Little bit of a Part 2 on my last post. While writing it, I was brought back in time and thought about all the different people I've worked with or for or against in my now almost two decade sports betting career. So many bookies, agents, dirty-agents, sharps, middle-men, wanna-be's, etc. They were all unique and I like to think I learned at least a little bit from every single guy (and one girl, actually). So today I'm going to go through and write a little bit about all the whacky characters from my 15+ years of advantage gambling, specializing in 'face to face' PPH accounts. Obviously I'm not going to use any real names or anything that could remotely reveal anyone, not that anyone would know (most of) these guys. And I'm not going to talk about anyone I'm currently working with, not that that list is long or anything. If you're into this world at all, I think you'll find this interesting and a lot of fun. Even you aren't, I think this will be a really good look into the nitty gritty of the PPH ecosystem and a look at how people work with each other in a completely unregulated and mad max-ish system.
The first guy that really got me going in the PPH world was a friend I had named 'Jay'. I talked about him in my "My Time As A Semi-Pro Gambler" post. He was a true hustler, super out-going and charasmastic. People just seemed to gravitate to him. He was a "former pro poker player" (mind you, we were like 22 at the time) and a really terrible sports bettor. He definitely had a degen streak in him which will come into play later. We met during college through my poker home game and he was really the one that got me interested in sports betting in the first place. He was kind of a bookie but he was one of those kids that just could not hold on to money. It would burn through his pocket. He seemed to know every single local bookie though and had all kinds of accounts, all of which were lifetime losers. So you can probably figure out how this went. He got the accounts and dealt with the bookies and picking up, and I made the bets. It was glorious while it lasted. Eventually though it all became too much for him, having lots of cash on him that wasn't his. He had to go away and we had a pretty bad falling out after he used my money to pay off a bookie after he lost a ton of money trying to martingale horse racing. The degen in him was always there and was always going to wreck him. That was honestly a good lesson to see up close and so early on. He'll come into play again later.
I met quite a lot of people through Jay. Once you get your foot in the door, it's really up to you how hard you want to push it. Another quasi-friend I had in this group was another kid we'll call 'Jon.' He was a wanna-be bookie taking action on the phone and I quite literally put him out of business. He used to give out NHL lines and make the totals -110 both sides! (Unders on 5.5 in the NHL are typically lined at like -250 or something like that). I beat him so bad that he had to stop taking action and could only pay me on a weekly payment plan. A lot of these guys were very slow to cut me off because they literally have never cut someone off from winning too much in their lives. I don't even think they thought it was possible. When you're an old-school phone bookie, all you're really doing is chasing people around for money that they owe you. EVERYONE loses to you. Everyone. The idea that someone could be a winning player isn't anywhere remotely on their radar. They just think that you're getting lucky and you'll give it back eventually. Jon eventually squared up with me and was really interested in what the hell I was doing. He was actually kind of sharp. He'll come back into play later.
Next up was an older guy that one of my friends worked with at a car dealership. (I got a few accounts this way. Car dealership guys were some of the absolute softest bookies I ever came across. And, to be honest, some of the stupidest guys I ever met). This guy was no different. I didn't have him long at all, maybe only a month, but I remember distinctly he gave out a CFB line of Alabama +6 when the market was +2. He paid me no problem though and passed me off to another, bigger bookie. The car guy was very small time.
This other bigger time bookie was the real deal. I was moving up the ranks fairly quickly, now that I think about it. This guy, we'll call 'A.C.', was the first real-deal, respectable, old school type bookie that I came across. I had to meet him in this seedy, dark little bar in the middle of the day and I remember he took my drivers license and copied down my name and address for me to get the account. I wasn't scared at all though, I actually liked it. It showed me he was serious and I probably wouldn't have to worry about getting stiffed. He looked the part, too; pretty much exactly what you'd expect a real old school bookie from New England to look like. Big, scary looking, tattoos. The kind of guy who never ran 'because he didn't have to move fast for anyone'. He was the former head of security for a huge Boston rock band and he looked exactly like that and booking were his jobs. I beat him up pretty good and he was sharper than most so he knew to cut me off. I took a little bit of a gamble the last time we were to meet and I tried to turn him dirty. This was my first time attempting this. I told him something like 'you've seen what I can do, I do this full time, if you can get me accounts you can have a percentage of my weekly action.' It took some coaxing and explaining but he eventually agreed to try it out and off we went. We worked together like that for years, him getting me accounts and me betting. Having a guy like that out there collecting for me was a goldmine. I knew I'd never get stiffed. I still remember the very last time we met, he owed me a good chunk. As he paid me he said 'a lot of guys would have kept this.' He was a good dude and that really was a great partnership to have, especially early on. Eventually thought we burned through everyone he knew and it fizzled out.
