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Before 1980, computers were only a gimmick of Science Fiction, where blinking lights and crazy display monitors
were serviced by Geeks in white lab coats. The idea of beating the Bookmakers, started with a small group of programmers.
It was headed up by a 34-year-old mathematician Michael Kent, who had spent 11-years helping develop nuclear submarines for the Westinghouse Corporation.
 Finding such work boring he relocated to Las Vegas to bet on Football games. For the last seven years he had been saving his money, to wager
on football and basketball games. The job of betting sports fulltime was a little harder than he had imagined.
Kent would wake up early, update his information from the morning newspapers.
Access the Control Data computer on which he was renting time, and establish a betting line for each game. Then he and a friend would spend the rest of the day and night visiting
sports books and private bookmakers, seeking out the most favorable opportunity.
According to his records, he lost $40.000 that football season. His bad luck continued two months into the basketball season.
"I was getting killed," he says. "I was at the point where I was debating what my future was going to be.
Betting the games was an awesome responsibility. It was not an easy thing to settle up with a bookmaker after each
round of bets, carrying huge bundles of cash in and out of public places. Whenever he had a lot of money on him, he feared he was being followed.
If he happened to notice two men walking behind him on the sidewalk, he would run as fast as he could into the nearest casino, and stand near a security guard for a while.
"Carrying $100,000 in a Paper Bag was getting Risky"
Of course, this only drew more attention to himself. He asked security guards to escort him to his car whenever feasible. He also depended heavily upon valet parking.
He didn't like the idea of carrying $150.000 into a dark garage. Valet parking was much safer. He didn't know how to just be cool about it. He couldn't chill out.
He was working 80 hours a week in the strangest city in America and he was always worrying. He won $150.000 betting college basketball in 1979-80, but it was a terrible way to live.
He became partners with orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ian Mindlin, who agreed to place the wagers and split the profits 50-50.
The computerized predictions netted the pair $100,000 dollars in 1980, their first year of playing college football.
By 1983, the Group had expanded and they were winning almost $1 million a week.
Because of the success of The Computer Group, bookmakers were unwilling to accept their wagers. Obviously, this was long before Betfair. They branched out from Las Vegas and employed
dozens of agents, and betting beards to cover New York and the Eastern portions of the United States.
Enter Billy Walters
In 1983, Billy Walters began making bets for the Computer Group, with a wagering pool of $40 million per year. One of the original partners Stanley Tomchin, a Cornell graduate and world class
backgammon and poker player lost interest in gaming. His newlywed wife insisted that he stop gambling, and so, in 1984, he walked away from the money and moved to Spain.
Billy Walters was then placed in charge of moving the weekly millions. He lived on the eighth fairway of the Las Vegas Country Club. He was a power broker who blanked the country with bets,
taking action wherever it was available. In return for his work, Walters received free use of the group's betting information. Because he didn't have to share his profits with others, he
may have earned more than the original computer wizards.
For the first time in his life, Billy Walters was winning consistently and holding onto the money.
He invested in real estate, fast food franchises and other ventures. His confidence was
such that he could play golf matched for thousands of dollars. He even captured the 1986 Super Bowl of Poker in Lake Tahoe.
There has been recent talk that he won more than $3 million in one day of roulette in Atlantic City. Apparently, Walters hired
agents to take notes at the roulette tables, in attempt to locate "biases," or patterns, in the wheels. Sources at Caesars
Palace say that after Walters beat them for more than $1 million in one sitting, the wheel was sent to NASA for an examination
and dissection that revealed specific biases - but no for the numbers Walters had been playing. Nobody knows his secret, and he isn't saying, though he admits he has been
barred from playing roulette in the major casinos.
Late in 1984, Walters' reputation had risen so high that he was invited to join the Computer Group on a percentage basis. In other words, he would share in profits with
Michael Kent, Dr. Mindlin and other core members of the group. Walters continued to place additional bets for himself until January 1985, when the FBI raided the group of its records and cash,
shutting down Walters for the remainder of the college basketball season.
He complains about harassment by the FBI, saying it confiscated 
funds and refused to transfer them to the IRS to pay his taxes. He claimed he is persecuted in part because the government loathes his attorney,
Oscar Goodman, a colorful Las Vegas lawyer who has represented many mob figures. In later years after many court battles, the Computer group was exonerated off all wrongdoing and Oscar Goodman became and is now the Mayor of Las Vegas.
