Gambling Wizards
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1 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.