Betting on sports hasn’t been more high-stakes or more accessible. However, with the invasion of Europe-based businesses in the game, the pros are feeling getting banned from plying their trade and pumped. Is this the end of this professional sports bettor?
I’m not a bookmaker,” Gadoon Kyrollos tells me as we stroll through the Hard Rock Casino in Atlantic City, enjoying with penny slot machines. “I’m a sports bettor.” Kyrollos is one of the highest-rolling sports bettors in the USA. He bets millions of dollars each year on sporting events, from NFL matches to the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. He’s known throughout the world by the name Spanky, also in his hoodie, sweatpants, and back pack, he looks like a 40-year-old variant of the Little Rascal. His backpack is not carrying snacks and school books. It’s filled with bricks of money.
“Bookmakers hang on a number,” he explains, as he pantomimes holding a gun sight up to his attention and pulling the trigger. “And I snipe’em.”
Regardless of the bag filled with money, the penny slot machine transfixs Spanky, pumping one bill into it after the next. On his phone he consults a recorder which tells him how to play with this particular machine so that it’s”plus EV,” or positive expected value, meaning the player has an advantage over the system with time. “Here is some true insider shit I am showing you here,” he tells me, referring to his dictionary, that has formulas for heaps of different slot machines plugged in to it. “I mean, it is probably a border of, for example, $12, but if you were walking down the street and saw $12, you would bend down and pick it up, right?”
It’s very important to Spanky I know the gap between bookmaking and betting, since a lot of people do not understand or appreciate the differentiation, including the Queens district attorney, who billed Spanky with bookmaking in 2012, a charge he states originated from a widespread misunderstanding of the business.
Read more: last3seconds.com