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BILLY WALTERS

Billy Walters may be the biggest sports bettor in the world. On any given weekend, Walters bets hundreds of thousands of dollars using data generated by an exclusive and world-class crop of com-puter programmers. He filters the data, then goes to work at his specialty—getting the money down at the point spread he wants.

Born in Munfordville, Kentucky, Billy’s father died when he was a year and a half old. His grandmother raised him, and on her way to work, she’d drop him off at a pool room owned by his uncle, who set up Coke cases around the pool table for Bill to stand on. At age four, Billy Walters began shooting pool. As Bill says, “More skulduggery goes on in a pool room than anywhere. It’s the greatest place in the world to learn what life is all about.”

After a short stint as a bookmaker and an arrest, Billy decided that he had to go to Las Vegas. Since then, his gambling exploits have made him a legend among professionals. In the early 1980s he was part of the Computer Group, the first gamblers to successfully use computers to analyze football. They bankrupted bookmakers from coast to coast. In 1986 he won Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker, the second most prestigious tournament at the time. In Atlantic City he won $3.8 million in one day playing roulette. The story goes that the casino sent the roulette wheel to NASA after-ward to be analyzed by their engineers for biases.

After following these incredible stories for years, I knew I had to have Billy Walters in this book.

But there was also a dark side. In his early days, Bill was a self-described gambling addict. More than any other, he’s had to beat not only the casinos, but the federal government, as well. As

part of the Computer Group, he was indicted for bookmaking, and he’s been indicted three times in Las Vegas for money laundering. Walters keeps fighting them, because, he says, “There’s a principle involved. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Since 1988, Billy has spent most of his time developing and operating his company, the Walters Group. He has six golf cours-es and a hotel. He’s built mobile-home and industrial parks, and filled many subdivisions with houses. During my interview, Bill stressed that business and gambling are no different. If you val-ue something at ten, then you’re a buyer at eight and a seller at twelve. It makes no difference if it’s a piece of property or calling the last bet in a poker game.

How does a man go from compulsive loser to being one of the most successful gamblers in history? Billy told me, “I know what every sucker thinks, because I used to be one.”

When did you first start gambling?

I guess I was about five years old.

What were you betting on?

I was shooting pool, playing penny nine ball. The way I got intro-duced to gambling was quite different from most of the people I know.

As a youngster, I led two lives. My father was a professional gambler, but he died when I was a year and a half old. My grand-mother raised me, and we were very poor. My grandmother cleaned people’s houses and washed dishes at a restaurant at lunch hour. She was the most religious lady I have ever known. We lived in a town of fourteen hundred people in Kentucky called Munfordville. Every Sunday morning I went to Sunday school, and church afterward. We had training union on Sunday night and prayer meetings on Wednesday night. I was part of a Chris-tian youth organization called the R.A.s, the Royal Ambassadors.

My uncle owned a pool room. When I was four years old, my grandmother would drop me off there while she went to work. My uncle would put Coke cases around the back pool table for me

to stand on and I started shooting pool when I was four years old. When I was five or six, I was racking balls in the pool room.

When I was eight I got a paper route. I worked seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. I cut grass for people. There were eight or ten people whose yards I kept. I hired out in the summer with the farmers, working on the crops and things like that.

I remember the first time I lost an amount of money that had a major effect on me. I was about ten years old. The town grocer was a baseball fanatic. His name was Woody Branstedder, and he was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. I loved baseball and my heroes were Mickey Mantle and the rest of the New York Yankees. I had saved up about thirty dollars from this paper route and I bet the whole thirty on the Yankees beating the Dodgers in the World Series. I think that’s the only series the Dodgers ever beat the Yankees. I remember it like it was yesterday: that sick empty feeling I had the first time I got broke. That was the first thing that was memorable from a gambling standpoint.

When did you start playing golf?

I didn’t start playing golf until I was about twenty. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a golf course. Obviously, I wasn’t raised in a country-club set. The town I was in didn’t even have a golf course. My grandmother died when I was thirteen, and I was forced to move to Louisville where my mother lived. I worked two jobs there and played a lot of pool. I got a girl pregnant when I was sixteen, so I got married. I continued to go to high school until I graduated. I worked in a bakery in the morning and a service sta-tion at night until I got out of high school. I eventually ended up in the automobile business. Some guys I was selling cars with invited me to play golf.

Did you have an aptitude for the game right away?

I thought I did, and I bet the first time I played. We played a hun-dred-dollar Nassau.

Nassau — The classic betting proposition in golf. A Nassau consists of three bets for an agreed-upon amount. In a $100 Nassau, $100 is won by the player with the best score on the first nine holes, a second $100 is won for the best score on the back nine, and a third $100 is won by the player with the best combined score for the entire game.

Without ever having played before?

Oh yeah. Although my father was a professional gambler and I was raised around gambling, I was addicted to it. I didn’t realize it then, but in retrospect I was totally addicted.

Even though I was married and had a child to raise, my typical week went like this. I worked eighty hours a week selling cars. Af-ter I got off work I went to a poker game. On Saturday I bet every game on the schedule for college and pro football. Every Monday a parade of bookmakers came by to get paid. Four or five times a year I would take a trip to Las Vegas and whatever money I had, or didn’t have, I would lose in Las Vegas. This went on for a num-ber of years. I made a lot of money in the automobile business, but never accumulated any. We lived okay.

So you weren’t out blowing the rent money.

Oh, no. But I had innumerable opportunities in the automobile business. If I had stayed focused on cars, and hadn’t gambled, I would probably own three hundred automobile dealerships to-day. But I didn’t. My love, my heart, my mind were always on gambling. In Kentucky, where I lived, there was gambling before anybody ever heard of Las Vegas.

Newport?

Yeah, Newport, and Louisville, too. Newport is better known, because that’s where a lot of the people who started Las Vegas came from. But there was underground gambling in Louisville fifty years before Las Vegas was ever founded. Louisville is not a city like Chicago or New York or other major metropolitan areas.

There’s no organized crime there, and there never has been any organized crime. Everybody gambled and as long as bookmakers didn’t mess with any players, the police couldn’t care less. We had walk-in gambling establishments where you could shoot craps, play poker, and get the call of the races at Churchill Downs. Gam-bling was a way of life there. It was a wide-open town. When I moved there, it made gambling even more convenient. I saw book-makers that couldn’t read or write, driving Cadillacs.

In the late ’70s I had a son who was diagnosed with a termi- nal brain tumor. I had a marriage that was on the rocks. It was the only thing in my entire life that I have been faced with that I couldn’t deal with. I’ve been shot at, I’ve been heisted, I’ve owed money that I didn’t have, I’ve been broke a zillion times, but I had never faced any kind of pressure that I couldn’t deal with. When I was told my son had thirty days to live, I went through this tremendous feeling of guilt. I was working eighty hours a week in the automobile business and the rest of the time I was playing poker or playing golf or doing something. Here is this kid who had thirty days to live and I hadn’t spent nearly as much time with him as I should have. The girl I was married to at the time was having tremendous emotional problems and our mar-riage was weak anyway. We got divorced and I got out of the automobile business.

I was burned out on automobiles, I was defeated emotionally because of the situation with my son, I had gotten a divorce, but I was still infatuated with gambling. I looked at all those people I competed against. I played golf once a week; they played seven days a week and practiced. I’d go to a poker game at eleven o’clock at night after working all those hours and I could hardly hold my eyes open. I was up against guys that played for a living. I thought to myself: If I could devote a hundred percent of my time to gam-bling, I could be successful. It was something that appealed to me and something I really wanted to do. So when I got out of the au-tomobile business, I decided I was going to become a bookmaker, and that’s what I did.

