In the early 1990s, Jay Cohen was a trader on the Pacific Options Exchange in San Francisco. Traders will bet on anything, and so Cohen and a colleague set up a brisk market for betting on the outcome of the O.J. Simpson trial. But it wasn’t a traditional yes/no betting structure. You could actually buy futures on the outcome of the trial, which would fluctuate in value upon the arrival of news.
It was then that Cohen hatched the idea of opening an online betting exchange for sports. And with that, he started the process that led to the gripping book Odds Man Out, Cohen’s account of being prosecuted and jailed for the crime of starting a successful sports betting website.