ABOUT BOB AKMENS...

HOW AND WHY HE STARTED A SPORTS SERVICE:

Before getting into the sports-service business, Bob Akmens had extensive managerial-experience with major subsidiaries of several multinational corporations, notably, the British publishing firm of Macmillan, Inc. and what is now Time-Warner, Inc.

Precisely because there weren't enough hours in a day for him to handicap sports and excel at his day-job, Bob explored the exciting possibility of handicapping professionally on a full-time basis. The year was 1978 and his market-research told him that the sports-service industry had explosive growth-potential. And did it ever!

He founded a firm called The Winning Edge, ran numerous ads in the few gambling-related publications available then, and within just a year had an office full of people answering ringing phones day and night.

Of course, the fact that he shot out of the gate like a meteor and won like there was no tomorrow may have had something to do with that.

Two years after getting into pro handicapping, he was a charter member of the very first sports-service monitoring operation: the American Association of Documented Sports Services (the AADSS). The AADSS took an industry which had at its one end a few prominent, well-known outfits and at the other end hundreds of thieving touts who lied and cheated to make their gains - and all those in the middle, the operations who were small and unknown nationally - but reputable and willing to have their records made public by an impartial third-party - and shook it to its foundations.

Suddenly, the crooked touts had to become accountable to a public which would ask them: "if your record is so good, how come no one like the AADSSS is tracking you?"

Many of these businesses quickly disappeared as their owners crawled into the holes they had come out of. What the AADSS did is to make fame and fortune available to the over-achieving sports-service owners - those, at least, who did not lie and cheat about their records and actually could pick more winners than losers.

BOB'S SPORTS SERVICE GAINS NATIONAL ATTENTION:

Bob Akmens' The Winning Edge was one of those services that flourished in this new national-limelight. In the spring of 1980, the AADSS sponsored the very first handicapping contest exclusively for sports-services: the AADSS Baseball Handicapping Championship. And it's fitting that in this premier competition that Bob Akmens picked 44 out of 55 winners to start that baseball season.

The contest results were posted daily at the old Stardust Casino & Sports Book in Las Vegas. And with that kind of start, Bob Akmens and his service got a lot of publicity - write-ups in many publications, radio interviews, and general-media attention. Also, a lot of new clients - some of whom are still with Bob to this very day.

When all was said and done, Bob had won that first baseball contest - and he's never looked back - finishing is more categories of documented handicapping contests, 165 of them and counting, more than any other service in the history of our great country.

Along the way, his operation came to be known simply as Bob Akmens Sports - a name known by many thousands of clients around the world over the years.

In 1994, after being at the top or near the top in baseball, football and basketball contest-after-contest, Bob suggested to the AADSS that they have a hockey contest. The inaugural AADSS NHL Handicapping Challenge was born. In this contest, all services began with a $10,000 bankroll. When the dust had cleared, Bob won that first hockey contest with a bankroll exceeding $140,000 - and that's not a typo. He had increased his initial stake by more than fourteen-fold, in the process becoming the very first AADSS member service to ever finish above $100,000 in bankroll in an AADSS contest.

His list of accomplishments in this industry are just too long to cover one-by-one. Just look through the complete list of his "Documented #1 Titles," available on every site page, if you want to see his performance by sport over the years.

In April of 2008, Bob was informed by The Sports Eye that he won his 5th-straight hockey handicapping contest in a row. And, we also found out we finished #1 in 8 different categories of The Sports Monitor's regular-season hockey contest. And in June of 2008, we were awarded the Titanium Award by The Sports Eye for most bankroll won in the hockey playoffs. You heard right. #1 in 6 straight regular- & post-season hockey contests in a row at either The Sports Monitor or The Sports Eye. To compete against anywhere from dozens to hundreds of other services...to even lead for a single week against all that competition...then to win a 1/2-year-long contest...and then win 6 of those contests in a row...how much more consistent can you possibly be?

Now, is that a better criterion for joining a service than the guy who has a hot month and everyone is chasing his performance by living and dying (bankroll-wise) with each of his daily plays? Infinitely better. No one else on earth has ever finished #1 in 6 hockey seasonal-contests in a row. No one. Of that we're positive. Except Bob Akmens Sports. You can live to be 100 and never see that again.

One thing's for sure: Bob's mojo still works - and powerful mojo it is, indeed!

WHAT'S IN STORE FOR THE FUTURE?

Some years ago, Bob Akmens decided to quantify his handicapping expertise. To get a better idea of what this means, look at "How Bob Akmens Picks Winners" on any page on the site. What it meant, in short, is that he created sophisticated computer-models for picking his plays. And what these models have done is take away much of the "luck" aspect that many handicappers live with. So many handicappers will have good runs only to see those runs turn sour and bring their overall win-percentages back to right around 50%. Economists have a term for that, "reversion to the mean." For that to happen to Bob Akmens' plays would mean that his mathematical models would have to all turn bad simultaneously - something that is always possible, but unlikely.

Using dispassionate models which don't care if you're coming off of an 8-0 run or an 0-8 run and thus aren't subject to the failings we as human beings have of not wanting to lose back what we've won or having the desire to immediately win back that which we've lost, makes Bob's results more reliable and subject to less bad runs over the long-term.

And the models are tweaked by Bob constantly to reflect both changing conditions in a given sport such as the rules changes the NHL implemented a few years ago (which resulted in immediate changes to the nature of all NHL games) and the slower-evolving changes in sports such as the role of starting pitching in baseball which in the space of a few decades has devolved from domination and complete games to a much-lesser role today.

