🏅Sports Gambling Hall of Fame Inaugural Class At Circa Tonight/Friday

[jjgold]

FD and DK have a legal monopoly usa gambling market and never will be broke

Thats GENIUS

Genius software

KINGS OF THE SPACE

 

[Wagerallsports]

Once it's up I will make a video next time I'm over there

Thanks Bobby

 

[BobbyFK]

Thanks Bobby

Your welcome. Curious to see it

 

[2the9s]

Just saw this thread...

Even though he denies it, Baxter pretty much admits to fixing Hagler vs. Leonard in this interview. That fight and the controversy around it did a lot of damage to boxing as a sport. I'm can't be a fan of Billy for that.

Billy Baxter

Pro sports bettor and poker player known for staking Stu Ungar the $10,000 buy-in for the 1997 World Series of Poker Main Event, which he won for a record-tying third time.

“Billy Baxter has always been my hero,” fellow inductee Michael “Roxy” Roxborough said. “Here’s a guy who’s a professional poker player, professional sports bettor and managed world champion boxers. Who’s got a better life than that?”

 

[JDS]

Billy Walters & Frank Rosenthal are my two favorite all time greats personally.

 

[jjgold]

Walters was the biggest crook in world most of his money was made illegally

It makes hall f fame list a joke

 

[BobbyFK]

 

[KVB]

That is pretty cool, I must say.

 

[BigJay]

 

[BigJay]

I find it very odd that Jimmy Vaccaro and Billy Walters are just now being inducted. Sounds like names that should have been in there years ago

Isn’t this the inaugural class?

 

[BobbyFK]

Isn’t this the inaugural class?

Yes I believe so. That would make sense then

 

[Wagerallsports]

Thanks Bobby for the vid

 

[BobbyFK]

Thanks Bobby for the vid

No problem. It was even better to see in person

 

[Wagerallsports]

That's a heck of a wall and empty spaces

Looks like they will be doing a lot of inducting in the future

 

[BobbyFK]

That's a heck of a wall and empty spaces

Looks like they will be doing a lot of inducting in the future

I was very surprised by all the empty spaces actually. I figured they would just have the few for the inductees they already did. And then add more spots as they add more inductees

 

[Pimike]

The CEO of Pinnacle is on the board.

Would you bang?

View attachment 17369

Nope

 

[Pimike]

Good stuff

 

[BobbyFK]

The CEO of Pinnacle is on the board.

Would you bang?

View attachment 17369

No way

 

[Wagerallsports]

‘Herbie Hoops,’ ‘Stevie the Pencil’ and rest of Sports Gambling HOF class​

LV REVIEW JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTION
8/2/24

Herb Lambeck was known as “Herbie Hoops” for his prowess as a college basketball handicapper. But his best sport was boxing.

“He was Las Vegas’ best boxing oddsmaker for decades, where almost everyone used his odds to start booking fights,” longtime Las Vegas oddsmaker Michael “Roxy” Roxborough said of the man he considered his mentor. “And this was at the height of when Las Vegas really was the boxing capital of the world (in the 1970s and 1980s).”

Lambeck will be inducted posthumously into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame on Aug. 9 as part of its second 10-member class at the Circa sportsbook.

He left his native New Jersey for Las Vegas in 1968 after going bust on a bet on the Jets in their loss to the Raiders in the infamous “Heidi Game.” He was the oddsmaker at the Saratoga Club and Leroy’s stand-alone race and sportsbooks in downtown Las Vegas.

Lambeck also made the lines for fellow Hall of Famer Bob Martin and was the college basketball expert for Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s nationally syndicated sports betting column, which was in more than 200 daily newspapers.

“He made the line for a lot of people that are famous,” Roxborough, a fellow Hall of Famer, said. “He was like the man behind the scenes.

“He was pretty good at betting college basketball and then eventually became the key oddsmaker for college basketball at a time when no one wanted to book college hoops. It may seem hard to believe now, but nobody ever booked the November and December games. People didn’t mess with it because of football.”

Lambeck’s sharp opinion attracted the unwelcome attention of notorious Las Vegas mobster Tony Spilotro, the basis for Joe Pesci’s character in the Martin Scorcese mob movie “Casino.”

