Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports, Part 6
The Oddsmaker: Michael Roxborough
In this chapter, I discuss the career of Michael Roxborough, the heir to Bobby Martin, based on my interviews with Roxy.
This is an excerpt from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (pp. 384-389)
Michael Roxborough is the heir to Bobby Martin, the man who sets the line for Las Vegas on sporting events, mostly on NFL games.[1] Roxy went to high school in Vancouver, British Columbia, and became a student of political science at American University in Washington, D.C. He switched to psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Bringing an academic but extremely sophisticated approach to oddsmaking, Roxborough is the president of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which he founded in 1981, and which has a staff of five full-time employees.[2]
Roxborough is anything but flashy. He dresses like an insurance agent, wearing dark suits, basic white shirts, and conservative ties. His wife teaches Sunday school in Las Vegas. He is an intense, no-nonsense man, who hardly drinks and never smokes.
A vegetarian who swims a half mile four days a week, he is more like Charles McNeil, the University of Chicago mathematician who refined the point spread system, rather than a streetwise Bobby Martin or a flamboyant Kentucky gentleman like Ed Curd.
Roxborough’s office is on the twelfth floor of the Valley Bank Center on Convention Center Drive, down the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center and up a few doors from The Stardust, just off" the Strip. The main room where Roxborough’s staff works is Spartan. There is no artwork, no football posters on the walls. There are three desks, five chairs, several wire machines, a large IBM computer, and a slew of pocket calculators.
There is a clutter of long sheets of paper from the wire services scattered about the room, mostly filled with general sporting news, and more important, results of the recent college and professional football games, including player injuries and other data. The sports sections of several daily newspapers and weekly and monthly sports magazines are piled atop the desks. They are creased, underlined, and marked up, highlighting bits of trivia, which might figure as variables in some oddsmaking equation.
Roxy’s adjacent private office is equally unspectacular except when his window shades are open. He has a panoramic view of the Strip. The most sophisticated piece of equipment on his desk is a small fax machine.
“I got interested in oddsmaking because I liked to go to the racetrack, and I liked to gamble,” Roxborough told me. “It’s funny. I thought gambling was a good thing to do, and I thought it would be great to be a professional gambler. When I came to Las Vegas, I learned that it was different than I thought. I wanted to be a professional gambler to escape conventional work. What I found out was, yes, I was escaping conventional work, but it looked like I was going to have to work sixty hours a week to do it. I figured: It’s not really glamorous, and it’s a lot of work. And I also found that people don’t make a lot of money by just going out and trying to pick winners. These gamblers are value people or arbitragers.
“It’s like the stock market. The real money isn’t being made by guys who are trying to pick stocks that are going up so much. It’s being made by guys who can arbitrage, who can buy and sell at a profit, immediately. That’s basically the way the game is here. I thought it would be great if you could sleep until noon, drink a few beers, pick a few games, and collect a few tickets. I think most people come to Vegas for that type of lifestyle, but it doesn’t work that way. If you think it does work that way, well, there are some people who spend several years going broke and getting into money, and then going broke again—because they think that’s the lifestyle. I just didn’t think it was for me.”
Roxborough’s mentor is Herb Lambeck, better known in Vegas as Herbie Hoops, because he was to basketball oddsmaking what Bob Martin was to the football weekly line. “I wanted to learn how to make a line, but no one ever wanted to work with me,” Roxborough says. “With Herb, it was a real close-knit thing. He listened to me. I used to try to do some work for him, so I wasn’t just a guy taking up his time. There was no remuneration for it. I did it to try to keep me on top of the game, so that I would learn more about it. The first time I was paid for making a line was when I started my own business in 1981.”
Although most people have been amazed at his rapid success, Roxborough is philosophical about it. “I think it was the type of thing where I was doing some work that was good. But, more important, I was in the right place at the right time. I think what happened was that I was providing a service that probably no one else was. In other words, I had made a business out of just line-making. I had an office. I had a spot where you could actually reach me or somebody from six-thirty in the morning to seven at night. No one had ever thought of doing it that way.
“The [legal sports-gambling] business was exploding in Las Vegas, and there weren’t a lot of managers to fill these new race and sports books. Because of that, people would call up those who didn’t have as much expertise as previous oddsmakers, and they needed people to help them. We had an office that was available that did that. And we were here and doing a pretty good job for the people we were servicing. And we got on a big wave.
“We provide services to licensed [casino] operators. What makes our service unique from others is that we are oddsmakers, so we are actually making the point spreads. We are not copying them from somebody else. The other thing that makes us unique is that we only deal with licensed operators. You have to be licensed by some governmental agency. We also do a place in the Caribbean and a place in England. So that makes us a little different too. In other words, we will not provide odds to private individuals. We will not go across state lines to other people.
“So, we furnish casinos in Nevada with odds that they can post on betting events that we feel are going to get a good cross-section of the betting public. We don’t want to get too esoteric. I don’t do something like a small-time fight or collegiate high-jumping contest. I deal with those sports that have broad public interest. And that is in the best interest of the casinos because they’ll attract enough action to create a profit. The NFL has the broadest public interest by far.”
Contrasting his operation to that of Bobby Martin, Roxborough continues: “We do it a little differently. The man-to-man betting was a good way to do it when the circle was smaller. But I don’t have good contacts among the bettors. I don’t know who they are. I follow the way the line goes, but I don’t follow the people who are betting it. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether Joe Blow makes the game move from three to four. I just know that it has moved from three to four. And that’s my major concern. I really don’t have contact with what’s going on with the books and the people.
