Weekend with TV: Billionaire Explains How to Bet

Engramme's Weekend with TV #3 - Billions: The Numbers Never Lie (Listening B1-B2)

Once again, the weekend is here, and so is our 3rd edition of Engramme's Weekend with TV. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy while you can ;)

Watch & Enjoy

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Showtime's "Billions", which ended its second season with its  finale aired on May 7, 2017, has been renewed for a third season with an early 2018 debut.

The series allows viewers a peek into the world of a Wall Street billionaire, Bobby Axelrod, who's making, well, billions! And it also follows the U.S. District Attorney (DA), Chuck Rhoades, trying to bust him for illegal trading.

In this particular scene, Bobby is explaining how he learned to bet on the right horses in order to win. The scene tries to show that billionaires like him did not rise to big money by chance; that more often than not, they also had to learn to succeed  by trial and error.

Let's Practice!

Watch again: Can you fill in these blanks¹?

Bobby: This place gave me my first real look at how the world worked. I watched people running toward the betting window, with ______ hopes, no plan; then, I watched ‘em walk away from the track, ripping up their tickets ___  ________. That wasn’t gonna be me… Bach: You didn’t bet? Bobby: Oh, I bet. I bet. But first, I _________  ___ where the sharp action was, where the guys who had a plan were; guys who grinded, took the guesswork out of it. They knew which drivers had been rested. They knew which horses were ready; and they also knew which ones were ___  ______  _______. Bach: How’d you meet those guys? Bobby: I didn’t ___  _______. But I figured out that they always bet late, and they bet heavy. So, I started watching that [pointing to the scoreboard]…instead of that [pointing at the tracks]. The numbers ______ the _______, they always do. I started making bets of my own, ya know, the right ones. And _______ I understood what had happened, I watched the track to see how it happened…

(See the first comment for the answers)

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Nice Practice Ahead of the Weekend! We wish you a great one ahead. If you missed any of this week's posts, they are all here in order: Day#8, Day#9, Day#10, Day#11

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1 In this and other 'listening practice sections' on Engramme, you get a chance to practice important phrasal verbs (e.g. 'figure out'), key collocations (e.g. 'high hopes'), key grammar points (e.g. starting a sentence with 'once'), and pronunciation nuances (e.g. 'at first' pronounced /ə(t) fɜː(r)s(t)/ instead of /æt fɜrst/) that give most learners the most difficulty in listening to a second/foreign language.^↩