I started booking in Kentucky in ’79 or ’80, along with about a hundred other people that were already booking. In no time I had a lot of business, because I worked hard and I knew a lot of people. Looking back on it, I was very naïve. I lived there my whole life and I’d seen all these people book and nobody ever had any prob-lems. Had I known the problems it would create for me for the rest

of my life I never would have considered booking, but I did it. I booked there for a short period of time and the end result was the same as what happens to most people that book. I wound up being arrested. That was in September of 1982.

If the town was wide open, why you?

There was an election. The incumbent mayor was defeated and a new mayor came in. He brought in a new chief of police and they were going to crack down. I was the most visible guy, because I was the biggest guy. Once I got arrested I knew I had to make a decision. I could either stay in Kentucky, go back to the auto-mobile business, and completely get out of gambling, or I had to go someplace where gambling was accepted—someplace where it was legal and I could be a respected member of the community. That place was Las Vegas; Las Vegas is the Wall Street of gam-bling.

In retrospect, the chances of me making it in Las Vegas were about one in ten million. I’ve always been someone with at least average intelligence and I’ve always had an incredible work ethic, but back in those days I had two major leaks in my game. First, I drank. And when I drank I was an idiot when it came to gambling. I gave my money away. Second, I was a very poor manager. Even when I was sober I wasn’t a good manager.

money management (being a manager) — Considered by many to be the cornerstone of professional gambling, it’s the skill that often sepa-rates the pros from the wannabes who drive taxis. Pros use it to protect their bankrolls during extended losing streaks and to maximize the ad-vantages they find and exploit. Not to be confused with money-manage-ment-based betting systems—no betting system can win in the long run without a mathematical advantage in the game.

When I moved to Las Vegas, most people [who knew me] gave me little or no chance of being successful. I decided I was going to devote a hundred percent of my time to becoming the best gam-bler I could possibly become. And I remarried. I married the lady that I’m married to now. We’ve been married twenty-three years.

What was her reaction to that decision?

A large part of the success that I’ve been able to achieve has been because of the lady I married. Unlike the first girl I married—who didn’t like gambling, didn’t understand gambling, and was against gambling—this girl knew me and knew what I was. From day one she’s been totally supportive of me regardless of whether we had a bag full of money or we were broke. She’s been that kind of wife and partner. She wanted me to be happy, and anything and everything she could do to support me she’s done since the day we were married.

You’re very different from the other gamblers I’ve interviewed. From the beginning, they always wanted to have an edge, where-as you had a lot of gamble in you and became a professional later.

Yeah. I suffered a lot of disappointments gambling. Had most people gone through what I went through, they wouldn’t still be gambling. At one time I was addicted. Back in the early years, I probably had more gamble in me than any man alive. I’d flip a nickel for all the money I had. If I got broke, it didn’t make any dif-ference. When it came to gambling, money didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t stupid. I looked for the best of it, but if I couldn’t get the best of it, I’d take the worst of it to get in action. As I said, I wasn’t a very good manager of my money.

On the other hand, I won a lot of money gambling. I probably won more money gambling than anybody you know. The reason I was able to win such large amounts was because I had a reputa-tion for being someone who would give a lot of gamble. In the gambling world, if a guy has a reputation as a nut peddler, a lot of people won’t gamble with him. If a guy has a reputation as some-one who gives a lot of gamble, then people who won’t gamble with other people will gamble with him. But back in those days, be-cause I wasn’t a great manager, I never accumulated any money. I eventually ended up getting taken off.

giving (or having) gamble — The willingness to bet when you may have no advantage.

nut peddler — Someone who wants to bet only on sure things. In poker, an unbeatable hand is called “the nuts.”

taken off — Usually, to be cheated. Also (and as used here), to be beaten by other players.

What changed that? How did you change?

Several things changed it. Number one, I got older. Number two, I became more mature when it came to being a gambler and un-derstanding the facts surrounding gambling. Number three, the casinos had as much or more to do with my outlook changing than anything in the world.

I started coming to Las Vegas in the ’60s. I always believed that it didn’t make any difference whether you won or lost. If you gave the casinos action, that was all they cared about. For many years I was the most popular guy in Las Vegas, because I lost millions and millions of dollars there. In the ’80s I saw another side of the casinos that I hadn’t realized existed. When I started beating them, I found out that my previous belief was incorrect. If you threat-ened to become a consistent winner, the casinos not only didn’t want your business, but they would go to great lengths to create problems for you. Once I saw this side of the deal, it had a chill-ing effect on me. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t do any more gambling in casinos unless I was convinced that I had a mathematical advantage.

action — Betting; when money is on the line.

Once you began operating this way, did they bar you from play? I didn’t exactly get barred. For many years I’d won and lost large amounts of money in casinos, but at the end of the day I was a big loser.

Was this at all different games, or betting sports? It was at table games. I played blackjack and baccarat.

So you were exactly the customer the casino wanted—you were a player. I was exactly what they wanted, and again, back in those days I drank. When I was sober I was a much tougher guy to beat. But when I drank, I played really poorly. That’s what they’re looking for today, somebody who has a lot of gamble to him and is willing, on a continual basis, to belly up with the worst of it and lose his money.

In years prior to moving to Las Vegas I’d played in some of the poker tournaments at the Horseshoe. Jack Binion had a golf tour-nament every year. [Jack Binion was the owner of the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino.] In those days it was pretty famous. I say a golf tournament, but it was a bunch of guys from all over the country who got together and sometimes four months later we would still be out there gambling every day. Customers from the Horseshoe and professional gamblers from all over the world came and we matched up and played golf. Even before I was a successful gam-bler, I won a lot of money back in those days playing golf. I then lost that money in the casinos or betting sports or something else.

How high were you guys playing? I had some $100,000 Nassaus. Throughout those years I met a lot of people. I met Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Billy Baxter, Sarge Ferris, Puggy Pearson, and on and on and on [Chip Reese is in-terviewed in Chapter 2; Doyle Brunson is interviewed and Puggy Pearson is profiled in Chapter 8]. When I decided to move to Las Vegas I was broke, but one of my associations was with a group of guys who had developed a software program to handicap sports. How did you get connected with them? That’s a real long story, but I was basically involved with them in marketing their product. I was moving the money. They got start-

ed and were successful, and they wanted to expand their market share. They didn’t have the means or the ability and that’s how I got involved. I got involved with them back in Kentucky before I moved to Las Vegas.

moving money — Getting bets placed. As used here, betting with many different bookmakers in order to get a large amount of action without moving the point spread.

This was the famed “Computer Group”1? Right. So when I moved to Las Vegas, Chip Reese was, if not the best, one of the best poker players in the world. Chip was a much better manager than I was, but at that time he wasn’t the great-est manager in the world, either. He made a lot of money playing poker and screwed it off betting sports or something like that. He enjoyed golf and he and I liked each other, so when I moved to Las Vegas we formed a partnership. I tried to help him as much as I could with his golf game and taught him what I could regarding sports. He taught me about poker, backgammon, and gin rummy. We were next-door neighbors and we did almost everything to-gether. I look back on those days as some of the happiest of my life. We even played slot machines. When the progressive jackpot was out of whack, we would put a crew together and play slots. Chip put up the money and we were partners. All the money we won playing poker, or backgammon, or betting sports went in a pot and we split. That relationship went on for a couple years. We had a basketball season that wasn’t going very well and he decided to discontinue the partnership. But I continued to bet sports.

crew — A group of gamblers who work together as a team.

