I previously
worked as a writer alongside legendary oddsmaker Michael "Roxy" Roxborough from
1997-98 after our company Computer Sports World (CSW) was acquired by his
company Las Vegas Sports Consultants (LVSC).We worked together on a nationally
syndicated gaming column called Sports Book Insider. I was lucky enough to
catch up with Mr. Roxborough during his most recent trip to Vegas and will be
sharing our conversation in a series of Q & A articles over the next month.
Following
is Part 2 in the series (click here for Part 1), which is dedicated to our former co-worker
and good friend Jason Been, who loved betting and sports more than anyone I
have ever known and passed away on June 5 following a courageous 10-year fight with brain cancer at the age of 41...
Q: Can
you describe how your company LVSC was involved in helping create the Stardust
Line?
R: The
Stardust was the first Las Vegas client. They were going to open first, and
when you open first, you need more than one line. So they employed us, and we
were the most high-profile people. They employed other people to make the line
too. When you go first, it's good to look at more prices. But as time went on,
we ended up getting a gaming license, and casinos felt comfortable working with
somebody who already had a gaming license, and it wasn't tied into offshore
books and was going to put some heat on them. That helped the business grow. At
one time, we had 90 percent of the sportsbooks in Nevada.
Q: How
big of an impact did the Stardust Line have on betting in Vegas and across the
country?
R: It
was a big deal at the time because Scotty Schettler had more or less this responsibility
to put out this line that almost everyone in town was going to copy. Plus all
the bookmakers around the country too, but I don't care about those guys. He was
putting out a line, and his supervisors were going to manage how it got bet
early. And I thought he did a very good job of it. And it was a big deal. In fact,
back before telephone account wagering, everybody who was a sports bettor in
town was at the Stardust at 8 o'clock in the morning. Everybody was there, not
only bettors, but people who ran line services. Even if people weren't betting
that day, they were there because it became a social hangout for the city. For
years, their line moves were the most important in the city because they took
large limits, and they moved it judiciously.
Scotty had an idea that you can balance out games if you
can find people that would want to buy the opposition. Not everybody uses that
style of betting. But he thought that they could. He had so many people sitting
in the room that if a price moved, they would buy it back. So they did have a
lot of line moves, and that was their style. Their style was to grind out a
small percentage and high volume.
Q: How many line services were there, and can
you tell me about Don Best founder Don Bessette?
R: I
don't know, but once the line went up, you could never get to a telephone to
phone around. There was an incredible amount of line services, and it was all
operating in a gray area. Once the line went up on a board, everyone would be
scurrying for a pay phone.
Don was a real gentleman, first of all. I think he was
self-taught in computers. Our office was on Convention Center Drive, and his office
was across the street in a small strip mall. The idea was to be close to the
Stardust. He was monitoring lines with runners at the Stardust. They'd look at
line changes, and then they had to go outside - because you couldn't use the
phones inside - and call the changes in. Someone would manually enter them, and
then he'd send them out. Don had a good business plan, unfortunately he died
before he had a chance to see what happened to it. I could see that we were
going to have to get odds into sportsbooks, and eventually we'd have to get
real-time.
Q: Can
you talk about how technology has changed the way sports betting information spreads?
R: There's always a rush for
relative information. There's a lot of noise out there, but in some sports there
are injuries that can be very key, like in basketball. Breaking stories just
have a way of getting on Twitter first. It's good for bettors, bookmakers or
linemakers now need people moderating social media. There's always two ways to
find out about an injury, it's you get it first, or they bet you and then you
find out about it. Most of the time, it's that you get bet first and then you
find out about it. There are people all around the country that just know about
certain areas or certain players. And if you're sitting here in Las Vegas, you
can't know every situation everywhere. That's the main reason there's limits on
betting, so you can manage your liability, and so you can manage professional
gamblers. They don't manage you.
Q: How did technology help improve the
efficiency of how lines were made after you started?
R: When
we first started making lines back in the 70s, it was all loose-leaf notebooks
and pencils and calculators. Then the first computers were more or less just dumb
terminals, they stored data. We didn't have any programming with them. But they
stored data, and that was a big thing because the first computers saved us a
lot of stuff on data storage and writing everything down. Then the sports
network and other companies started doing boxscores. And then Computer Sports
World opened up a business that not only could we record all the data, they
could actually write third-party programs to massage the data and come up with
the data that you needed. So that was a big revolution for us.
I think we were the first oddsmakers to use computers,
and it made an amazing difference. Because if we wanted to check how an NBA
team plays when they're out on the road for so many days and so many games, before
a guy would have to go through three years' worth of data and dig it out hand
by hand. It would be a project that would take three to four days. Once we
wrote the program, we could run the data. It might take an hour to write the
program, and we could run all the data for three years in less than three
minutes. To my knowledge, they had the best and oldest database with point
spreads and stuff.
Part 1 | Part 3