Michael Roxborough
Appearances
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
He came to Blue Cat one time, Adam. Even after one lunch, I said, this guy's... thinking at a higher level than other people. And I learned a lot from him, not because he was divulging his secrets, but he was just thinking at a higher level.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
I always had an interest in sports. My father coached me in swimming, coached me in tennis. That's Michael Roxborough. Everyone just calls him Roxy now. But my world changed when I found out you could gamble on it. I became no longer a fan. I became interested in gambling.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
I decided that if I'm going to look at sports betting, I need to look at it statistically driven, data driven, not visual or instinct or just watching a lot of games.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
You just could not hit the ball out of there. And then the Padres went and spent like an outrageous contract to sign a guy like Oscar Gamble. All he did was hit fly balls. And that park was a place where fly balls went to die. So you soon found out that general managers really didn't know anything about their own ballparks either.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
We started to start getting weather reports from all the cities to parse out which ones helped scoring or hindered scoring. And dimensions, right? I mean, just the length of the left field fence. Dimensions were important. And we found out a couple of the ballpark dimensional drawings were wrong. They had the North Pole wrong. We'll point it north because we went out and did them ourselves.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
No, because actually what they would do is they could find somebody else who could take your bet. They can move it for more money someplace else in the country.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
It's a chariot. Why? It just sort of takes over your mood and your personality and I don't know anybody who's ever been in gambling who thought they were a better person for it.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
It does. What do they say? It's a hard way to make an easy living.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
So I said, you know, I'm gonna try this for a couple of years, but I'm not sure if it's going to work because it wasn't a given that every hotel was gonna have a sports book. It was a rather limited business. But that was one of my better decisions because it turned out to be a massive business.