Where to buy : MINZY Horse Racing The Only Time You Should Ever Look Back is to See How Far You’ve Come Poster

Months earlier, Yass’s gambling syndicate, which he named “RAMJAC” after the fictionalized corporation in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Jailbird that owned 19% of the United States, brought bags filled with $60,000 in cash to Sportsman’s Park. They placed their bets, hit on the right horses, and walked out with the $600,000. By July, Sportsman’s Park had grown wise to Yass. When his syndicate returned with a quarter million dollars, they were swiftly escorted to the exits and barred from ever stepping foot in Sportsman’s Park again.

Yass’s syndicate raided similar jackpots across the country, traveling to Palm Beach to bet on Jai Alai, and to a track in the Boston suburbs to bet on Greyhounds.

While Yass’s RAMJAC made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits annually, he probably wouldn’t have made it too far if he stuck to betting at the track. After all, for someone with his talents, lugging bags of cash around the country was both inefficient and risky when compared to the money he could make trading options in the 1980s bull market.

Secretariat looks behind for the other horses on his way to a 31-lengths victory in the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, New York on June 9, 1973. Photo by Joe Dombroski/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

Newsday RM via Getty Images

Born in the Bronx and raised in Bayside, Queens, Yass soaked up the world of arbitrage at an early age. The son of an accountant who was the CEO of a small, publicly-traded financial information company called Datalab, Yass was exposed to markets and gambling from an early age. As an adolescent, he and his father Gerald would thumb through the business pages of the New York Post, studying stocks and esoteric securities like warrants. On weekends, Gerald would take his son to bet the trotters at the Bronx Yonkers Raceway and Roosevelt Raceway in Long Island.

By the time Secretariat won the Triple Crown at New York’s Belmont Racetrack in 1973, Yass was a capable handicapper and a skilled poker player. He marvelled at an arbitrage in that legendary race. Demand was so high to bet on Secretariat to win, a gambler could make more money betting the racehorse would simply “place,” which in racing parlance means finish either first or second. If it was possible, Yass would have bet on Secretariat to “place” and bet against the racehorse to win, guaranteeing at least a modest return. This is the basic theory that governs Yass’s startling rise.

After graduating Bayside High School in 1975, he matriculated to the State University at Binghamton. He studied mathematics as a major and economics as a minor hoping to sharpen his skills at gambling and trading. At Binghamton, he roomed with his best friend from Bayside High School, Arthur Dantchik, and made lifelong friends with Eric Brooks, Joel Greenberg, Andrew Frost and Steven H. Bloom, most of whom also came from working class neighborhoods Brooklyn and Queens.

On campus, Yass began to study the options contracts that would eventually make him rich. His senior thesis examined whether options, which had begun trading at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange in 1973, added value to society. For an economics class, he wrote a final paper titled, “An Econometric Analysis of Horse Racing,” that he eventually published in Gambling Times magazine. For extracurriculars, Yass and his friends played poker and would drive two hours to bet on horses at the Monticello racetrack. Though he graduated with a mathematics degree, Yass likes to say he was a poker major.

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