Sports betting historian Arne Lang wrote in Lambeck’s 2015 obituary for The Sweet Science that during college basketball season, Spilotro was Lambeck’s morning wake-up call: “Herbie, this is Tony. Who we got today?”

After Spilotro was murdered in 1986, Lambeck said he was very relieved.

”I had a nice run with him,” he said. “But I knew that someday I would fall into a bad slump, and I didn’t know how he would react.”

Here is a quick glance at the rest of the class:

Living inductees

Richie Baccellieri

Former sportsbook manager at Caesars Palace and sportsbook director at MGM Grand and the Palms, where he orchestrated the expansion of in-game wagering. Founded Stadium Technology, a leading software and technology provider to books, and is still active as director of product development for Circa Sports. Portrayed as “Stevie the Pencil” in the book “The Smart Money: How the World’s Best Sports Bettors Beat the Bookies Out of Millions.”

Nick Bogdanovich

Born and raised in Las Vegas, he started as a ticket writer at the Sands and became sportsbook director at age 27 at Binion’s Horseshoe, where he took bets from the sharpest of the sharps. Also ran books at the Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay, the Golden Nugget, Club Cal Neva, William Hill and Caesars. Still active as a bookmaker at Circa.

Jimmy Evarts

Helped revolutionize the offshore bookmaking landscape by going fully online and dealing reduced juice as one of the founders of sharp offshore sportsbook Pinnacle Sports, which Roxborough said “was the gold standard for years.”

Ron “The Cigar” Sacco

Known as the godfather of offshore sports betting, he helped popularize Caribbean offshore gambling at Costa Rica International Sports, aka Betcris, where the motto was, “Where the line originates.” Posted first lines in the world on several sports and took the biggest bets.

Vic Salerno

Pioneer who computerized the sports betting industry and introduced several other innovations, including the first major network of sportsbooks at Leroy’s, the first sports betting kiosk and the first sports betting mobile app.

In memoriam

Ed Curd

Old-school bookmaker from Kentucky known for standardizing the 11-to-make-10 vigorish (-110), or juice, which is still the basis of all straight sports bets.

Michael Kent

Math and computer wizard who wrote the code that launched the renowned Computer Group, which featured Billy Walters, regarded as the most successful sports bettor of all time. The group was credited in the 1980s as the first sports betting syndicate to successfully use mathematical formulas and computer models.

Gene Maday

Owned and operated Little Caesar’s, one of the last of the stand-alone race and sportsbooks in Las Vegas. It was known as the dingiest joint that booked the biggest bets.

Chuck Schuapp

Known as Chuck Sharp, the high-stakes sports gambler and poker player is regarded as the best NBA totals bettor of his generation.

 

[Wagerallsports]

Sports betting pioneer Salerno headed to Gambling Hall of Fame​

LV REVIEW JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTION
8/2/24

When Vic Salerno left his Southern California dental practice to become a Las Vegas bookmaker in 1978, he quickly discovered that the sports betting industry was in need of a deep cleaning.

Cheating was rampant in the era of handwritten tickets, which were filled out on triplicate forms and ripe for past posting.

“Counterfeit ticketing was crazy. Writers could change the amount of a bet from $20 to $200 very simply by adding a zero,” said Salerno, who took over Leroy’s stand-alone race and sportsbook in downtown Las Vegas from his father-in-law, Leroy Merillat.

“My employees could cheat me, and the race and sportsbook owners could cheat the state. It was unbelievable, being new to the business. There just weren’t any controls. I had to find a way to stop the cheating.”

He knew his cashier was stealing from him because the balding employee was paying for hair plugs Salerno knew he couldn’t afford on his meager earnings.

Computerization

Salerno found a better way of combating theft when he teamed up with computer programmer Javed Buttar to create Computerized Bookmaking Systems in 1984. Computerization was the first of several key technological innovations pioneered by Salerno that revolutionized the industry.

CBS paved the way for Salerno to build the first major network of sportsbooks, the first self-service sports betting kiosks, the first sports betting mobile app and more.

“It wasn’t like I invented technology,” said the mild-mannered Salerno, 80. “I just applied sports betting to it.”

Salerno will be inducted Friday into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame as part of the second 10-member class at Circa sportsbook.