In 1985 I had a controversy with the FBI, who had looked at the Computer Group. There was an agent that had been out of the academy for about two months. He didn’t have a wealth of experience and he thought we were bookmakers. He couldn’t

1 For this and subsequent numeric references 2-4, see “Walters Notes” at the end of this chapter.

fathom that we were mere bettors. To be fair, up until then any-one involved in betting sports with large amounts of money and a large group of people had always been a bookmaker. A group of people making large amounts of money from betting was some-thing that neither he nor the FBI had ever seen before. In December of 1984 they put wiretaps on our telephones. In January of 1985 they carried out simultaneous raids throughout the United States. They raided several places under the pretense that this was a large bookmaking network.

The wiretaps should have made it obvious that this wasn’t the case. That’s right. When they listened to those wiretaps it should have been very clear that we were doing nothing more than betting, but [to them] it wasn’t. We were raided and they seized quite a bit of material and money. We felt that once they reviewed all the evidence, they would come to the conclusion that we were bettors and that would be that. After the raids took place, infor- mation was submitted to the grand jury. It became very apparent to both the head of the strike force and the head of the FBI in Las Vegas that we had done nothing wrong and the case was put on hold.

During the next five years, two new strike force heads came in and there were two new heads of the FBI here in Las Vegas. Then, two or three months before the statute of limitations ran out, a book was published, titled Interference. The book was about ninety-nine percent fiction. It alleged that there were pro football games being fixed by organized crime. This wasn’t related to us, but to sports betting in general. The book was all bullshit, but there was a chapter that mentioned the Computer Group. The author said we were the most successful sports betting group in the his-tory of America. He mentioned the raid that had taken place in January of ’85, and insinuated that the reason we weren’t indicted was because one of the members of our group was a fellow who was married to Barbara Walters. According to this book, the rea-son we weren’t indicted was because Barbara Walters’ best friend was Nancy Reagan, and there was this so-called fix.

When the book came out, the principals at the Justice Depart-ment read this and said, “What the hell do you mean there’s a fix

going on?” There was no fix, but it got the case reborn. Four years eleven months and two weeks after the arrest, we were indict-ed. [The statute of limitations was five years.] We were charged with—and listen to this, because nobody in the history of America, to my knowledge, had ever been charged with this—“being part of a criminal conspiracy, conspiring to bet.” We were charged with a violation of the travel act and a violation of 1084. Fortunately, we were found not guilty of two of the counts. On the other count, the jury voted eleven to one to acquit, and it was dismissed.

The thing I learned first-hand from this experience is that the vast majority of people in law enforcement are competent, and well intended, but they’re not perfect. What happened in the Computer case, and what is happening to me today, is that people went out and spent large amounts of money. They made representations and public statements. When facts came out that didn’t support their representations, they were put in a position where they had to cover their asses. That’s when people become extremely danger-ous.

It seems that the system is ripe for abuse. These forfeiture laws are more abused than anything I can think of. Congress passed the RICO Act and it was put in place to confis-cate ill-gotten gains from drug traffickers and such. Unfortunately, they use that law to target people. Let’s say a guy is truly guilty of violating the law, and he has assets. What the police do now is cut a deal with him. They let him plead guilty to a lesser offense, the person doesn’t do any jail time, and the money gets forfeited into the police slush fund. The bottom line is, if you violate the law, I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, black or white, you should be held to an equal standard. Because of the way these forfeiture laws are worded, you have police motivated to do one thing: Get the money.

You think they target gamblers because of the amount of cash involved? Sure. I’ve had people in law enforcement tell me that gamblers are the easiest targets in the world for them. From an administrative standpoint, they invest little or no resources and the amount of

money they get in forfeiture is substantial. A lot of people in gam-bling can’t stand up and defend the thing as vigorously as they would like because, let’s face it, maybe some of them didn’t pay all the taxes they should have.

In Las Vegas I have a controversy with the Metropolitan Police Department. Twelve years after the FBI thing, the Las Vegas Met-ropolitan Police Department confiscated $2.8 million of my money under the pretense that I was an illegal bookmaker. They found out I wasn’t, but that didn’t make any difference. For the last three years they’ve worked day and night trying to concoct a crime that doesn’t exist, so they’ll have the legal right to keep my money. Back in 1996 their offer was: I give them $500,000 and they give me back the balance and it would all go away. I refused to give them a penny, because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I can account for every cent of my money, and they basically bit into something that they’re unaccustomed to. That is, someone who has not violated the law and someone who has nothing to hide.

They confiscated your money claiming it was ill-gotten gains? Yes. Any money that they seize from people in forfeitures goes into a bank account. There is no accountability for the money that goes into the account and no accountability for money that goes out. We’ve been told, and I believe it to be true, that the police working in this department are making as much or more money in overtime as they are in base pay. They’re traveling here, there, and everywhere, supposedly doing investigative work. Why shouldn’t they be held accountable just like any other public agency?

The vast majority of people they do this to are somewhat dirty. For these people, it’s much more affordable to give the police the assets than it is to hire an attorney and fight it.

In the long run it could cost you more than the $500,000 they would have accepted. Oh, it’s already cost me far in excess of $500,000, but there’s a prin-ciple here. I don’t know how well you know my background, but in 1997 I was recognized as Man of the Year in Las Vegas, as Phi-lanthropist of the Year. I’ve donated millions and millions of dol-

lars to local charities in Las Vegas. There’s a charity here called Op-portunity Village for which we were the lead donors. The dollars have nothing to do with this case. It’s the principle.

That aspect of the case surprises me. Las Vegas is a small town, and you’re a successful businessman and a respected member of the community. It seems odd that they would target you. If you were to talk to the majority of the people that make Las Vegas what it is, I think you would find ninety-nine point nine percent of them would feel just the way you do. The editorials and articles that have been written in the paper have been extremely critical of Metro and the Attorney General’s office. The second time I was in-dicted, the publisher of one of the newspapers invited me to write an op-ed piece. Have you ever heard of someone who was indicted being called up and asked to write an op-ed? Both newspapers have published scathing editorials criticizing the Metropolitan Police De-partment and the Attorney General’s office for this. Nevada is no different from any other state. There’s politics here.

There’s a unique situation in Nevada regarding this, though. In Las Vegas’ Metropolitan Police Department there’s a unit called Intelligence. They target people through any means they can. They go in and charge people with various violations of the law, and end up bargaining and gaining vast amounts of money through forfeitures.

When Metro’s Intelligence unit got my money and I wouldn’t bargain with them, they said, “Look, we raided this guy under the pretense that he was a bookmaker, but he’s not. But we can still get him for money laundering.” They came up with some wild plan on how to do it. I got in their cross hairs and they had to devise a crime. They started with that theory that I’ve laundered money in some way, and that’s what this whole thing has been about for three years. Twice these guys have indicted me. It’s been thrown out of court both times. They just re-indicted me for the third time for the same charge.

Isn’t that double jeopardy? If the case is dismissed with prejudice they can’t. The case was

thrown out of court both times, but it wasn’t with prejudice so it allows them to do it again. Now, you’re right that in the real world it doesn’t happen. But these guys don’t seem to have anyone above them that either cares or has knowledge of what they’re doing. That’s how they’ve been able to get away with this stuff.