Another guy I had around this time was a similar guy to A.C. but not nearly as scary looking. 'Jim' was another guy I met through Jay. He was an older guy with a family and was fairly high up in the ecosystem. He had agents under him who will come into play later, but for some reason I don't remember, I dealt with Jim directly. And to this day, I will say that this guy had the softest accounts I ever got in my life. Barely any parlay restrictions, props completely divorced from reality (and tons of them), big moves on local games, whacky team totals, you name it. And he was solid in that I didn't have to worry about getting paid. I destroyed this guy and he kicked me out, but I kept finding ways to get back on his accounts. This was the only time I ever came close to really getting in trouble with these guys. I went through someone else, probably Jay, and got back onto one of his accounts through an agent of his.
This guy was a real wanna-be. He looked the part but he was one of those guys that seemed to think that looking the part was the most important aspect of it all. He was clueless though and he let me stay on way longer than he should have. This was the guy that tried to copy my correlated parlays into his own account, and when they rejected them, he finally figured it all out. I got stiffed on the last week and that was actually the main event that led me to move to Las Vegas. I felt like I had out-grown the whole PPH world, which was a badly misguided idea in retrospect. Anyway, I made a big stink about getting stiffed that last week and some threats went back and forth. There was talks of 'sit-downs' and 'the mob' but it was all nonsense. One of the biggest lessons I took from all this is that these guys are mostly all phonies. They've seen Goodfellas and The Sopranos and honestly, that's about it. They didn't even understand bookmaking, really. That wasn't a great situation though and it's funny looking back at how ballsy/stupid I was for a naive, still really green kid.
Up next is the one and only woman to enter the fray, 'Kay'. I was trying to bang friendly with this girl who knew what I did and apparently knew some kids in a neighboring town who took action. I got an account from them with her as the de-facto agent. And this went horribly. They cut me off a couple months into betting with them even though I was down! I guess they had a clue what they were doing and saw what I was betting and decided they didn't want my action anymore. In the world of PPH betting, this is a no-no. It's the equivalent to hitting and running in poker. It's not 'against the rules' but it's frowned upon. This was bad because it made me look stupid to Kay who thought I was some sports betting savant and who I told was about to make a bunch of money. But the worst part was that I had made a few big MLB future bets on this account. When they cut me off they obviously changed my password so that I couldn't access the account anymore. It was right at the start of the season, too. So they cut me off, I'm pissed but whatever, I move on. Months and months later I hear from Kay that suddenly I owe these guys money. The futures bets settled and they lost. This was another sticky situation. It was a pretty clear freeroll to me. If the futures had won I would have NEVER heard from them again. I wouldn't have even known as I wasn't keeping track of everything the way I do now. But even if I did they would not have paid me. They pretty much said as much. I didn't want to pay and again there was some back and forth, veiled threats. I couldn't really explain it to Kay though and if I didn't pay it would make me look really bad. She knew a lot of the same people as me. I tried to negotiate to pay only a chunk of it but they wouldn't hear it. I ended up paying them and still to this day this whole situation irks me. It's the only time I was sort of 'had' like that in my career.
