Growing up in a casino family in Las Vegas, sports have always been more than entertainment for me. They’re a market, a data problem, and a living system. From my early streaming days—armed with curiosity and a mic—to building equilibrium-based betting models rooted in economic theory, I’ve treated sports like any other complex market.

My great-grandmother, Ester Katz Engel, was one of the four original investors in the Moulin Rouge, the fifth hotel-casino ever built in Las Vegas, at a time when women were forbidden from even having their own bank accounts. She originated the Vegas-style showgirl revues and championed desegregation, making the Moulin Rouge the first hotel-casino to welcome all races, while old Vegas was largely a Jim Crow town.

My grandfather, Jerry Engel, carried that same spirit working as the only CPA in Vegas when the town only had one traffic light. Grandpa was universally trusted by casino owners, entertainers, mob figures, and legitimate business leaders who were literally building an empire in the desert.

And my mom continued that entrepreneurial legacy in her own way, founding Say Cheesecake, a bakery that supplied cheesecakes and pastries to hotels, casinos, and even the World Poker Tour. Her work kept her at the center of the Strip’s hospitality scene, blending old-world recipes with the high-rolling culture of Las Vegas.

That entrepreneurial DNA shaped my own path. My journey naturally turned to sports as a market to study and solve. From my early streaming days to publishing a book on sports wagering, to building AI and ML Nash Equilibrium-based betting models rooted in economic theory, I’ve always treated sports like any other complex market: dynamic, data-driven, and shaped by human behavior. The same way my grandfather saw numbers behind the neon lights, I see probabilities, inefficiencies, and equilibrium behind the scoreboard.