CentSports.com provides free and legal sports betting
By Zach Swartz, Sports Editor
June 10, 2008 | 8 p.m.
So picture this: It’s noon on a Saturday, and your friends have not quite started drinking yet. You are bored, so you hop on your laptop and start surfing away on the Internet.
After about a half-hour of failures to beat that previous oh, so high score on Text Twist, you get pissed and decide to go to the highlights page of ESPN.com — just one more time — to see if maybe, just maybe, Marc-Andre Fleury really did not knock that puck behind him into his own goal. Unsatisfied, you keep surfing and accidentally come across a sports betting site. "CentSports.com," it says at the top of the front page. “Free sports bets, real sports cash.”
“This looks interesting,” you say to yourself initially, and you click on the “Just curious about the site?” button and begin to read.
“CentSports.com is just one of many places on the Internet where you can place bets on major sporting events,” the opening reads. “[W]e give you a small amount of play-money to start out with ... you make bets with this, just like you could in Vegas ... but, again, you're just betting with ‘play money.’”
"Wow," you say to yourself. "That’s a little odd." But you read on.
“However, if you do well enough ... i.e., if you win enough of your play-money bets, we'll actually let you ‘cash out’ your play money for real money....”
That flips the light switch in the corporate-scandal-awareness part of your brain. “Yeah, um, that’s probably not too legit,” you mutter. “I think I’ll go back to Text Twist.”
As rational and logical as that conclusion might sound to all those reading this, it would, in fact, be wrong. The site is actually legitimate, and yes, all you skeptics, it is also legal.
With approximately 3,000 newcomers every day, CentSports is one of a kind, a site where new signees can bet with “fake” money on sporting events to win actual cash money. All you need to do to sign up for the site is type in your e-mail address, name, gender, birthday and a password, then click the “Sign me up bitch!” button at the bottom of the page.
Upon entering, the site provides you with 10 imaginary cents to begin betting and then sends you on your way. It has got it all — NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, WNBA, AFL, college sports, even European soccer and Mixed Martial Arts. Members can make bets on the spread, money line bets and over-under bets to win on the odds provided, with lines that originate from Vegas casinos and offshore online sports books.
If you recruit friends to join, you can earn 5 percent of everything they earn. Once you get up to $20 of the imaginary money, you can ask to cash out, upon which time you are placed in a bracket of other prospective casher-outers and can eventually get your money — the real money, that is.
So how in the wide, wide world of sports betting can this possibly happen? The guy who made this thing had to have been drunk to think he could just give people free money out of nothing.
Well, that's not too far off.
Here’s how it all began. The site was originally created in a student office at Texas A&M University in 2007 by Victor Palmer, a graduate student working on his Ph.D. at the university. While words like “student office,” “graduate student” and “Ph.D.” might make the site’s creation sound pretty official, the story of CentSports' birth is not quite.
Palmer, who had just failed his first defense for his Ph.D., was “incredibly depressed and started drinking really, really heavily,” the CentSports' candid creator said. After downing nearly all of a handle of vodka (“Not the small one,” he said. “This is, like, the big handle.”), the sufficiently drunken graduate student and university employee blacked out and woke up sprawled on the floor of his student office to the sounds of the stunned cleaning lady who was taking out the trash. It was not until 2 p.m. the next day that Palmer, surprised as anyone, discovered the coding for the original CentSports site on his computer.
“My friends actually call it ‘The Vodka Summer’ because I was drunk every single day,” Palmer, who himself is a lover of sports betting, openly explained. “About that same time, all the major online gambling offices started getting shut down...I didn’t have a job. My future was very bleak. I actually have no memory of coding the first version of the site. It’s really weird, but apparently my stupid, drunken mind just decided that it was a good idea. It was probably the best blackout I ever had.”
Despite the loss of brain cells Palmer endured that apparently eventful night, his site took off in no time. Originally hosted on a $4-a-month personal Web-hosting device and initially used only by Palmer and some good friends to keep track of their own bets just six months ago, the site soon will be hosted on 10 servers. At its current income rate, Palmer estimates that his site is now poised to bring in $250,000 per annum, but he expects that number to double every upcoming month.
CentSports is financed completely by advertisers. Although the site started with Google, which as Palmer points out, “a dead cow can sign up to advertise,” it quickly moved up to other broker ad agencies. It all began with a failed attempt to reach a company called Tribal Fusions who, after Palmer posted a notice asking all followers of the site to call the company and tell them to support CentSports, were unable to call out of their offices because of the multitude of people phoning in. Although that incident ended with an angry cell phone call from Tribal Fusions’ CEO to Palmer 20 minutes after the original post, the CentSports crew members eventually found themselves swarmed with advertising agencies wanting to get involved with the site.
Palmer, who also has a consulting job with a firm in Washington, D.C., is amazed at the success his site has had, and he loves doing exactly what he is doing.
“I’m trying to get fired from the [consulting job] contract,” Palmer said, maybe or maybe not, jokingly. “Every day I look forward to waking up and just doing CentSports stuff. It’s a blast. It really is.”
While he said he would consider selling the site to the few firms in D.C. that have already offered to buy it as long as he is able to control its direction, Palmer really has no plans for the future of the site. It is kind of appropriate, considering the less-than-lack of planning the site had at its onset.
“The only way a site like this survives is if you’re completely honest with people,” Palmer said. “You can’t hide anything. You can’t have any pretentiousness. You just have to be you out there, and the users recognize that. It’s hard for corporate America to do that.”
So do not worry. The site’s home page might feature a Photoshopped Mr. T head saying, “I pity the fool who doesn’t earn 5% of what he friends win,” and may or may not suggest that you “rob a hobo — preferably a rich hobo” if you do not have quite enough money to cash out, but it is far from a corporate scam. It is, however, a multi-hundred-thousand dollar, more-than-slightly irreverent, drunkenly conceived sports betting wonderland that anyone, anytime can join. For free.
“I just think it’s funny because people think we’re, like, a real, formal start-up or whatever, but it was literally a drunken accident,” Palmer said about his site. "It just happened to turn into something kind of cool."
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