How has your wife handled this? I’ll tell you a story about my wife. When I got indicted in 1990, they indicted my wife along with me. The whole purpose of in-dicting my wife was to pressure me into plea-bargaining, which I was ready to do. I went down and met with my attorneys. They met with the government and I was going to plea-bargain, actually plead guilty to something I was totally innocent of, just because I was afraid of what my wife was going to be subjected to.

My lawyers met with the prosecutors, but the deal they of- fered was absolutely preposterous. My wife was right there, and I asked the attorneys to explain the possibilities to Susan. The lawyer said, “Look, you’ve done nothing wrong and we believe that you will prevail in court. But, understand that with a jury anything can happen.” My wife said, “What could happen to me?” The lawyer said, “You could go to prison.” It was the first time in the whole ordeal that it dawned on my wife that she could possibly do time. Initially, her eyes welled up and she started crying. I said, “Honey why don’t we go someplace and talk about this.” We left the attor-neys’ office and went to a fast-food restaurant and ordered coffee. I’ll never forget this. I said, “Look honey, don’t worry about this. I’m going to plead guilty to what they’re offering us. Don’t worry about this at all.” She got hold of herself and said, “No. We’re not pleading guilty to anything.” She said, “These bastards are not go-ing to do this to you.” In the twenty-three years I’ve been married to this gal there was only one other time that I heard her use a curse word. We went back to the attorneys’ office and she said, “We’re going to trial.” So we all got indicted, and I sat there in fed-eral court with her for fourteen days. We went through that ordeal together. There aren’t many women that are made like that.

You talked about the first time you realized that the casinos didn’t want you as a player if they thought you had a chance of winning. Was there a specific incident that made you realize this? Yeah, there was. If you’re committed to being a professional gam-bler and you want to be the best you can be, you spend every waking moment trying to figure out a way to beat the game. Liv-ing in Las Vegas, as you can imagine, there are all kinds of theo-ries that gamblers come up with for winning. The vast majority of them don’t work. But some guys approached me with a theory about playing roulette. This was not even something that they tried to keep secret. It’s something that many people have tried for many years. Everybody has tracked roulette wheels, and in fact in Europe they write all the numbers down on the wall, try-ing to seduce players into playing the wheel because they think there’s a bias.

So these people approached me with this method to beat rou-lette. At the time, I shared it with all of my gambling buddies that I played poker with and they all thought it was quite humorous.

Was it a system based on biased wheels? Without going into details, let me say this: It was done from a mathematical standpoint. It was absolutely one hundred and ten percent above board. This wasn’t even a gray area. This was basi-cally a situation [that took advantage] of casinos with old faulty equipment that had not been maintained.

This was written about in Russell Barnhart’s book, Beating The Wheel.

Right. So I started playing roulette. Up until that time I had won and lost large amounts of money in casinos. Even after I moved to Las Vegas, there were at least four occasions where I’d lost over a million dollars playing blackjack or baccarat at the Horseshoe or the Golden Nugget. The first time I won playing roulette, I started to see that other side of the casinos. Without naming the establishment or the owner, I won a large amount of money playing roulette.

When you say large, wasn’t it seven figures? Yeah. This boss took the position that not only did he not want any more of my roulette business, which was fine, he didn’t even want his employees to associate with me anymore. He went out of his way to ostracize me from the people who worked at his company. Just as an added coincidence, I had the criminal investigation divi-sion of the IRS investigating me for four and a half years. I took a hundred percent of the proceeds in the form of a check in my name. I deposited it in the bank in my name and paid income tax on the win, and still went through four and a half years of one of the most unbelievable witch hunts you can ever imagine.

I guess the casinos are pretty powerful in Nevada. Well this happened in New Jersey, but it was a casino that was represented both in New Jersey and in Nevada. A week prior to me winning this money, I’d lost $1,047,000 in the same casino play-ing blackjack. I paid it off like a man and that was fine. On top of this, there were some [financial] incentives that had been prom-ised me by the casino and I got stiffed for that. The guy refused to pay. When I saw this side of the casinos, I just got to where I hated them. I couldn’t lose a hundred-dollar bill in a casino now if my life depended on it, unless I felt I had the best of it. It took me a while to realize that the casinos operated this way, because I’d always done the majority of my gambling at the Horseshoe. You couldn’t do business with any classier people than Benny and Jack Binion. If you won or you lost, the treatment was consistent. They were nice, friendly, and professional. I believed all casinos were that way. When I ran into this experience with roulette, it was like a little boy who finds out for the first time there’s no Santa Claus. That incident had as much or more to do with me becoming a good manager as anything.

Sounds like they may have shot themselves in the foot. You were a sucker who lost a million dollars in the same casino playing blackjack. And it wasn’t any secret to the people who had the casino that I

thought I had this method [for roulette]. I told them, and they all laughed at me. Then, after the fact, the boss said that there was something wrong with the wheel. Okay, what was wrong with it? He didn’t know. Well, I didn’t do anything to it. I offered to take a polygraph test. If I didn’t pass the test, I’d give them all the money back. I represented the following: I didn’t do anything to the roulette wheel; I wasn’t involved with anybody who did any-thing to the roulette wheel; there weren’t any employees who did anything to the roulette wheel; if there was anything wrong with the roulette wheel, I don’t know what it was. And up until today I guarantee you the casino doesn’t know what was wrong with the roulette wheel.

A boss said to me, “Some of these numbers were biased.” So I asked him a really important question: “What if I had bet on some of these numbers that were biased against me, that were about 70-1 against the ball landing on them? If I lost all my money and you found out about the bias, would you give me my money back?” He said, “No. There’s no way I would give you your money back.”

The other casino owners had to hear about this when it hap-pened.But you got action in other casinos playing other roulette wheels. You’d think they would have seen you coming and said, “Stop all the wheels.” Well, in their defense, this wasn’t like someone betting late on a wheel. It wasn’t like someone using a computer. Playing these rou-lette wheels wasn’t any cinch. I played a lot of wheels where I lost money. We’d look at a roulette wheel and do a sampling. Many times we believed we had an advantage. Sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t. This wasn’t a sure thing by any means.

What about when you were with the Computer Group and you were massacring these sports books in Las Vegas? At some point they must have decided to stop you. For a smart bookmaker, I was the most preferred customer they could have. Only a stupid bookmaker would try to avoid doing business with me. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of Bob Martin.2

Bob Martin in his day was recognized as being the sharpest bookmaker in the United States. What Bob Martin did was go out of his way to create alliances and relationships with the smartest bettors in America. He let them bet him first and he put them on for large amounts of money. Many times he would charge them a dollar five instead of a dollar ten. Other times he didn’t charge them any juice. But when Bob got finished, everything and any-thing those handicappers knew, he knew. He did this on Sunday afternoon. He put his line3 out on Monday morning. Bob Martin knew everything he needed to know on Monday morning. He bought that information. He paid for it. But he took the informa-tion and used it to his benefit. He priced his product [the line] in such a manner that it forced people on the other side. Many times he went out on Monday and Tuesday and bet on the games him-self with other bookmakers.

juice — The amount a bookie charges to wager above the base amount of a bet. Often 10%, a football bettor might bet $11 to win $10. The $1 difference is the “juice.” Also called “vigorish” or “vig.”

When the hotels got into the sports book business, the guys that knew the business couldn’t get licensed. Either that or the ho-tels didn’t understand how important they were. They wouldn’t pay qualified people enough money to come in and run their books. What they ended up with was a bunch of kids who were wet behind the ears, guys that really couldn’t even clerk for a good bookmaker. When they got interviewed by the gaming bosses, who didn’t know anything about sports betting themselves, they knew you had to lay 11-10, and in the interview they sounded like they knew what they were talking about. Plus, they would work cheap. So these guys got hired and since day one they’ve run the sports book industry in Las Vegas.

