The site started as a way for Palmer and his friends to keep track of their sports bets. Before long, others wanted to use the application and Palmer found himself spending hours to set up new accounts. Then in a flash of free-market insight, he opened it to everyone and set up an online registration form. He hired an ad salesman. The site generates about 32.1 million US page views a month.

A few users with prior gambling problems send emails to say the site is an injury-free way to fulfill their compulsion to make a bet. One man thanked Palmer for saving his marriage. A few more sappy emails could put him in direct competition with Oprah as marriage counselor to the nation.

Palmer says he keeps the website “amateurish looking” so no one will think it’s a front for an illegal gambling operation or a come-on for a casino company. He once let a misspelling go for months, despite an avalanche of emails from fussy users pointing it out. File that under "manufacturing authenticity."

Palmer has a tough time explaining the website to his mother, who isn’t quite sure it’s a suitable job for her super-nerd son who has a Ph.D. in computer science. But creating such a business is about what you’d expect from a guy who showed up in gym shorts and a t-shirt to defend his doctoral dissertation (“Extending Reinforcement Learning to the Unconstrained Multi-Agent Domain”) before a panel of fussy, buttoned-up professors.

CentSports.com is expanding. It recently launched a preliminary version of CentPoker.com, operating under the same rules as the sports-betting site.

The company is even going upscale. After 2 years in College Station, Texas, it may move to Austin.

There’s no IPO in the business plan. But like any entrepreneur, Palmer wouldn’t mind being bought out by a gargantuan media company such as Google (GOOG) or Time Warner (TWX) looking for content attractive to those in their 20s and early 30s.

“If the right offer came along, we’d sell in a heartbeat,” he says.

But he quickly adds, “This is more than a property -- it’s a revolution. I’d need to know that it ends up in the right hands.”

Lacking a fat-cat buyer, Palmer plans to continue to run and expand the site.

“At least until Congress makes it illegal to give away money,” he says.