Illustration: Carolina Moscoso for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Sports Betting Revolution Started With a Bored Nuclear Engineer
In 1980s Las Vegas, Mike Kent’s Computer Team made millions with an algorithmic prediction system. The mob, and the feds, took notice.
Mike Kent, probably the first person to bet on sports using a computer, began his career testing top-secret nuclear reactor designs at a Westinghouse facility in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. In the early 1970s, that involved pushing punch cards through a reader connected to a mainframe computer. The strips of paper came out coded, marked with tiny holes.
Although Kent was short-sighted, overweight and asthmatic, he was fiercely competitive, known to drub his 5-year-old nephew at chess and tear at his clothes in frustration while watching his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers. He was also a proud member of the Westinghouse softball team and a trained coder who’d learned the programming language Fortran at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. So, around 1972, he decided to use the company computer to rank the strength of the corporate league teams beyond simple wins and losses. Kent didn’t ask his bosses for permission to use what was then a state-of-the-art machine. He just did it—mostly, as he later told friends, because he was extremely bored.