There’s a guy who runs all the race and sports books for one of the major casino chains. He’s even written a book about being a bookmaker. I don’t mean any disrespect to the man, but the facts are the facts. He doesn’t know anything at all about bookmaking. He knows that he doesn’t know anything about it, so what he does is put up a great front that he’s knowledgeable. He has a Gestapo force inside all the hotels that he’s responsible for. Anyone who comes in and doesn’t look just right to him, or walks up and makes a bet using the wrong lingo [sounds sophisticated], or somehow

looks like a professional, he’ll throw them out and tell them not to come back to his sports book.

He throws people out just from the vibe he gets from them? Yeah. My friend Gene Mayday used to own a casino called Little Caesar’s. It was the laughing stock of Las Vegas. He had this lit-tle hole-in-the-wall sports book and he wrote more business than Caesars Palace and the Las Vegas Hilton put together. This guy who wrote the book on bookmaking used to send his own custom-ers over to Gene Mayday’s casino in a limousine to bet teasers, because he was afraid to book teasers. Gene Mayday used to sit back and make millions of dollars and laugh at him. Yeah, if you walk in there and he thinks you’re any threat at all he will 86 you and tell you not to come back.

86ed — To be thrown out. In some cases a player is politely asked to leave; in others he’s read the “Trespass Act,” which states that if he returns, he’ll be arrested.

Las Vegas was built on, and continues today to thrive on, peo-ple that we in the gambling business refer to as half-sharps. Prob-ably one-thousandth of one percent of the people that bet sports can win. The rest of them are all losers. So all those people that went into this man’s sports books over the years that were half-sharps, he’s thrown out. If a smart guy goes into one of his books, he doesn’t have the advantage of knowing it’s a smart guy and pricing his product accordingly. Smart people are smart for a rea-son. If they can’t go in and bet directly, they’ll get someone else who can. Instead of him getting bet once or twice, he’ll get bet four times on the sharp side. The game will kick off and he still won’t know it’s the sharp side. Whereas, a guy like Bob Martin wanted the smart guy betting him, and when he did, Martin moved his line a point and a half. When a sucker bet him he might not move the line at all. Bob Martin made a lot of money.

The sports bettors over the years have become a lot more so-phisticated than they ever were. The good news for the bettor is the bookmaker in the last fifteen years has regressed instead of progressed. They’re not as smart as the bookmakers were fifteen years ago.

But they are in communication. Yeah, but ninety-five percent of the guys booking today aren’t real bookmakers. They’re frustrated players. They all want to bet. The guys of the past era that made millions and millions of dollars were guys who spent a hundred percent of their time booking. They tried to become the best bookmakers they could be. Today, there isn’t one in ten that’s a true bookmaker.

You have two kinds. You’ve got guys like the author of that book who, if a guy looks like he knows what day of the week it is and what two teams are playing, he wants to run him out of his casino. Then you’ve got the other kind; if anybody bets him that he thinks is halfway smart at all, then he runs out and tries to kick it out and bet ten times as much money as was bet with him. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity out there in the bookmak-ing world.

I don’t know how hard it is to get licensed as a bookmaker, but it would seem that if a guy were sharp and became a legal book-maker in Las Vegas, he’d clean up. The original purpose of sports books in Las Vegas was to attract more potential customers for the casinos. The whole reason they were created has been lost in the shuffle. If sharp bookmakers were running the sports books in Las Vegas, you could have a national football contest that would be second to none. You’d have people from all over the United States traveling there every weekend to be involved in the contest. The sports books could get together and pay a fifty-million-dollar prize for the winner, paid out over time. If done correctly you could bring thousands of extra people into Las Vegas.

Let’s face it; Las Vegas has a monopoly on sports bookmak-ing. When a customer comes into a sports book here and the em-ployees are customer-friendly, what’s supposed to happen is they try to develop that sports customer, and introduce him to a casino host. That has never happened. It hasn’t come close to happen-ing. Another thing is, the sports books in Las Vegas have not been that profitable. The reason they haven’t been profitable is what I pointed out to you earlier: The people running them don’t know what they’re doing.

Jails across America are full of people who were willing to take a chance at booking because it was so lucrative. The point I’m try-ing to make here is that if somebody can book legally, it can be one of the most lucrative businesses in the entire world. Here’s Nevada, which has a monopoly on legal bookmaking. They have no competition at all, but when you look at the sports books, they don’t make any money. When you look at these unlicensed book-makers throughout the world, they make millions and millions of dollars. Why? The guys who are running the sports books in Las Vegas don’t know what they’re doing.

It’s amazing to me that they’re not making money. They make a small amount of money, but nothing compared to what they should make, or what bookmakers traditionally make. You look at what bookmakers make in England, Mexico, or in the Caribbean and compare it to the percentages they hold in Las Ve-gas. It’s not even close.

How did the casinos manage to get this messenger-betting4 law passed? The gaming industry in Nevada runs the state. If you’re part of an office pool and you make a bet in Nevada on behalf of that pool, you’re violating the law. You’re a criminal and they can take your money.

You won at least one major poker tournament. Yes. I won the Super Bowl of Poker in Lake Tahoe.

Do you still play poker? No, I quit playing poker about twelve years ago. When I had the controversy with the FBI in the ’80s, I ended up being indicted in 1990. In the middle of that, around ’87 or ’88, I decided that I was going to reposition myself. I was going to continue to bet sports,

but I would discontinue a lot of other things in gambling. Poker was one of those things. I became much more involved in business. I formed a company called Berkeley Enterprises and I did a lot of acquisitions and things like that. Since ’88, I’ve made a concerted effort developing and operating that company.

You own golf courses now? I had ten golf courses, now we have six. In ’92 we changed the name of the company to the Walters Group. The Walters Group is a holding company for several other companies. I’ve done a lot of building and development. We own a hotel. I’ve built some mo-bile-home parks, some industrial parks, and a lot of homes. I own some commercial office buildings and some warehouses.

It’s unusual to be both a successful gambler and a successful businessman. A lot of gamblers try to get into business and end up blowing their money. It’s all risk-reward. I experienced a lack of success as a gambler early on because I didn’t understand the necessary principles. When I became a full-time professional gambler, I went through an indoctrination period. Once I learned those things, I realized that the same principles applied in both worlds. That is risk-re-ward, and being able to evaluate things correctly. It’s putting your money in a poker pot with one [card] to come, knowing what the probabilities are. What’s in the pot? What are you risking? What are the odds the pot is laying you? What are the true odds of your hand prevailing over the hand you’re trying to beat?

Or, it’s buying a large piece of real estate, entitling it, improv-ing it, and then selling it. The businessman who buys and sells stocks looks at current earnings, past earnings, the officers of the company, what their growth prospects look like, what their competition looks like, etc. He then comes up with an evaluation: This company is worth ten dollars a share. Well he’s a buyer at eight dollars and a seller at twelve dollars. The guy who decides to play pool against another guy does an internal evaluation of what that guy’s skills are. The sucker overvalues his own abilities and undervalues his opponent’s. The sharp successful gambler

does the opposite, and factors in about a twenty percent contin-gency.