He perceives himself to be a rare gambling success story - a man who was in debt before he came to Las Vegas. "I came to Las Vegas because it's the Wall Street of gambling.?
How We Did It...
In March 1986. Sports Illustrated became the first national publication
to report the story of the Computer Group. They told an intricate tale, of how they had run 25,000 past college basketball games through computer services from coast to coast so see how accurate the pregame
spreads were against the final score.
The magazine reported that they "devised a program to make a number' on each game.
The handicapping and mathematical masterminds behind the mysterious Computer Group
had become the biggest known sports betting ring ever established anywhere." Each day they collected the statistical data for every team on baseball, basketball, and football, fed it into the computer,
and updated their programs. Remember, this was long before the Internet's?
Everything was still being done by hand. After fine tuning the forecasts they dumped them into a computer file and out popped gambling gold.
The Computer Group reached the height of its powers in 1983-85.
The national betting network was operating at its peck of efficiency. The programmers continued to further fine-tune his computer program. The 1983 seasons were smoking times for the Computer Group,
which had enjoyed a great run three year run against inexperienced Las Vegas Bookmakers. In its sleekest moments, the Computer Group had as grand an effect upon its constituency in the 1980's as OPEC had upon American consumers in the '70's.
By 1984-'85, the Betting Line began to improve appreciably, as others were now competing in the market against the Computer Group.
The Computer Group had burgeoned into the first truly national network of sports bettors, able to buy up the best point spreads from coast to coast.
At the height of its powers, the Computer Group of 1983-85 wielded more influence over the millions of Americans who bet on sports than any superstar athlete or Super Bowl franchise.
Profits were staggering. The group never had a losing season betting on college football or college basketball. According to figures compiled recently by Michael Kent, the Computer Group in 1983-84 earned almost $5 million from wagers on college and, occasionally, NFL games. Yet Michael Kent suspects that his records are incomplete.
They do not account for personal bets made by Dr. Mindlin, or Billy Walters, or by the dozens of other associates who had access to the Computer Group's information. By the time everyone had exhausted the Computer forecasts in the 1983-94 sports year, they might easily have earned $10 million, perhaps $15 million. Perhaps more.
"When you worked it down all the way to the bottom," says Billy Walters, "it might have been 1,000 people using our information."
Finally, in 1987, success got the best of them. They had to break up, just like the Beatles.
Despite all the time they had spent working together, the members of the Computer Group had never really known one another. In most cases they had spoken only by phone, using code names. Faces rarely had been attached to voices.
Thomas Noble, lead agent for the FBI obtained wiretaps on the group's telephones for five months. Noble maintains his firm belief that the Computer Group was a criminal enterprise worthy of prosecution for Bookmaking.
The investigation cost the taxpayers $1 million dollars, which does not include the $577,000 lost by the Internal Revenue and their investigation. He oversaw the seizure of evidence by the truckload: bank checks,
the origins of which had to be traced, hundreds of thousands of dollars with serial numbers that demanded verification, gambling ledgers that had to be interpreted, not to mention 216,000 pages of computer printouts, incomprehensible to all the Computer Group programmers.
Then, in January 2004, after six years of investigation and review, after the case had been opened and shut and opened again, the indictments at long last came down in Las Vegas.
Nineteen men and women were placed under arrest. Each was charged with up to 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling and racketeering, related to their use of the telephone to place bets and exchange betting information.
There was no charge of bookmaking.
No bookmaking?
So the government admits, at last, that the Computer Group was "Simply Betting on Games." No Bookmaking...Everything we were doing was Legal.
Six years with Big Brother has not cured us. Of the 19 who were indicted in 2004, most are still gamblers and are now living all over the world.
With the internet and all their promotion, these modern brokers of sports bets will never match the sensation created by the Computer Group, who were sophisticated enough to beat the linemakers at their own game.
Our legacy was to ruin the game for all who might try to duplicate our success, including themselves.
The Sports Betting Advantage was gone. Many of our group looked for a NEW opportunity
It was a Three Word Answer
"THROUGHBRED HORSE RACING"
Some of the group remained in Las Vegas and some of us became interested in the new untapped market of Hong Kong racing. We would develop much more sophicated programs to attack thoroughbred racing. The
evoluation continues, as we became High Tech Investors. lead by our driving force
Alan Woods.
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