Not everyone I came across was a bookie/agent, though. Later on, I started meeting and partnering with fellow sharps and would give them accounts I couldn't use, or sometimes share them. One guy I dealt with was this weird guy I 'met' online. He seemed to be the real deal and was apparently a guy who could beat straights. I was always looking for a guy like this to share accounts with because the biggest red flag for my betting was that it was almost 100% props. Having a guy bet straights on an account of mine would provide me some cover at least, plus I had a piece of his action too. But man did this guy turn out to be a dud. When we first started talking about sharing accounts, he kept going on and on about me not copying his bets. This was his big thing, by far. He did not want me copying his bets. I had no problem with it as I didn't plan on doing that at all but man was he paranoid. He ended up being a pain in the ass and just took loss after fucking loss. I don't really remember but I don't think he was even beating the closing line most of the time. I know edges are a lot smaller on straight bets and you can easily run bad for weeks, if not months, but you combine that with how annoying he was and it just didn't work. I told him to back off a few accounts that I was afraid of getting stiffed on a couple times and he lost his mind. And he would not stop accusing me of copying his plays, which were getting killed. It was really strange and I was happy to get rid of him.
Another sharp I worked with was a guy I 'met' on the old forums. This one went a little bit better. This was actually really early on, before I even knew what correlated parlays were. I let him use one of the super soft accounts I got from Jim. This sharp told me he would bet straights and I'd use the account for props. What he was doing though was betting hockey correlated parlays, and not even NHL ones. This was one of the first times I had even heard of/seen CP's. He was on one of the accounts when everything went tits up when the wanna-be guy cut me off and stiffed me for the last week. Some of that money was owed to the sharp. I didn't cover it though which I technically should have. He had won a ton though up until that and he was fairly understanding. This was when I was just starting out and if that happened today I would have covered it. I thought that he kind of took a shot at me though. He knew what he was betting and he knew that I really didn't. If you're hammering away at obscure KHL correlated parlays and are way up, you really can't be too shocked when you get cut off and stiffed on the last week. He left the partnership with more money than when he started so all in all it was fine, though I will admit it wasn't my finest moment. If he had to go back in time though, he would definitely have still taken the accounts. The PPH world can be messy.
The funniest/weirdest account/agent I ever dealt with was this guy 'Keno-Bill' I met through Jay. I talked about him in one of my older posts but not in great detail. Jay had an account with this new guy Keno Bill. I saw the account and was absolutely licking my chops. I wanted my own though, I think this was when Jay was starting to get sloppy. Jay set up a meeting for us and I walked into this little hole in the wall dive bar where this guy Bill ran the Keno games. (By the way, Keno is maybe the single worst possible game you can gamble on. The house edge is somewhere in the 30% range. Never, ever play Keno). I can still remember walking in there and seeing him for the first time. He didn't see me though, so I sat there and watched him a little bit, trying to get as much info on him as I could. He was like the mayor of the place, chatting everyone up, friendly but a little full of himself. Perfect. One random thing I still remember; while I was watching him waiting for an opening to approach him, I saw him blow his nose and get boogers all over his hand. When he met we had to shake hands and I remember feeling like I had radioactive material on my hand. We chatted for a bit and he gave me an account and on the way out I booked it into the bathroom to wash my hands. I can still picture the old dusty arcade game right near the bathroom. It's weird the stuff you remember. This account ended up being an absolute goldmine, maybe the best I ever had. The account itself wasn't particularly soft, for those days anyway, but he let me bet forEVER. I couldn't believe how long he let me stay on there. And he couldn't hide either as he was posted up at that keno place all the time, so I wasn't worried about getting stiffed. This was also when I got the idea of getting a percentage back on losses. I had a bad stretch starting out, losing something like a month or more in a row on this account. And I paid him every week no problem. Once I heard of the percentage-off deal, I approached him. I said something like 'I have another account and the guy is offering me 15% off my weekly losses. I really like your account though so if you can match it, I'll stay with you'. He must have thought I was a whale because he ended up giving me 20% off of weekly losses. If you know anything about betting, you know how absurd that is. I could be a break even or a slight loser and still come out way ahead. Well in the months that followed, I absolutely crushed him. Week after week. Even the rare losing weeks were softend with the 20% rebate. Every week I thought for sure I'd go to log in on a Monday and the account would be closed. But it didn't happen for a long time. Finally, when it did, some real hijinx ensued. One day, after another huge week, I go to log in and the account is off. Bill is not responding to my calls and he still owes me a good chunk. I'm going crazy, calling different people, trying to get a hold of him when I suddenly get a call from a random number. It's Keno Bill's boss, the head bookie. Apparently he had been away on vacation for the last month and went crazy when he got home, seeing how much I had won. He kept giving me the sob story about how Bill was now buried in make up and 'wasn't going too good'. He was incensed at me for winning. And he had a wicked feminine voice with a lisp and everything, and he kept talking about his mother? I guess they lived together and ran the book together or something. It was surreal. At one point he said something like 'ya know, back in my day, when a guy won a bunch in a week he'd tip his agent 100 bucks.' And I shot back 'I lost a ton in the first couple months and no one ever 'tipped' me.' And he said exactly, and I'll never forget this in his weirdo Mark Harris voice 'ok ok ok, let us forget this and never speak of it again.' After we hung up, he called me back and started ranting again ABOUT me. He thought he was calling Bill and called me by mistake! Still to this day I kick myself for cutting him off and not letting him go on, just to see what he had to say. I ended up never seeing or hearing from either guy ever again. Keno-Bill disappeared from the bar he worked at with the last couple weeks worth of money he owed me.