Another thing is this: The amount of risk he takes is based di-rectly on the amount of return. You wouldn’t take near the amount of risk if you could win a hundred dollars as you would if you could win a hundred thousand. I may play golf with a guy and give him a lot more liberal game if I think I can win a hundred grand, than if I think I can win only a thousand bucks. The same goes in a business deal.

How do you rate the ethics of gamblers compared to business people? When I was five or six years old, I got dumped my first time in a pool room. I took a friend for a partner and he dumped me. I was playing penny nine ball. The pool room is the greatest place in the world to learn what life is all about. More skulduggery goes on in a pool room than anywhere.

getting dumped — To be set up by a trusted partner. Here, Bill’s partner intentionally played poorly, then took a cut of the money won by their opponents.

In any profession there’s good and bad, but from a percentage standpoint, in my opinion, the professional gamblers of the world conduct themselves with a much higher code of ethics than the corporate leaders of the world that I have been exposed to. There are exceptions to every rule. I have some friends in the corporate world that I have the utmost respect for. Their word to me is bet-ter than any contract. Still, I can think of only two of those. In the gambling world, I know a lot of people who could call me up and borrow a lot of money without signing anything and I would feel confident about it.

What’s the most money you’ve ever won in a day? I won $3.8 million.

Was that betting sports? No, that was playing roulette [the Atlantic City episode].

What’s the most you’ve lost in a day? Couple million.

Do you have any “greatest gambling moments”? I shared the one with you about losing the World Series bet when I was ten years old. The largest bet I’d made on a sporting event, at the time it happened, was when Bo Jackson was playing for Auburn and they were playing Michigan in a bowl game. I think the line on the game was Auburn by 5 or 6. I went out and made a big bet on Michigan. Some tout service was on the other side of it, plus Bo Jackson was playing for Auburn so the public was against us. The line kept going up and I kept telling people [who were betting for me], “Bet, bet.” I got carried away with the mo-ment. People I thought would get a $100,000 down on the game turned in their bets and had $200,000 or $250,000, because we had all this opposition. [The bookies were getting so much action on Auburn that no matter how much Bill’s team bet on Michigan, the line didn’t go down.] I didn’t know it until the kickoff, but I had $1,050,000 bet on this one game. I didn’t have enough money to cover all the bets if I lost, because I’d bet more than I’d intended to.

tout — A service that sells sports picks to bettors.

I was watching this game and Michigan should have been leading by three or four touchdowns. They outplayed Auburn so badly it was unbelievable. But with three or four minutes to go, the score was tied. Every play Auburn was handing the ball off to Bo Jackson. Auburn had the ball on Michigan’s thirty-yard line. A bunch of penalties were called and with a minute to go, Au-burn was on Michigan’s ten-yard line. If they scored a touchdown I would lose all this money, but if they kicked a field goal I would

win. They handed the ball to Bo Jackson every play and my heart was in my throat. To make a long story short, Michigan finally stopped him and I won the bet. I will never forget that one as long as I live. At that time it was the biggest bet I had ever made. I’d worked for several months to accumulate that money and I would have been broke and had to borrow money to pay off the rest.

Another very memorable moment I had came a little while after I moved to Las Vegas. I’d worked very hard. For the first time I had a million dollars. My wife and I went down to the Horseshoe to have dinner. I started drinking, and after dinner I sent her home. I started playing blackjack and blew all the money. I went home and told her I got broke. She said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine and we’ll get back on our feet.” I never will forget that.

I know some successful gamblers, and I will assure you that every one that has become a success has been through some monu-mental failures on his way to getting there.

Chip Reese said that Las Vegas is a town of traps. Chip is right, but for every trap in the gambling world, there are ten in the corporate world. For every gambler that comes to you with a proposition that’s basically taking a shot at you, in the busi-ness world there are ten of them. You almost get to the point where you become paranoid.

take a shot — To try to take advantage of a person or situation.

They say that the nerds are going to take over the world. With all these people with their computer models, have the lines been getting better? Is sports getting harder to beat? There’s an intangible regarding sports. From a technical side, as far as handicapping sports is concerned, yeah. I’m sure that peo-ple’s handicapping abilities are going to get better. Right now the handicappers are ahead of the oddsmakers. With all due respect to Roxy, he’s got this reputation as being an oddsmaker. If you were to put him in the world of professional handicappers, he’d finish in the bottom tier. [Roxy Roxborough was the President of Las Ve-gas Sports Consultants, a company specializing in setting odds on

sporting events and making the line for 75% of the casinos in Ne-vada.] But, as bad as his numbers are, once they go up these young handicappers are like a bunch of piranhas. They pretty much have them flattened out in the first 24 hours.

flattened out — If a bookmaker puts up a bad line, the handicappers bet against the mistake so fast that they force the line to a point where there’s no longer an edge to bet it. The line gets “flattened out.”

As long as there’s a guy making a line and people are out there betting, there’s going to be an opportunity for the astute handi-capper. The guy that’s making the line to book with has a differ-ent goal than the guy that’s creating the line to bet with. The guy making the line to book with has to come up with a number that will attract as much business on one side as the other. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the right number [in terms of gauging the teams’ relative strengths].

I’ll give an example. Let’s say Notre Dame is a powerhouse; they won the national championship the previous year. Late in the year they’re playing Northwestern, which last year was one and eleven and are one and seven this year. Let’s say that the linemaker does know the right line on the game, and it’s Notre Dame favored by 28. Well, he would know, or should know, that the public is only going to bet on the favorite. So what he would do is jack the game up to 30 or 31 to start with. If he put it out at 28, the bookmakers would get clobbered with one-sided action. If he starts the line at 30 or 31, the public is still going to bet on the favorite. But now the game is going to go up to 32 or 33, which will create enough value for the professional handicapper to bet on the other side. Now the bookmaker has a chance to get balanced out. For that reason, there will always be opportunities.

balanced out — To have approximately equal amounts bet on both sides of a game. If a bookmaker can balance a game, he’ll pay off the winning bets from the losing bets and still have the 10% juice as his profit.

The computer wiz kids who are involved in sports today don’t have a clue, and I mean a clue, about how to bet their money. They don’t have a feel at all for which way the line is going to move. There’s a big difference in knowing how to bet and when to bet your money in sports. It’s almost as important as handicapping is. When the lines

come out on Sunday night, I’d like to bet you a million dollars that I can tell you where ninety-five percent of the games are going to close on Saturday. Ninety-five percent of the time I’m right.

I see it all the time. There’s a game that opens and the non-pro-fessionals, the suckers, are all on one side. The game is moving one way, and these idiots are going out on Monday or Tuesday to bet; [the nerds] just can’t wait to take the other side. For example, Vir-ginia Tech was playing Florida State. That game opened at 7. Well, [the nerds] couldn’t stand it. They all ran in and bet on Virginia Tech. They bet the game all the way down to 4. The game still ended up closing at 6, 6.5. If they’d let that game alone, it would have been seven and a half or eight. They could have bet all the money they would have wanted at game time, but they couldn’t help themselves.

On the other side, Notre Dame is playing Northwestern. The game comes out 30. [The nerds] have a play for the favorite. They should bet right away on this game because the public is going to bet on that side. But that’s a non-technical advantage that I have. I’m not as smart as these kids today, and I’m not saying that they won’t figure it out, but I’ve got thirty-some years of experience in buying and selling. Knowing which way the line is going to move on these games is extremely important. Probably eighty percent of the time I take a better number on these games on Saturday than these guys took on Tuesday.

