Sports Betting for Winners by Rob Miech

Sports Betting for Winners by Rob Miech

Author:Rob Miech
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00


Hockey and mathematics course through the Roxborough lineage. Henry Hall Roxborough, a great uncle to Roxy, was a hockey historian. In 1964, he penned a book about the Stanley Cup that, for a time, served as the definitive source about the imposing trophy. A track-and-field official at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Henry Hall wrote for the Maple Leafs’ program, was a regular guest on Toronto’s intermission radio shows, and he ghosted other books.

Henry relished challenging equations, digging into probabilities as they pertained to hockey. He once determined that the team that scored the first goal in an NHL game had a seventy-percent chance of winning; when a team tallied the first two goals, its odds of winning increased to ninety percent. He also analyzed the wisdom of pulling a goalie, in the final minute or two, when facing a one-goal deficit, or even trailing by two.

Roxy Roxborough’s father had a Harvard MBA, and he restructured and bought businesses, a takeover maven. Relatives own NHL season tickets in Toronto, Vancouver, and Miami. Stephen, Roxy’s brother, wrote a comprehensive hockey anthology. Roxy spent some time as the statistician for the Vancouver Canucks of the old World Hockey League.

Roxy studied probability theory and behavioral psychology at American University, in Washington, D.C., and UNLV, critical assets that would pay dividends in the casino business. At American, as a dormitory bookie he was beaten for about four grand when the 1969 Mets upset the Orioles in the World Series, a gut-punch that would require a year to pay off when he borrowed the cash from another party. All of it was education, prepping him for his career. He’d teach a course in race and sports-book management at a Las Vegas junior college.

He bought into American Wagering, Inc., the Vic Salerno property that would become Leroy’s, and they would corner the market with a ticket-issuing apparatus. “We had a monopoly,” Roxy says. “And after the Stardust sports book opened [in 1975], business started growing so fast it would make your head spin.”

After Bob Martin, of the Union Plaza, got popped in 1983 for violating the Wire Act and was sent to a minimum-security facility in California, Roxy would fill an odds-making gap. It would take a few years, in which a soft line would be exploited by syndicates and computer groups, but Roxborough’s Las Vegas Sports Consultants would become the industry’s established lines-maker.

He had started the company, in 1981, in his kitchen, logging spreads and results by hand into notebooks, a practice that continues today in some circles, and on the twenty-third story of a high-rise on the Strip. In the last half of that decade, Roxy would earn that nation’s oddsmaker status by not just supplying thirty-five Nevada properties with the latest point spreads, odds, and lines, but also providing them with the latest information, injury and weather reports.

What’s more, it was a full-service outfit as Roxy and his team—he had six full-time employees and six part-timers—consulted on gaming strategies, management, marketing, and personnel. In



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