the totalisator
the totalisator
2026-05-31
It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of<br>late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of<br>almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets,<br>making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no<br>longer limited to island nations. It is a great American pursuit, or at<br>least, that's what modern television sports coverage leads you to believe.
There has always been an uncomfortable relationship between software and the<br>manipulation of marks. Techniques developed by casinos became a fundamental part<br>of consumer software, while the software industry wholeheartedly embraced<br>"gaming" as a market (the older meaning of the term here, meaning gambling).<br>We can readily point to a couple of reasons: first, gambling is profitable, and<br>technology is first and foremost a means of accumulation. Second, gambling is<br>mathematical, or at least arithmetical, in nature. Most forms of gambling<br>involve some sort of complex calculation with real-world stakes.
Gambling predates history, or it might be better to say that gambling has been<br>around for as long as recorded history has been able to observe it. Most early<br>gambling seems to have been based on card or dice games, but humans have been<br>betting on animal fights for more than a thousand years. As sensibilities and<br>resources changed, animal fighting has mostly given way to animal competition.<br>The most famous of these wagering opportunities is horse racing, a form of<br>gambling with such a long and pervasive history that it has often achieved a<br>unique regulatory status as one of the only legal sports betting venues in the<br>US. Well, at least, before Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.
The earliest recorded horse races were held in England in 1539, and bets were<br>placed. By 1666, horse racing had reached such prominence that King Charles<br>II—himself a jockey—commissioned and then won the "Newmarket Town Plate." That<br>event's eccentric history gave way to the King's Plate, a broader 17th-century<br>racing series whose royal remit made up the first formal rules for the sport.<br>Queen Anne founded the racetrack at Ascot in 1711; while it took decades for<br>permanent facilities to be built at the track, only stands for the royal family<br>came before a betting office. As British empire expanded around the world, horse<br>racing spread with it. Likewise, horse racing spread throughout Europe. By the<br>19th century, horse racing could be found almost anywhere.
For most of the history of horse racing, betting was based on the setting of<br>odds. A bookmaker would apply historical knowledge, experience, and no small<br>amount of "guesstimation" to set odds of various events—say of a specific horse<br>winning. A bookie might set odds of 7/1 on a given horse, read as "seven to one<br>against." A bettor placing $1 on this horse will make $7 if it wins the race,<br>which of course implies that the bookmaker thinks the horse's chance of claiming<br>first is around 14% or less 1.
This method of betting is known as "fixed odds," and the fact that it relies on<br>the bookmaker to set those odds is a significant limitation. First, there is the<br>constant possibility of error. A bookmaker who accidentally sets odds too<br>favorably could ruin themselves, which creates a natural pressure towards odds<br>that are less favorable to bettors. At the same time, competition between<br>bookies drove odds the other direction. This tension between bookmakers and<br>bettors, and between the bookmakers themselves, was a constant source of<br>conflict. Besides, despite the upper-class connotations of British horse racing,<br>gambling has always touched on the unsavory. Bookmakers were not always known<br>to be honest. A host of possibilities, from collusion to ignorance, could leave<br>bettors with no good options. Every bet offered might be a bad one—even more so<br>than the spread collected by bookmakers would suggest.
Of course, despite their prominence, horses did not originally inspire the<br>revolution in gambling that would soon transform racetracks—roosters did.
Josep Oller was born in Catalonia in 1839, but his parents emigrated to France<br>when he was a child. His parents seem to have found some regret that he grew up<br>without Spanish, and perhaps the opportunities in Spain were better. In any<br>case, as a young adult, he moved to Bilbao to study. Accounts vary on what<br>happened next: depending on who you trust, he either merely observed<br>cockfighting, or he was enthusiastically involved in promoting it. I tend to<br>suspect the latter, as Oller was an enthusiastic promoter of many things and not<br>too concerned with vice. Decades later, after his return to France, he co-founded<br>Moulin Rouge. That wasn't even his first entertainment venue, just the most<br>famous. But that's a later story, in another industry. In Bilbao, in the 1860s,<br>Oller watched the cockfights. And then, he watched the bettors and...