So, do I think the handicapping is going to become better? Yeah. But let me say this to you, I’ve been doing this for a long long time. I’ve seen flashes in the pan. I’ve seen lots of guys that can win for a year. Lots of guys win for two years. But when I look back, I don’t know anybody that has won year in and year out. It’s a lot more difficult than it appears to be. If it ever gets to the point where the bettors do have an advantage, obviously the casi-nos will have to protect their market. It will get to the point where bookmakers will go to six to five or they’ll cut limits back to where there’s no profit for the bettors.

For all these years I’ve bet sports, I’ve gone out of my way to try to camouflage what I do. I don’t want the public to know what I’m betting on. If the public were to know what I’m betting on, then everybody would end up betting on the same side, and the bookmakers wouldn’t get any two-way action. If I happen to be going good, they’ll lose large amounts of money and when that happens, they’ll cut back their limits and it affects the market.

Well, these new guys today, that doesn’t even enter their

minds. The good news is, not enough have come along who know what they’re doing to have a real adverse effect on the market.

Now, the last three years, some guys have beat baseball. But because of the way they move their money and because of the people that have been involved with moving their money, they basically burned up the baseball market.

Do you bet baseball? No, just football and basketball.

I used to have some guys that moved for me in sports. We were doing very well and the bookmakers got crushed. After a pe-riod of time, I figured out this wasn’t any good, so I devised ways to make my bets and have a minimal effect on the market. I would intentionally do things to get people who weren’t dealing with us directly to bet on the opposite side.

In order for the professional bettor to be successful for a period of time, the casinos and bookmakers have to make money. If it isn’t a profitable venture for them, the professional bettor will be out of business. So the professional bettor has to figure out a way to be successful, but he also has to understand that the casinos and bookmakers have to be successful, too. Now these idiots who come along and don’t understand that, all they’re going to do is burn up the market.

Marketing is the key. The most money I ever won playing golf off one guy, I did by sloughing off $40,000 one day, which was all the money I had. Then I made a three-day contract and beat him out of $550,000.

In golf, psychological pressure on your opponent and on your-self is a factor. This is much different from sports betting. I’ve played golf for a long time and I’ve made bigger bets on golf than anybody I know. The thing that I saw was, personal ego took over more with golf than anything I’ve ever done. I’ve seen some of the smartest people in the world, both from the business and the gambling worlds, people who had no gamble to them at all, get out of line on golf. Unlike poker or sports betting or any- thing else, it all boils down to being able to perform under pres-

sure to whatever your abilities allow you to do. I was never the greatest player at golf, and I can’t explain why, but the more pressure, the more heat I was under, the better I played. I played better than I was capable of playing. Even back in the days when I wasn’t a great manager in gambling, in golf I’ve always been a real good manager. I’ve always had a very good ability to evalu- ate my ability, and the ability of others. The mistake that most peo-ple make in evaluating golf matches is they consistently underes-timate their opponent’s ability and overestimate their own talent.

I beat one player out of a million dollars at golf. We were play-ing poker and started talking about golf. This guy said he was go-ing to start playing. A bunch of players bet him that within a year’s time he couldn’t break 90 at La Costa. He went down there and got a place and started playing every day and taking lessons. I went down there and started gambling with this guy. In no time at all he was shooting 95 or 96. I started playing him $10,000 Nassaus and gave him a handicap that, on paper, looked like he had the nuts. But there’s an intangible that he wasn’t aware of, which was the potential for dogging it.

dogging it — Choking or playing poorly under pressure.

I gave him eighteen shots playing match play and twenty in medal play. Every day we’d get to the back nine with four or five holes to go and I’d be about three down. He could make qua-druple bogey on every hole and still win. I beat him thirty-one straight days. He’d get to the last four holes and collapse like an accordion. The eighteenth hole was a par five with a little water in front of it. There was not a day we played that he didn’t make at least 10 or 11 on that hole. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.

All these other gamblers were there with their mouths water-ing [hoping for a shot at the same player]. But on paper I was giv-ing him a game that looked like I didn’t have a chance to win. If we were to go out and play for no money, he would have shot 95 and I would have had no chance. I decided that I was going to risk $50,000 or $60,000 and if I lost it, I was going to quit. I knew him well enough to know that if I beat him and got his nose open I could break him, and that’s what happened.

getting your nose opened—Losing badly. Often leads to gambling wildly.

As far as card-playing ability, Stuey Ungar5 was a better card player than anybody, hands down. I used to stake Stuey and sit behind him. Gin rummy was his best game. He was at the Alad-din one time and a bunch of thieves had him under a peek. Stuey was such a good player that after four or five hands he felt it. He continued to play and intentionally showed them half his hand. He broke them.

under a peek — The cards are being seen. Usually, a spy hiding in an adjoining room or a room above is able to see the cards through a small hole drilled in the wall or ceiling and relay information to another player through a wireless radio receiver.

He’d never played no-limit hold ’em in his life, but within a year’s time he was the best no-limit player in the world. Manage-ment skills are just as important as ability, but he didn’t have those.

That’s what’s made Chip Reese such a great player. He’s as good a manager of himself and his money as anyone I have ever known in gambling.

You were saying before that personal ego is most people’s down-fall. A lot of people are in denial. A lot of people have a difficult time stepping back and doing a re-evaluation and deciding, I was wrong. A lot of people want to continue on in denial until they’re completely broke.

So now it’s just business and golf? I continue to bet sports, and I play golf.

Do you ever play backgammon, poker, gin? No. I belong to this country club, and they’ve invited me to play in poker games a few times, but I’ve never played. Not even once. I have no interest in it at all. I still enjoy sports and that’s why I con-tinue to bet it. I no longer care anything about playing poker. I got to a point where I couldn’t stand being around smoke.

I was probably the fourteenth best poker player in the world, but I played with the thirteen best. In order to compete at that lev-el, it’s a full-time job. It really is. That’s one thing I learned from being a sucker. You can’t compete professionally in gambling and do it on a part-time basis. If you’re not a regular sharp and you get in a tough game, they’ll eat you alive. Being a professional poker player and playing at a world-class level, man, you have to eat it, sleep it, and breathe it.

That’s another thing that amazed me about some of the guys I played with. Stuey Ungar was a perfect example. I can say it now because Stuey’s dead. He was so incredibly bright it was unbeliev-able. But here was a guy who did drugs and everything else in the world. I never did drugs in my entire life. Competing in the gam-bling world I can just imagine what kind of chance I would’ve had if I had been addicted to drugs.

To compete at that level is like dropping a piece of meat in a fish tank full of piranhas. If you have a weakness or develop a weakness, you’re gone. It’s no different from the wildebeests you watch on the Discovery Channel. One gets old and slow and a little blind. A lion cuts him out of the herd and eats him. That’s what will happen to you in the gambling world. It might be a little corny, but that old song that Kenny Rogers had, “You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.” You better know.

One thing about gambling is no different from the corporate world or anything else. There’s going to be change. If you can’t adapt, you will be gone. It happened to the dinosaurs, and it hap-pened to a lot of flashes in the pan in the gambling world. We see it every day.

What would you tell someone with aspirations to be a profes-sional gambler? Number one, don’t even think about it unless it’s something you absolutely love and are really intrigued by. In order to become suc-cessful, regardless of your IQ, you have to be incredibly motivat-ed. Is it a life that I would recommend to someone? It depends on what you’re looking for. You’re going to meet a lot of interesting, colorful, very nice people. There are going to be some real peaks and real valleys. The old saying is true: Chicken one day and feath-ers the next. A lot of people have a stomach for gambling and lots don’t. Are you willing to get broke? How are you going to function once you’re broke? I see a lot of people who, when everything is going good, they’re successful gamblers, but the second they hit a bump in the road and run into some adversity, they can’t handle it. They end up on alcohol or drugs or they abandon the principles that made them successful.