“In years past, when someone would make a line, like Bob Martin, who is the legendary oddsmaker, he would think about it, and then he would ask a couple of his associates what they thought of his line. And they would tell him by betting money into it—which is a great way to have an opinion. But times have changed.
“What I do now is have people working for me, and we all work independently of one another. When we create odds, my checks and balances are the people who work for me. And the idea is to get everybody to work independently, not sharing anybody else’s work or power ratings. And that’s how I come up with a diversified opinion—as opposed to the way Bob Martin did it. So, basically, the result is the same—we’re getting different opinions. We’re just going about it in different ways.”
Roxborough says that history has no impact on the odds he posts. “I can’t remember what happened last week. The way I see it is that the bettors are completely different than they were ten, fifteen years ago. Right now, we have all these guys in a stock-marketlike atmosphere where it’s sort of an efficient market. If the spread is six and goes to seven and a half, there’s a pretty good chance it’s not going to go higher. A lot of people who lay the six, they’re going to take the seven and a half back [on the other team, thus trying to middle]. So, we actually see these efficiency markets within the betting. I think that’s the new wave bettor. If you go down there and take a look at the bettors and these operations with walkie-talkies and clipboards and beepers, they’re all more into arbitraging than they are in selecting winners.”
Also, cutting against the traditional wisdom, player injuries don’t receive much emphasis when Roxborough sets the line. “Injuries are generally overrated. I don’t feel the need to go out and find this information. You can’t have every injury. There’re ninety-six college teams we follow. We’re trying to get every injury we can. We’re not going to have them all. Somebody may know someone in some region of the country who knows about an injury we don’t know about.”
When I asked him about his own inside information, he replied: “We don’t talk to correspondents outside of town. We just talk to people here in town. One of the reasons I don’t like to talk to people out of town is I don’t know any gamblers outside of town. And unless a guy is a gambler, I don’t think he really knows what we’re interested in. A fan’s scouting report is totally useless.”
Roxborough posts his weekly line at the Stardust. “The Stardust traditionally has done this. There is no prize for going first [being the first sports book to post the line]. So, it’s not financially advantageous to go first because there may be some flaws in the line. But the Stardust creates a lot of publicity for itself and has made a name for itself this way. I think that’s one of the reasons why they continue to go first. But it is risky.”
When I asked Roxborough whether he or his oddsmaking operations have ever been influenced by the organized-crime gambling syndicate, he replied sharply, “No, and there are reasons. I don’t see how, if you put out a bad line, it will help a team win or lose a game—if it’s just a couple of points. Plus, you have the public who is going to be betting into the line anyway. I think that since the hotel casinos have been involved in the sports-gambling business, there have been changes.”
Roxborough says that he doesn’t stay in touch with Warren Welsh of NFL Security directly. “Warren Welsh has a contact in Las Vegas, who is here full-time. I know him. His job is to inform Warren if there are any unusual line movements. I work with this guy.”[3]
The oddsmaker added that he has taken NFL games off the boards—but has always put them back up by game time. “I didn’t take them off because of injuries unless it was a key player. I didn’t take them off because of too much one-sided betting. Let’s say Dan Marino [the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins] hurts his elbow. And there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would play or not play. We don’t know what to do. Between his playing and not playing might make a four-point difference in the line. If he’s out, fine, we know what to do. If he’s going to play, that’s fine, we know what to do. But if we don’t know whether he’s going to play or not, that’s a problem. And we might take the game off the boards until we get a further medical report.”
Citing a specific incident that caused him to take an NFL game off the board, Roxborough remembers: “Somebody thought that Dan Marino [who was getting ready to play New England in 1985] had been arrested for drunk driving the night before. The story was so unbelievable that I didn’t want to give it any credence—except the number [the point spread] was moving all over town. So, we ended up having to scratch the game.
“We hated to take it off, but it was Sunday morning, and we just didn’t know what to do. So, we started taking some bets on it, and it kept moving and moving. And it turned out that the rumor was totally unfounded, and the game went right back to the number it should have been. That was the craziest rumor I’d ever heard. I still don’t know how it got started.”
ENDNOTES
[1] In 1980, popular oddsmaker Bobby Martin was indicted in Rhode Island for his role in a six-state gambling operation, specifically for illegally transmitting betting information across state lines. Martin had been picked up on federal wiretaps, supplying the point spreads on sporting events to a Rhode Island bookmaker. The indictments of Martin and fifteen others culminated in a two-year investigation by the FBI, the U.S. Strike Force, and the Rhode Island State Police. Martin, who told me that he was fingerprinted by a police officer who had just lost a bet using the oddsmaker’s line, was later convicted and served thirteen months in the federal minimum-security penitentiary in Boron, California. He was released in March 1984.
[2] Roxborough is also the co-author, along with Mike Rhoden, of Race and Sports Book Management, which is a 1988, self-published, 128-page handbook. It is used by Roxy in a course he teaches on the sports book business at Clark County Community College in North Las Vegas.
[3] Speaking of watching the line move on the basis of the money bet, Roxborough told me: “We monitor the line during the week. In fact, we monitor it by the minute. We have runners in the books who are monitoring the line to see which way it moves. It’s very important. That’s part of our service.”