"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position.
Right after this ad.
I just want to point out, for people who aren't watching on YouTube, though, that is a fake background, Bob Vulgaris. It is, yeah. You're in an undisclosed geographic location. What do you got? What do you got behind you?
Well, this is my office, and there's a bunch of art that's, like, stacked against the wall. They're not hung yet, so it just looks a lot better this way.
Oh, you're just embarrassed. You're embarrassed to show me what your actual residence is like, those books. The books behind you, you haven't read those books. Those are just fake books.
I feel like that's kind of standard, isn't it? To have a bunch of books as like trophies. People hang their books like trophies in most places.
That's right. I was hoping you would have, you know, like betting slips framed. You ever save those?
Do you even have betting slips when you're working? I never, I wasn't in the betting slip. I mean, I wasn't around for the betting slip era. I think I had phone calls and yeah, dealing with third party intermediaries for the most part.
So I should just quickly explain here that the reason I am on this call right now is because of the episode we published last week about NBA betting and these poker games that allegedly involve the Italian mafia and also NBA players and coaches, and more recently, the FBI. Because while I've been thinking about this scandal and the federal government's concurrent pair of indictments, there is one person in specific I've been meaning to talk to about it. Someone I don't agree with on lots of issues, but someone whose secrets, whose perspective I always seek when it comes to these exact subjects. And so I asked this person to introduce himself on camera.
Bob Valgaris, former professional sports better and now current owner of a second division Spanish football club, CD Castellon.
That's pretty good. Also wildly insufficient. Okay. What was your job with the Mavericks, Bob? What was your job title in the NBA?
I was the former director of quantitative research and development, whatever that meant.
It meant you, like me, talked to Mark Cuban a lot.
You probably talked to Mark Cuban more than I did to be honest. Mark's a big texter. He's a big text guy.
You are also, according to both, I would say, historical record and legend, one of the most successful NBA bettors of all time.
No, I was the most successful NBA bettor of all time. Let's just get it clear.
And he's not wrong, by the way. ESPN called Bob in 2013, quote, the world's top NBA gambler. Meaning that, yes, he is the only NBA better who became an NBA executive in large part because of his success betting. He also is a highly competitive poker player and now the owner and operator of that European soccer team that he mentioned in Spain. But what is crucial to establish here is that Bob Vulgaris got insanely rich off of gambling long before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in May 2018. meaning that when Bob was becoming the guy that every legal sports gambler you know is now striving to be, there were no betting slips, no legal receipts for his millions to frame.
I mean, I did it from 2000 to 2017-ish, 16-ish, whatever. Probably made... 10 million or so a year every year, not counting like expenses and salaries, but actual betting net like wins versus losses.
Right.
Average was like about 8 to 10, I would say.
Okay. So for about how long? I'm trying to do the math.
17 years. Yeah, 17 years, 15, 17 years, something like that. Too long. How about that?
But we're getting into very clearly the nine-figure winnings territory is what we're talking about.
Yeah, I made a lot of money, for sure.
Yeah, just like the trajectory of guy without money who is desperately trying to get some to guy who uses sports gambling, particularly on the NBA, to get more than he ever dreamed.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:05
2
How did Bob Voulgaris become one of the most successful NBA bettors?
6:05–19:12
3
What patterns did Bob discover about NBA scoring that influenced his betting strategy?
19:12–30:28
4
How did the legalization of sports betting change the landscape for gamblers?
30:28–50:09
5
What role does tanking play in the current NBA landscape?
50:09–54:15
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Pablo Torre Finds Out
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