A lot of movies have been done about gambling. You’ve seen the Cincinnati Kid and Jackie Gleason in The Hustler. It’s all bullshit. There’s a lot of fun and, to a certain extent, there’s a lot of glamour. But when it’s all said and done, you better have an unshakable will and a commitment or you are not going to make it.

Are there any books that you would recommend? Books that can teach you the basics. But I think the most impor-tant things in gambling you’re only going to learn by living them, through experience. The good fortune I had, there was an old-time pool player named Hubert Coates. They called him “Daddy War-bucks.” He was a friend of my father’s and I learned a lot from him when I was a kid. I had cousins who were professional poker players. When I moved to Las Vegas, there was a guy named Fred Ferris; they called him “Sarge.” He and I became good friends and he was like a father figure to me. He went out of his way to try to school me. I learned a lot from Chip Reese and from Stuey Ungar. I didn’t learn a lot about management from Stuey, but I learned a lot regarding card play. I learned a lot from Doyle Brunson. But the majority of what I learned in gambling I learned the hard way. I got broke.

Any advice to the guy out in Peoria? If you got enough bark on your tree and you’re that committed to it, then fine. Anything short of that, don’t get serious about it. And forget the idea, “I’m going to double up and catch up, and when I get even, I’m quitting.” I know what every sucker thinks, because I used to be one.

Walters Notes

1—The Computer Group (first reference, page 10)The “Computer Group” was one of the most well-known and suc-cessful sports betting organizations in history.

In the early 1970s, a mathematician named Michael Kent was working for Westinghouse. He had use of the company computer and began compiling stats on his softball team, which sparked an idea. Could Kent apply his program to analyze college football and basketball for betting purposes?

Computers aren’t just magic boxes that spit out winning picks, but they can analyze many things very quickly. Once a computer has all the statistics from thousands of games, it can answer ques-tions. For example, is home-field advantage really an advantage? If so, what is it worth? Do all teams play the same on artificial turf? How does snowfall affect scoring? In a matter of seconds the com-puter can look at 10,000 games and tell you. From these variables, a “model” is built that determines how much weight each variable is given. Then, the ultimate question can be considered: When Dallas plays Detroit this week, who will win and by how much? The com-puter gives its answer. For example, Dallas will win by 7. Now the bettor must check with bookmakers to see if there’s a discrepancy between the computer’s line and the bookmakers’. The bigger the discrepancy, the more he bets.

For seven years Kent developed and refined his program. In 1979 he quit his job, moved to Las Vegas, and began his life as a professional gambler. He lost $40,000 during the ’79 football sea-son, but then won $150,000 betting basketball. But this wasn’t the life Kent wanted. He was working eighty hours a week and was in constant fear from walking in and out of sports books with large amounts of cash.

Enter Ivan Mindlin. Mindlin was an orthopedic surgeon in Las Vegas with a love of sports betting and an interest in computers. He, too, had developed a computer program, but with two major differ-ences. First, his program was for baseball, and second, it lost consis-tently. A mutual friend introduced them and Kent found a kindred spirit in Mindlin. They decided to form a partnership—Kent would handle the computer and Mindlin would bet the money.

Mindlin first called in Stan Tomchin (interviewed in Chapter 5) and later Billy Walters to assist in moving the money. Tomchin recalls, “When I used to move the computer order, we were bet-ting $3 million to $5 million on weekends. We busted bookmakers. We just destroyed them.”

On Super Bowl Sunday, 1985, the FBI raided 43 locations in 16 states, all affiliates of the Computer Group. The FBI thought they were a network of bookmakers, rather than sports bettors (while it’s illegal to be a bookie, it’s not illegal to bet). Five years later, one week before the statute of limitations was to run out, 19 peo-ple were indicted. The charges were eventually dropped, but the Computer Group had fallen apart.

2—Bob Martin (first reference, page 19)The dean of Las Vegas bookmaking, Bob Martin moved to Las Ve-gas in 1963 planning to bet sports for a living. In 1967 he was of-fered a job at the Churchill Downs Betting Parlor and soon sports betting in the United States revolved around Bob Martin. Martin set the line. He was so good at it that for 20 years, bookies across the United States used Martin’s point spread, rarely having to ad-just it to balance their books. Martin claimed that in setting the line, he tried to come up with a point spread against which he wouldn’t know how to bet himself. In 1975, Martin set up the Union Plaza sports book, with was the first book in a major casino. For budding professional sports bettors, Martin offered one piece of advice: “Marry a rich wife.” When Bob Martin died in March 2001, the elite of the gambling world—from casino CEOs to wisest of the wiseguys—showed up at his funeral to pay their respects.

3—The Line (first reference, page 19)The “line” in sports betting means the point spread placed on a game. If the line is 7, to bet the favorite you must give up (“lay”) 7

points, while to bet the underdog you get (“take”) 7. When formu-lating a line, the bookmaker isn’t trying to predict the final score of a game as much as he’s trying to choose a number that will cause the public to bet equally on both sides. A bookmaker charges $11 to win $10. This extra dollar on losing bets is called the “juice” or “vig.” If the public bets both sides equally, the bookmaker has no risk; he’ll collect from the losers and pay the winners, keeping the extra 10% vig as his profit. When more money is being bet on one side of a game, the line will be adjusted. For example, say Green Bay is playing Chicago and the line opens at Green Bay -7. If mon-ey pours in on Green Bay, the bookmaker would move the line to Green Bay -7.5 or -8. The bookmaker hopes more money will now come in on Chicago to balance his books.

4—Messenger Betting (first reference, page 22)In 1998 the Nevada Gaming Commission made it illegal to place a bet for another person at a sports book in return for compensation. This was in direct response to organized sports bettors who used teams of people (sometimes called “beards”) to simultaneously place bets at books all over Nevada in an attempt to get the most dollars bet before the lines were changed.

5—Stu “The Kid” Ungar (first reference, page 31)Stu Ungar was a gin rummy savant. He won his first gin tour-nament at 10 years old while vacationing with his parents in the Catskills. At 15, he won $10,000 in a tournament without losing a single hand. At 23 he moved to Las Vegas and promptly won a $50,000 tournament, which provided a bankroll (and easy-to-ob-tain financial backing) that allowed him to play anyone, anywhere, for any amount.

They came, they played, Ungar won. He began giving his op-ponents bigger and bigger handicaps, but he still won. They even tried cheating him, to no avail. Within a year it was almost impos-sible for him to find a gin game, so he turned to poker.

Ungar entered the no-limit hold ’em world championship event in the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe for the first time in 1980. He won. In 1981 he won again. The second larg-est tournament of the time was the Amarillo Slim Super Bowl of Poker. Ungar won that no-limit championship as well, making

him the only player ever to win championships in both the World Series and the Super Bowl (he won both three times).

Unfortunately, Ungar’s love of sports betting and horse rac-ing often busted him (he craved the action, and lost $80,000 the first time he stepped on a golf course). He was a millionaire one day and broke the next. After years of problems with alcohol and drugs, Ungar made a comeback in 1997 and shocked the poker world by winning his third World Series. In 1998 he was found dead in a small hotel on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip. A combination of narcotics and painkillers had triggered a heart at-tack.