His predictive models are almost living things in that they adapt to current situations in all the major sports. And these models should prove to be profitable many years into the future.

ABOUT BOB AKMENS' EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND:

Someone can be a success in any business venture with little or no formal education. And quite honestly, if you pay a handicapper to win with his plays - and he does that for you with some consistency - then you shouldn't care if he's an idiot or a genius in other things. But, it always helps to have a broader exposure to life and business and knowledge in general when one tries to successfully compete in any endeavor.

Bob realizes that while he uses mathematical algorithms (a fancy term for formulas) to create his models, he still quantifies factors that many handicappers consider unquantifiable such as revenge, the impact of coaching changes, and other human factors that influence the outcome of a game. So he has always viewed sports handicapping as just as much an art as a science. If it were beatable purely from a statistical standpoint, someone years ago would have come up with a super computer program that could consistently pick winners. No one has done this - yet people must be trying daily.

To be a really successful handicapper, you have to be a student of human behavioral psychology as well and understand what motivates these often-puzzling players we bet on. And Bob is quite proud of his educational accomplishments which have helped him gain the knowledge he has acquired over the years.

At the age of 16, he entered college at Queens College of the City University of New York. He promptly acted his age (he should have been a sophomore in high-school at 16) and screwed-up by failing 2 of the first 5 courses he took. Not because he couldn't handle the work - far from it. He actually got 3 A's and 2 F's because he never showed for the Chem and Math classes that semester which, for Bob, were unfortunately on the same day of the week, and thus, not worth the trip. Instead he partied and partied some more and was often drunk, crashing at some older friend's house, listening to the apocalyptic lyrics of The Doors and "This is the End" much of the time - and basically not remembering what he did the previous day.

Four years later, and just 11 credits short of his B.A., Bob was stupid enough to drop out of college. Principally because by this time, he was spending most of his days just down the road in southern Queens at another school of sorts called the Aqueduct School-of-Hard-Racing-Knocks - or journeying a bit farther to its prettier sister Belmont Park - where he learned how to make hundreds of bucks most days while not technically working for a living. Bob actually regrets to this day cashing a $20 win ticket on the very first horse he ever bet on, Dust to Dust, which paid $27 for a $2 bet (and $270 for his $20 bucks) and won by 5 lengths and made him instantly think about betting: "where have you been all my life?"

Had he not done so, he probably would have been a professor somewhere and a star in academia - or a corporate CEO.

Of course, good luck - as mentioned above - does not last forever, so he soon gravitated toward sales or marketing jobs - at which he excelled and made even more money, earning six-figures before he was even 21.

And then, as the money rolled in over the years, finishing college when he had come so close became a more and more distant "I'll-do-that-someday" thing which kept on getting pushed back.

As strange as this sounds, in the spring of 1992, when Bob was already set for life financially, he saw a news story about Billy Joel, the singer, and how he at the exact same age as Bob was at the time, had found the time to finish his high-school diploma requirements. Wow, thought Bob! Here's a guy who makes more money that I do - tens of millions of dollars more - and he actually took the time to finally get his high-school diploma. Well, good for him!

And good for Bob, too, as it turned out, because Billy Joel inspired him to return to Queens College - which was now a 5-hour round-trip commute - and take the 4 courses he needed to graduate with a B.A. in Political Science & Government - and get 4 A's and make the Dean's List in the process.

The following year, Bob was accepted into the Master's Degree in the Humanities program at The California State University, Dominguez Hills. Having aced something like the previous 16 courses he took in college (because he hardly ever found something hard once he applied himself), he thought this would be a piece of cake to do the same on a graduate level. The very first paper he submitted came back to him with a big-fat "B" on it. This slap-in-the-face engendered a fierce determination that he would, by golly, take all 12 courses for that M.A. and get 12 A's in the process - which was a lofty goal indeed. But hey, he had won 12 bets in a row many times!

The next year, Bob got that M.A., with a history concentration, writing a 321 page Master's thesis on The Stamp Act Congress in Colonial America. One of the professor's on Bob's thesis committee called it "brilliant." If you have an interest in American History, you can actually order this work from UMI's Dissertation Express at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dxweb/gateway; the full citation is "The Stamp Act Congress: Herald of American Union. Akmens, Robert, MA. CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, DOMINGUEZ HILLS, 1994. 321 pp." And Bob got that M.A. with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average - straight A's - as good as it gets - best in his graduating class - and a piece of cake, to boot.

After that, while still running his busy sports service, he was awarded the Postgraduate Certificate of Business Administration (which Europeans consider a mini-MBA) from Edinburgh Business School, one of the top B-schools in Europe.

And still later, because Bob was always exploring new venues for putting his money to work, he completed the rigorous - and quite difficult - CFP Certification Curriculum through The American College in Bryn Mawr, PA - which shares its faculty with the school down the road, the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. CFP stand for Certified Financial Planner - and unlike, say a CPA's credentials which fundamentally deal with accounting, the CFP curriculum deals with 6 areas of expertise: investments, insurance, financial-planning, estate-planning, retirement-planning, and taxation - dry subjects to be sure to most people but offering a world of financial knowledge to use and share alike.

The only thing Bob regrets is that he has yet to get a doctorate. He actually was accepted into the doctoral program in African History at The University of South Africa after meeting Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president. But time is the most precious thing on earth and Bob just lacked the time to write his dissertation. But who knows? That may also yet come about.

These days, Bob lives in upstate New York with his family, his dog, and his cat.

And he doesn't look back, because that's gone forever...just forward to the glorious and unknowable future still ahead and all the challenges to be met and conquered.