"Your eyes can only fool you"

The Man Who Shook Up Vegas
By SAM WALKER
January 5, 2007; Page W1

LAS VEGAS -- Veteran sports bettors and bookmakers are not prone to fantastic notions. They like to think that everything new is just something old in a fashionable suit.

But this fall, the stereotype no longer fit. Years of studied cynicism gave way to breathless talk. Las Vegas had a mystery on its hands.
Each Thursday morning at precisely 10 a.m. Nevada time, every major casino sports betting operation in the world from here to Costa Rica was being simultaneously pounded by thousands of bettors wagering millions of dollars on the same few college football games. Odder still, most of these lock step bets were turning out to be winners, costing the casinos a fortune.

To protect themselves, bookmakers broke with protocol and began making unusually large and sudden corrections to their betting lines, or "point spreads." At least one offshore casino disabled its Web site for maintenance and restored it only after adjusting the odds. "The whole thing was unreal and unbelievable," says Robert Walker, the race and sports book director for MGM Mirage in Las Vegas. "In 20 years I've never seen anything like it."

There were rumors. Some thought terrorists were involved, or hackers, or maybe a shadowy international gambling syndicate known as the Asian Group. But as the month wore on, the truth began to bubble up through the Las Vegas whisper pool.

Turns out there was no grand conspiracy. The global business of sports betting was being jolted every week by one person: an obscure 41-year-old statistician from San Francisco named Dr. Bob.

Full Story