re: LSU's Real Odds of winning the CWS

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While you are technically correct, there are enough knowledgeable bettors with enough money to play with that, if the bookmakers set the odds way off from the teams' abilities, they would get hit pretty hard by the experts. Now, this may not be the case with college baseball, since I doubt it's a huge betting sport, but in more major sports, the lines should be pretty close to the bookmakers' estimates of the teams' actual chances.

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He is wrong though. Bookmakers want to maximize expected value, not balance out risk. Especially in Vegas, where they have enormous resources backing their bookmaking. In many cases, maximizing EV will also balance out risk, but there are plenty of conceivable situations where maximizing EV will cause heavier betting one way or the other. When that's the case, Vegas would be perfectly happy to play against the bettors.