Hear the full interview
From 4:28 in Thursday’s episode of Nick Luck Daily. Press play to start at the interview.
Roxy Roxborough, the Las Vegas oddsmaker credited with bringing computers into sports betting, says horse racing is still what makes his heart beat fastest, more than 50 years after he arrived in Las Vegas with a couple of hundred dollars.
Nick Luck caught up with Roxborough, 75, at Flemington during Melbourne Cup week. “I’ve spent my entire adult life in Las Vegas, the only life that counts,” he said. “And I supposedly created the first computer programs for making odds on sports betting.”
‘There’s easy money out here’
It started in 1967, when his father took him racing at Exhibition Park in Vancouver, where he went to high school. “Little did I know at the time, my father didn’t like horse racing. There was somebody who owned horses and owed him money,” he said. “But I decided, hey, there’s easy money out here. It’s nice to be young and foolish.”
Las Vegas came after a bad trip to Del Mar. “I went broke at Del Mar, got in my car with a couple of hundred dollars and some credit cards and drove over to Las Vegas. That was in 1972. A year later I moved there, and I’ve been there ever since,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’ve lived on the Las Vegas Strip all my life. Most people get a real life, live in the suburbs and raise kids. I’ve just always been a degenerate gambler.”
From beating the casinos to making their odds
In his twenties, he said, it was “mostly all cash, desperado-type business”. When the casinos went into sports betting, he was beating them. “Then they started limiting me, and in the ’80s they asked me would I make their odds,” he said. “I actually didn’t see a future in it. I didn’t know every casino was going to have a sports book.” He founded Las Vegas Sports Consultants in 1982 and hired people who understood computers better than he did. “The gambling business has basically become a technology business, whether we wanted to go that way or not.”
He stopped betting once he was making the odds. “I saw a major conflict of interest between making the odds and betting, which a lot of people have never made that separation,” he said. “It’s like people who go to prison. When I went to work with the casinos, I was in my office. I was inside.”
“What makes my heart beat fastest is horse racing. It’s a hobby I’ve had all my life.”
Roxy Roxborough
Still punting at 75
Now retired from oddsmaking, Roxborough is back betting on racing, though he never watches other sports. “I always thought it was a waste of time. I was always a numbers guy,” he said. “But horse racing, I really like being there. It was my introduction to gambling, and here I am, 75 years old and enjoying it more than ever.”
He says he can still win, just not as much. “Can I make money? Yes. But you just can’t make the money you used to,” he said. “There are much smarter guys now crowding you out of the market. But as long as I can have some champagne, have some bets and think at the end of the week they’ll end up okay, I’m pretty happy.” Asked what betting gives him, he said: “It makes you think. It keeps your mind in the game. It keeps your life in the game.”
Melbourne Cup week is one of his favourite meetings, along with Ascot and the Breeders’ Cup, partly because of the rest days between race days. “If it wasn’t for horses coming from England or Ireland, there wouldn’t be much of a Breeders’ Cup,” he added.
