Before DraftKings made sports betting a household name, before prediction markets started capturing headlines, Jay Cohen and his team at World Sports Exchange were already building the future of online wagering from a small Caribbean island in 1996. Their mistake? Doing it decades too early.

The Sportsbook That Actually Worked Online

Walk into most conversations about modern sports betting’s origins, and you’ll hear about the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision striking down PASPA. That’s certainly a pivotal moment. But it glosses over what Cohen and WSEX were already accomplishing years before the legal landscape shifted.

What made WSEX genuinely different wasn’t that it had a website. Plenty of operations had those. The real distinction? WSEX was actually transactional. Customers could place bets, parlays, teasers, exotic wagers entirely online. They could buy points and check balances without picking up a phone. In the late 1990s, that was almost unthinkable.

“People couldn’t believe what we were doing,” Cohen explained in recent interviews ahead of his forthcoming memoir, “Odds Man Out: The Untold Story of How Professional Sports Crushed the Pioneers of Online Betting.” “You could do everything online.”

Most competitors? They had a webpage with lines and a phone number. That was it. WSEX was something else entirely.

Live Betting Before Anyone Knew What Live Betting Was

The real innovation came with what WSEX called real-time betting: live markets running throughout a game down to the final second, and crucially, tradable. A bettor could move in and out of their position as odds shifted, just like a trader on a floor moving positions. You didn’t have to bet the opposite side to exit. You simply got out.

Golf showcased this brilliantly. In the Tiger Woods era, prices on individual golfers would fluctuate throughout tournaments. A rough patch could shift the entire market structure in real time. It was, by Cohen’s account, genuinely thrilling stuff.

Baseball “at-bat” markets let customers pick singles, doubles, triples, strikeouts, or home runs. Football had next-score markets layered on top of standard game wagering. Modern bettors would recognize this as micro-betting. WSEX was running it in the 1990s.

Prediction Markets? Nothing New

Beyond sports, WSEX also offered markets on political events, awards, and entertainment outcomes. When asked whether platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket represent fundamentally new ideas or are simply building on WSEX’s foundation from decades earlier, Cohen’s answer was direct: they’re not new at all.

“It’s everything we did back in the 90s,” he said. “There’s nothing new about it.”

What WSEX had actually pioneered was the market-maker model, where the company stood as counterparty to customer trades. That remains central to how prediction markets operate today. The tools have changed. The underlying mechanics haven’t.

The Missing Chapter

Cohen’s perspective matters precisely because it fills a gap in how the modern betting industry tells its own history. The WSEX story involves federal prosecution, regulatory hostility, and the eventual collapse of a company that was arguably a decade or more ahead of the market it was trying to serve.

That’s the chapter most industry narratives skip over. It’s also the one that explains quite a bit about where today’s sportsbooks and prediction markets actually came from.

What the team thinks

Philippa Ashworth says:

Carl’s piece rightly positions Cohen as a visionary who grasped the regulatory arbitrage opportunity before the market had even formed, but I’d argue the real lesson isn’t just about timing, it’s about infrastructure, compliance frameworks, and how offshore operators essentially wrote the playbook that legitimate operators would eventually follow once PASPA fell. What makes WSEX historically significant isn’t merely that it existed early, but that it proved the operational model worked at scale, giving the post-2018 wave of licensed sportsbooks a detailed blueprint for everything from odds management to player acquisition, even as they had to rebuild everything within completely different legal structures. The article touches on Cohen’s prescience, but misses the underappreciated continuity between the gray-market era and today’s regulated space, where the best operators are still solving problems WSEX solved thirty years ago.