for a sport not influenced by gambling?

Then I thought, why not jai alai, and maybe I can relive my excitement of Miami Vice.

Some college buddies and I went to a Jai Alai game in Ocala once.

> it looks like even jai alai is corrupted by gambling You may be joking but for those who are not aware betting has been prominent in jai alai since the thirties.

Jai alai in Miami was always about betting.

I remember going to jai alai games in Miami as a kid.

Florida lawmakers then tried to really kill it: > State lawmakers recently eliminated a measure requiring casinos to host several pari-mutuel betting sports, including jai alai and harness racing.

They replaced the expenses of running a horse racing meet (and cleared up tons of land they could sell) with jai-alai and they pay a few locals to put on an exhibition.

Pelote courts were all over the place, south towards Spain and inland into the low Basque Pyrenees, and often full of people of all skill levels playing variations of pelote and jai alai.

It had a last gasp since 2013: > But jai alai, the world's fastest-moving ball sport, fell off in the 1990s and didn't get a boost until 2018, when Florida banned greyhound racing and casinos needed a parimutuel activity (in which all bets are pooled) to continue offering slots and table games.

Fun fact, jai alai means "cheerful/happy party" in basque.

But I'm a little surprised to hear Jai Alai described as "dying".

One for the Steven Skiena algorithms fans: In his other book "Calculated Bets" he devotes an entire chapter, entitled "what is jai alai", to explaining the intricacies of the game.

As a kid to me that was the "Odds and Evens" Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movie (they were extremely popular in certain parts of Europe) First time I saw jai alai was in that movie, and it was shot in the famous Miami arena.

A great many similarities can be drawn between the biography of our characters and the actual history of the Jai Alai.

That'd be for the Basque Country region, the region of origin for Jai Alai.

I thought the same thing, and that's typically how pari-mutuel betting works (horsetracks, Jai-Alai, etc).