“When I think of any Hall of Fame, Vic is one of the few that I think embodies what greatness means,” said former Stardust and MGM Resorts sportsbook director Robert Walker, who ran USBookmaking for Salerno. “He ran sportsbooks. He developed the first computerized sportsbooks platform. That was a game changer for all of us.”

In addition to replacing handwritten tickets with computer-issued slips and accounting for every dollar, computerized betting enabled sportsbooks to dramatically improve their risk management.

“Bookmakers had a difficult time managing liability. We would chart our liability on a piece of paper with a pencil,” Salerno said. “One thing that the CBS system could do was what-ifs. What if the Rams win by 3? What if they win by 4? This could tell what your risk was, and you could adjust to mitigate your risk.

“It was eye-opening. You could book better when you knew where you were, especially when we expanded to satellite books.”

One of Salerno’s first clients was the Stardust, and his computer system quickly became the gold standard in the industry.

“Once we proved it could work at the Stardust, it just ballooned from there,” he said. “Everybody wanted it, and the (Nevada) Gaming Commission saw that it could stop cheating and they passed a regulation that said, by a certain date, everybody had to be computerized.”

Satellite books

Nevada law was changed in 1989 to allow outside operators for casino sportsbooks, and Leroy’s soon operated a vast network of books that eventually included 130 locations in the state.

“All you needed was a phone line between two books, and the computerized system would let you see remote locations,” fellow Hall of Famer Michael “Roxy” Roxborough said. “That led, in turn, to the Leroy’s empire. There were all these small places that couldn’t afford overhead for a sportsbook, and Leroy’s would go in there.”

Roxborough, who ran Las Vegas Sports Consultants as America’s preeminent oddsmaker in the 1980s and 1990s, became business partners with Salerno in the late 1970s, and the two have been friends for 45 years.

“He was instrumental in me computerizing our odds company and distributing the odds via computers,” he said.

Salerno and Roxborough also created the precursor to the Don Best odds screen in the 1990s.

Self-service betting

Leroy’s network led to the development of self-service sports betting kiosks in the early 2000s.

“When we started all these satellites, smaller properties wanted into the business. But it was very difficult for them to have live ticket writers and spend money on terminals,” Salerno said. “That’s when we went to self-service kiosks.”

Leroy’s parent company, American Wagering, was the first American bookmaker listed on the stock exchange, under the symbol “BETM.” William Hill acquired American Wagering for $18 million in 2011.

When the federal ban on sports betting was lifted in 2018, USBookmaking, another brainchild of Salerno, was the first company to operate sportsbooks in tribal casinos. Salerno sold USBookmaking to Elys Game Technology, an Italian company, in 2021 for $12 million in cash and stock.

Not every venture paid off for Salerno, who lost millions on MegaSports, a pari-mutuel sports betting company, and USFantasy, a pari-mutuel fantasy sports company that was a precursor to USBookmaking.

Salerno’s proudest accomplishment is developing the first sports betting mobile app for Leroy’s, which was launched on BlackBerry and Android smartphones in 2011 before becoming the first wagering app in the App Store.

He and his wife, Terina, a lawyer, traveled to Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California, in 2010 to pitch the Leroy’s app.

“We were the only ones in suits. Everybody else had T-shirts and jeans on,” Salerno said. “They didn’t understand our business. Their biggest fear was we would end up losing a big bet and they would be on the hook for it.

“They didn’t know how they were going to monetize a wagering application. But they approved it because it meant so many eyeballs and users in the App Store.”

Six months after Leroy’s app was launched, Salerno said there were more than 80 betting apps in the App Store.

“It was a tremendous effort. When we put it out, this was just when the iPhone came out,” he said. “The hardest part, after it was approved, was not convincing people to use the app. It was teaching people how to use the phone. We literally had to give phones away to people.”

Mobile sports wagering now accounts for the vast majority of bets placed nationwide, including 65.8 percent of wagers placed last year in Nevada.

‘Worst call’

When Roxborough first met Salerno, fresh from moving from Marina del Rey, he predicted that the former dentist wouldn’t last a year in Las Vegas.

“That’s the worst call I ever made,” he said. “In retrospect, the reason I didn’t think he would last is why he transformed the industry. He’d already run a successful dental business, and it gave him the view from the outside.

“He could see things that people on the inside couldn’t see.”