History Of Point Spread Betting

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The advent of the pointspread literally transformed sports betting in the United States. For most of the 20th century there was little interest in sports betting and particularly on football. Many games were mismatches where the winner was a foregone conclusion. These had little, if any, betting interest since players didn’t want to lay the huge odds on the favorite nor did they want to back the underdog no matter how much they were getting in return. For that reason, horse racing had significantly more betting interest until the middle of the 20th century.
Historically, there’s no real consensus as to the point spread’s origin or for that matter who came up with it in the first place. It likely came into use in the United States in Minneapolis during the 1930s with several different bookmakers claiming to be the inventor including Carl Ersine and Darby Hicks. For several decades the ‘Minneapolis Line’ became the most respected in the country and was distributed nationwide.
Despite the clear evidence that the pointspread predated him by a decade the origin is often credited to Connecticut math teacher Charles K. McNeil. During the 1940’s he decided to make a career ‘pivot’ and became a bookmaker in Chicago. McNeil became successful on both sides of the counter working out of his ersatz ‘office’ at the Gym Club in Chicago. The point spread make him one of the most influential bookies in American but many of his associates thought that he was more adept at betting and viewed his handicapping ability with extreme respect.
THE POINTSPREAD COMES TO THE MAINSTREAM
McNeil is frequently credited with the invention of the pointspread but those with an extensive understanding of the history of sports betting dismiss this narrative. There’s even a school of thought that it began not in the United States but in Australia and New Zealand to create more interest in rugby betting. Even if McNeil didn’t invent the pointspread he’s viewed in much the same way as Henry Ford is in automotive history—as the person who brought it to the masses. He’s often credited with improving and popularizing its use. Sports book history export Mort Olshan sums it up by saying “McNeil might not have invented the pointspread but he certainly refined it”.
With all due respect to McNeil’s importance in improving the pointspread and raising its profile within the gambling community the opinion that he is the primary source for its widespread uses is also highly questionable. The individual who is likely responsible for bringing the pointspread to the collective consciousness of the masses was Las Vegas bookmaker turned major celebrity Jimmy ‘The Greek’ Snyder. ‘The Greek’ found rock star like fame from being part of the top rated NFL pregame show on network television. As unfathomable as it seems now, he contributed his handicapping and betting insights on ‘The NFL Today’ along with Brent Musburger, Irv Cross and Phyllis George.
What most don’t know is that Jimmy ‘The Greek’ was fairly well known long before he was hired by CBS. As manager of the downtown Las Vegas Sports and Turf Club he became the mainstream media’s top source for anything sports or betting related. He was such a fixture in the media that he earned the sobriquet ‘America’s Bookmaker’. This modest fame brought him to the attention of CBS and his stint on ‘The NFL Today’ made him a household name.
‘The Greek’ is now considered an anachronism of the 1970’s best known for his ham handed comments on the genetic origins of African American athletic ability than anything else. The reality is that he deserves credit more than anyone for introducing the point spread and basic handicapping concepts introduced the concept of the pointspread to the larger, non-gambling public. It’s not a stretch to say that he brought sports betting to ‘flyover country’ and establishing the NFL as the USA’s top betting sport.
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Spread betting was born, as are most great new ideas, from the mind of an entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to provide people with a service that was unavailable elsewhere.
In 1974 it was illegal for individuals in the UK to trade gold as a speculative investment. That didn’t mean there wasn’t any gold trading – it only meant that there was then no legal way to do it.
Enter Stuart Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler, who now has more money than God, came up with a way to get around the ban on trading gold. His solution was a deceptively simple one: rather than actually trading physical gold, he would offer investors the opportunity to make trades based on the price of gold.
The law was satisfied since gold itself was not actually being traded. And the desire of traders to speculate on gold prices was satisfied by being able to make a bet on which way the price would go – up or down.
Spread betting was created with Wheeler’s founding of IG Index, now IG Group. Following the London gold fix every trading day, which set the buy and sell prices for the day, Wheeler created his own bid and offer spread (the difference between the buy price and the sell price) and christened it the “Investors Gold Index”. IG Index was born, starting an industry that today is worth billions.
