Odds Man Out: The Untold Story of How Professional Sports Crushed the Pioneers of Online Betting, by Jay Cohen, Post Hill Press, 384 pages, $32
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.
