Pablo Torre Finds Out
"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis
06 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Bob Voulgaris become one of the most successful NBA bettors?
But the idea that the NBA is the thing you're going to start putting these bets on such that you have a facility with it. What was the reason why you chose the NBA? And what was, if you were to diagnose it in retrospect, what was your competitive advantage? Why were you actually good at this?
Yeah, I mean, my competitive advantage is that I just have like a real, real good attention to detail when I'm doing something. And I probably am decent at pattern recognition. I think if I have one talent in life, it's probably pattern recognition. But I just started watching NBA basketball because I was in Vegas at the time. And I was under the age of 21.
And it was one of the few places I could park myself in a casino without being bothered was in the sports book. And I remember I would just sit there at the Stardust or the Caesars Palace and watch basketball. basketball that was on. I liked it and I developed an affinity for it and I wasn't actually good at it. And then I decided this is something that I really enjoyed.
I somehow got satellite TV through those little dishes that came out and started watching a lot of NBA basketball and it became something I was obsessed with. I loved it. I loved the sport.
You're trying to find patterns in all of these games and you're sifting through as granular data as you can get.
Yeah, I'm trying to collect as much data as possible. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of data. There was the box score, and that was about it.
Right.
In 1999, the NBA started publishing play-by-play data, which is a description of what happens on the court, including where the shots were taken, the location of the shots, who got the rebound, time of possession, when the shot was taken. So you could get some detailed information. And that became more and more detailed.
And I would say up until around 2016, that's all you had was play-by-play data. But what I was doing is I was watching a lot of basketball, recording a lot of games on VHS. I had like four VHS machines. I would record all the games. I like focusing on the West Coast teams just because it was just easier. There was fewer games and it was later on in the evening.
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Chapter 3: What patterns did Bob discover about NBA scoring that influenced his betting strategy?
Because you may generally know that NBA teams, home and away, switch baskets at halftime. But the thing I never thought about is that in any given game, the away team, the visiting team, gets to choose which basket they're going to shoot on first.
Which means that the visiting team will have their bench, where the other 10 guys on the team are sitting for the entire game, alongside the entire coaching staff, right in front of their defense in the first half, or far more commonly, if they so choose, in the second.
And I would say 90% of the teams when I was coming around in 95, like there was three teams who wanted to have their defense in front of them in the first half. Usually you want your defense in front of you in the second half. And so those three teams were the teams, Utah Jazz, New Jersey Nets, Washington Wizards, who had that first half under, second half over profile in away games.
So the three teams wanted to have their bench on the side of the court in which their own team would be playing defense in the first half.
Correct. And I think the reason is, is because in general, defense is so important. And so most coaches want their defense in front of them the second half, which is that's the winning time. So every team does that. And for whatever reason, these three teams flipped it on its head. And so it just, it creates a little more randomness.
It's a lot harder to defend because you can't call it the coverages.
So that's the key insight, though, is that if you have your defense in front of you on the side of the court that your bench is on, the coaches can communicate with the players more effectively, more clearly.
There's so many layers to it. There's like you get more fouls because you're yelling at the refs and the refs are influenced by you yelling at them. There's the bench defense where these clowns show up in the guy's ear, which is a joke that teams do this, but they do do it.
Along the sidelines, the bench can try to interfere.
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Chapter 4: How did the legalization of sports betting change the landscape for gamblers?
It was just about a bunch of different things, but yeah.
But that's after the 2018 finals, presumably, just to put us in the timeline there.
For sure. Yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't the first year I was with the Badlands. Maybe it was the second year. I forget when it was, but it was definitely after that. Because I remember, that's the point I brought up was, hey, like, That's kind of weird. People watching the finals didn't even know about this. But also, someone had access to the information.
Are you 100% sure that that never got leaked?
And now we look at this indictment, and we see that allegedly, Damon Jones, who was serving as this weird volunteer shadow assistant coach around the Lakers, allegedly fed information that this player, who was identified by the powers of logic and deduction, is LeBron James, was not going to play in a game.
You have a real-time example of player availability with LeBron James, allegedly, being at the center of the biggest gambling scandal in the history of the NBA, this side of, allegedly, Tim Donahue, right?
And so you have this... By the way, the Tim Donahue scandal
not to bring but not to interrupt you but the Tim Donaghy thing was way worse than this like in terms of what we know now I think there's probably much worse things that we don't know about and just to be transparent I reached out to I sent I sent the league an email a week ago like offering like hey like if you are interested I'd be happy to help you protect the intact like not like an official role but just like some ideas because there's lots of things they could do to improve the integrity of the game and the things that they responded with recently and
About Terry Rozier and John Tate Porter, like with all due respect to their partners in gambling and their people at Sport Radar, whoever's doing their integrity, that's like the easiest thing in the world to catch.
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Chapter 5: What role does tanking play in the current NBA landscape?
Yeah, Mike Zarin's wheel thing is not bad.
That thing's not bad. You can make every rookie a free agent with a hard cap. Why not just give these kids the ability to go wherever they want and make the salary cap hard? Hard salary cap, no salary limit on individual players, but a hard cap, similar to other sports. You don't even have to be bright to be an NBA. And I guess I fell as an NBA GM, so that says a lot about me. But like...
Oh, this guy's a max player. How much do we pay him? Well, let me look up what the max is for his contract. The level of creativity that's required to build a team in American sports is zero. Especially in the NBA. You're told what you can play the player. You know exactly what the mid-level exception is. You know exactly what the demand on years of service.
You know what the rookie minimum wage scale is, the rookie maximum scale is. So yeah, if you want to just bring back the integrity of the game without... jeopardizing your golden goose gambling over there that you're so happy to cap for over and over and over again. And you don't want to go with Mike Zarin's wheel, which seems you just make it so that there's no draft.
I'm personally in favor of free agency for all incoming rookies. And I'm in favor of a zillion mini television shows in which they all get to make their individual decisions. I want rose ceremonies. I want the bachelor for, I want Victor Weminyama of 2027 to have his own rose ceremony.
But why shouldn't they be able to do this? And then if you're the Milwaukee Bucks and you've got $250 million in salary that you can spend, you can decide to give Victor Weminyama $125 million a year and build the rest of your roster up. That's an easy way to fix that. That's a very simple one. Like a very, very hard cap, but no max salary. And all NBA rookies are free agents.
And that seems to be a simple way. And then that solves the tanking. And then you still have the issue of these bananas who want to go and rig poker games when they're making $20, $30 million a year. That's a separate conversation.
On some level, though, what we are reckoning with is the inability to solve for people being f***ing idiots.
But I think also, honestly, I know you're not big on this, but... Yeah, I'm a big free market. People should be able to do what they want to do. I agree with that. But I don't think that should include gambling companies, marketing to vulnerable people, a dream that isn't even realizable.
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