Question of the Day - 13 July 2022

Michael "Roxy" Roxborough was born in 1951 and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. Always analytically and mathematically inclined and attracted to gambling, in his early years, he frequented pool halls and race tracks and took an interest in the Vancouver Stock Exchange. He was a sports bettor and did a little bookmaking, taking bets on the NFL and, being Canadian, the NHL long before the Nevada sports books did.   

He didn't exactly make a killing at race or sports betting on either side. He had to earn the rent money as a cab driver; he also sold booze out of his trunk when the liquor stores were closed on Sunday. And he did a stint at American University in Washington, D.C., as a political-science major, though he spent a lot of time at Bowie Race Track in nearby Bowie, Maryland. 

He returned to Vancouver and, as you can imagine for an illegal bookmaker, eventually wore out his welcome with the local constabulary, so he migrated, like so many gamblers before him, to the promised land of Las Vegas in the mid-1970s, right when sports books were starting to open in casinos. He worked at a few, but earned most of his livelihood betting baseball totals. 

He made his presence felt by winning, but also by getting to know many of the main players on both sides of the counter. In our book Then One Day ... Forty Years of Nevada Bookmaking, Chris Andrews writes in his "Roxy" chapter, "You meet a few people along the way who love, and I mean love, to talk about everything related to betting sports and Roxy was one of them."

Of course, Chris was another and when Roxy started showing up at the Cal Neva in Reno, where Chris was the sports book director, they got friendly.

"As a bookmaker, I knew the best thing was to treat the sharp bettors right and try to go in with their side if you  considered them sharp enough. While Roxy was betting at the Cal Neva, we started hanging out, having drinks, and going to dinner almost every night. We spent hours discussing the business and different philosophies on how it all worked. Roxy had a lot of knowledge and I wanted to pick his brain."

But more than that, Roxy was beating up Chris and the Cal Neva with his baseball over-under bets. "When Roxy came in to bet, I asked him to let me know when he was finished. Once he was done, I asked him where he thought my number should be. He was done betting, so whether the line moved or not didn’t matter to him. After he revealed his thinking, I moved the line to his number and kept taking action. His totals were way better than the ones I’d been getting from Vegas."

Then one day ... Roxy told Chris he was returning to Vegas and Chris asked him to call every day with his totals, offering a couple of hundred a week in return.  

That led to Roxborough launching his business, Las Vegas Sports Consultants (LVSC). 

In late 1983, the Stardust started buying information from LVSC. "The Stardust became known for setting the opening line and taking the largest limits, so signing on with (Stardust sports book director) Scotty Schettler was key," Roxborough told an ESPN reporter in 2015.

"Roxy and LVSC," Chris Andrews notes, "had a major impact on sports betting as it grew from shady operators in boiler rooms to the legitimate multinational industry it is today." So that answers your question about his influence on the industry.

He did it, primarily, with information -- using hardware and software to collect and crunch data. He also established networks with casinos all around the world for the dissemination of his lines to the sports books. And he paved the way for the books to follow his technological lead, allowing them to expand their range of bets to include less-known sporting events.  

"Well, somebody had to do it first," Roxy recently told a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with characteristic modesty.

Roxborough sold Las Vegas Sports Consultants in 1999, "but not before setting the table for the current generation of oddsmakers, who rely heavily on algorithms," CBC reported.  

Roxy has also been a syndicated sports-odds columnist ("America's Line"); he authored the textbook for the College of Southern Nevada race and sports book management course he taught; and he was named the second-most influential person in 20th century sports by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and was one of GQ magazine's "50 Most Important People in Sports."

Last we heard, Roxy was retired in Thailand, so we asked Chris Andrews about him.