I had another car dealership old guy who was a little bit of a dummy but was more solid than the usual car guy. We got along pretty good and once he cut me off, I flipped him into a dirty agent. He got me accounts for a while until it dried up. He was amazed and what I did.
Eventually me and 'Jon' hooked back up and he started getting me lots of really good accounts. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was going through a tough addiction thing and apparently owed money all over the place. He started getting sloppy and started shorting me here and there, rolling it over until the next week. One week I won big and poof, he disappeared. I tracked him down and got a little bit out of him plus an excruciating payment plan that fizzled out. That turned into a bit of a sticky situation, too. Sometimes guys will just be down BAD. They owe money to all kinds of people, they can't make any money and even when they do, they can't hold on to it. So what do you do in a situation like that, exactly? It's easy to think and talk about what you'd do, but reality is different. He wasn't ducking me, he was just beyond broke. This kid was my friend at one point, I was doing really good back then and he was down and out. So how hard did I really want to lean on him? At one point he had his mom giving me money for him. That didn't feel good, even though it was my money. I got what I could and moved on which is typically what happens in situations like that. It's not like the movies. 'We're not makin a Western here.'
Last one I'll get into here, just because it was so weird. At the very beginning of all of this, before I sort of switched teams, I ran a book with Jay, taking action from absolute deadbeats. One of our customers was this group of Albanian guys that Jay knew from some bar. I think it was their bar, actually. They were always just hanging around, all day, every day. They seemed like absolute whales and we were happy to take their action. The way they bet was bizarre and to this day I still don't understand what happened exactly. During the MLB season, they used to take the four or five biggest dogs on the board and max parlay them. Like, every single day, for months. And they CRUSHED us. They weren't getting good numbers on the teams and our parlay odds were normal, if not slightly worse. We actually put a max win on parlays and they would still bet them, even though their wins were capped. So we were getting way the best of it, or so it would seem. They just won, week after week. It made no sense. I guess it was just a good streak but man, I don't know. Eventually we gave them to another bookie we knew and they won a HUGE amount the first week he took them. Like, a really big amount, way bigger than we could have paid. I don't even know what we would have done to be honest. My life could have taken a whole different turn if we waited one more week to cut them off. (Fun/scary little nugget: Jay knew roughly where and when they were going to meet to settle up for the huge week, and Jay and one of his friends floated the idea of robbing them. Thank god I heard about it and talked him out of it, not that I think they would have actually gone through with it. Jay got weird towards the end. Stay away from pills, my friends.)
That's about it for today. This is only a snapshot, really. I've had many other partnerships that were a lot less dramatic. A lot of them are just silky smooth, barely any bumps in the road. Those are the best and mostly where I'm at now. The ones that blow up or are bizarre are the fun ones to think and write about though. Nowadays it's a lot less frantic and I barely deal with anyone anymore. I'm always in the game though.
Thanks for reading, check back soon!