Traders who believed the price of gold would rise could bet on the index going up, while those who thought the price would fall could bet on the price going down. This was one of the great innovations of spread betting – the fact that one could just as easily bet the sell side as the buy side.
Spread betting gold prices with the gold index was a hit with traders – enough so that it soon encouraged IG to offer other financial instruments as well.
Following the success of Wheeler and IG Group, other spread betting companies, such as City Index Group and Currency Management Corporation, now CMC markets, began to enter the industry. However, at the time, the take up of spread betting was limited by two major factors:
Although spread betting was available on an increasingly wide range of financial instruments, most of those instruments – such as foreign currency exchange, commodities, and options – were traded in markets that the vast majority of investors were unfamiliar with and therefore leery of.
The second handicap was inadequate technology. Personal computers were just starting to be seen in the 1980s and connection speeds to this mysterious new thing called the “internet” were as slow as watching paint dry. Spread betting is inherently a fast-paced trading endeavour.
For everything to work smoothly, traders have to be able to access real-time price spreads and be able to enter an order before the spread changes. The trading platforms that provide real-time market information and lightning-quick execution of orders, that are commonplace today, simply didn’t exist in the 1980s.
Where the 1980s were lacking for spread bettors, the 1990s and beyond the turn of the century seem almost like they were tailor-made for the successful boom in spread betting.
In the 1990s, technology advanced more quickly than most people could keep up with. You could buy a computer with the fastest processor the maximum amount of RAM available and twelve months later it was hopelessly slow compared to the latest models.
Advances in technology were adopted in the financial markets more rapidly than other areas, and electronic trading began to become increasingly the norm. Brokers began to develop sophisticated trading platforms that offered real-time pricing, instant order execution, up-to-the-minute market news, and charting with every conceivable technical analysis tool.
The financial markets expanded in two key ways that fed the growth in popularity of spread betting:
Derivatives trading – the trading of securities whose price is based on an underlying asset – grew exponentially across all of Finance in the 1990s.
As derivative instruments, spread betting and contracts for difference (CFDs) began attracting the attention of more and more traders. More traders became aware of, and attracted by, the tax-free nature of spread betting (CFDs, in contrast, are typically subject to capital gains taxes).
As the new century dawned, the financial markets increasingly became global markets. This spurred an increased interest in some of the most popular spread betting markets, such as foreign currency exchange.
The new century also saw a downturn in most major stock indexes and a bull market in commodities. Such a market shift was Heaven-sent for spread betting companies, as more and more traders began to explore new financial markets and instruments that were ideal for spread betting.
Spread bet firms were hard-pressed to keep up with bettors demands for more instruments to bet on.
The simplicity of trading and other advantages of spread betting continued to attract novice traders and small investors, as well as savvy veteran traders who could appreciate the advantages offered by spread betting.
The leverage offered in spread betting gives spread bettors access to markets – such as basic commodities like oil and gold – that were previously the trading province of only the most well-heeled investors.
The fact that spread bettors can trade virtually any financial instrument worldwide from a single trading account – and with no currency exchange risk – gives spread bettors a significant advantage over more traditional investors.
Contrast that with more traditional trading avenues that – to accomplish the same range of investing access – would require an individual to have separate accounts set up with a stock market broker, a commodity futures broker, a forex broker, a financial services firm, a cryptocurrency exchange, and two or three sportsbooks.
The spread betting industry, and its close relation CFD trading, continues to grow worldwide, with no signs of slowing down. When spread betting becomes legal in the US, as it almost certainly will, that will open up the floodgates with millions of new spread bettors to write a new chapter in spread betting history. 
Betting apps for mobile phones means spread betting is getting easier and more accessible all the time. 
Stuart Wheeler’s innovative solution for traders being denied access to gold trading has grown to become one of the largest retail financial industries in the world. The continuing expansion of spread betting – with spread betting companies constantly coming up with new things for traders to bet on – translates to more and more people opening spread betting accounts every day.
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