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I made just under $200,000 betting sports in 2 months. Here's my story...
February 28th, 2019
11:22 AM
I’m sitting here with 59.374 bitcoin in my e-wallet and I’m slightly aggravated. Not because I’m unfortunate and ungrateful to have that many (59.374 at this time is equivalent to approximately $223,000), but because every time the price of bitcoin drops by $100, I’m losing about $6,000. And over the course of the last two days, the price had dropped roughly $250 from its peak. I had literally just lost $15,000 for withdrawing at the wrong time. I didn’t want to ‘invest’ in BTC. It just so happened that the easiest way to get paid out from my online sportsbook was thru bitcoin.
Many ponder how one gets introduced into the degenerate world of sports betting. The following is a collection of pieces from my story, ages 16-27. Some of it is about sports betting, some of it is just about my life. I’m not trying to bore you with my life story, but hopefully it allows you guys to understand me a bit better.
I’m writing this from Saigon, Vietnam in the living room of my Anh Trai. This is Vietnamese, it means ‘older brother’. Technically he’s not my older brother, we’re actually just good friends; but in Vietnamese culture, you can call someone ‘anh trai’ if their relationship with you is similar to that of an older brother. I actually don’t have any blood brothers or sisters; I’m an only child.
I met Anh Trai four months ago through a friend of a friend. I remember that night we had began drinking at Bui Vien street, which is a famous backpacker street hosting loud music and a party-like atmosphere. Afterwards our group of friends went to a karaoke room to continue drinking and there we were able to bond a bit further. When I met him in that karaoke room, he encouraged me to stay over at his apartment building which had two bedrooms and was very spacious, during my time in Vietnam. Anh Trai lived in a building called Wilton Tower on a high-rise apartment on the 20th floor. I was very interested because at the time, because I was paying $1500/month for a luxury condo at Vinhomes located in the Binh Thanh District to have the same accommodations and standard of living I was used to back in the States. He didn’t even want to collect rent money from me, simply just wanted company and had an extra empty room.
Before I moved in, he asked me a few questions to make sure I wasn’t a shady foreigner.
“Do you use cocaine or any other drugs?” … Back in college, I tried a little bit but that was it.
“Are you a loud person? Do you stay up late at night?” … I mean, I was going to have my girlfriend stay over every now and then, but I didn’t think we’d be that disruptive.
“Do you have any cocaine or any other drugs?” … I didn’t have any, but he said I could move in anyways.
I had bought a one way ticket from Seattle, WA to Ho Chi Minh, VN in September 2018 and wasn’t exactly sure how long I was planning to stay. Now it’s almost March 2019 and I’m still here. It’s not like I’ve been in Saigon, Vietnam for the entire duration. Some highlights were taking a trip to Thailand and visiting Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Phi Phi Island. I also went to Cambodia and visited a casino that also had a cockfighting ring. I proceeded to lose 50 million Vietnam Dong there (equivalent to just over $2000). Picking 1 correctly out of 6 chickens... those games had to be rigged. I’m sure they were injecting my chicken with some kind of virus pre-match once they locked in my bets. I was most definitely a high roller by their standards, betting each rooster about 10 million VND while I saw others mostly trying 200K-500K VND. I travelled with my best friend from America through all of this, but he returned back to Seattle right before Christmas.
I can’t say for sure, but I think I was 16 or 17 years old when I made my first sports bet. $110 to win $100. It was the Chicago Bulls at home, but I can’t remember the team they were playing against. The Bulls were a favorite, seven and a half points to be precise. I remember Derrick Rose making clutch play after clutch play driving in for reverse layups, hitting step-back 3’s in the late 4th quarter to push the Bulls to a comfortable margin of victory and securing the win. I was watching this game in a local cardroom/bar in Shoreline, WA while playing billiards. I had used a fake ID to enter this joint. My bookie gave me a crisp c-note as D.Rose was running out the final seconds of regulation as the game concluded. I bought a Rose jersey with the money.
It was about the time I discovered online poker and was spending most of my hours grinding online. When I was 16 years old, I asked my dad to allow me to use his credit card to deposit $250. I told him I’d give him $300 cash for the hassle, so why wouldn’t he say no?! (My parents was separated at this time and I lived with my mom. Dad was the more gentle parental figure between the two. It was easy to hide things from my mom.) Often she would see me playing “card games” on the computer but never came to the realization that it was for real money. About six months later, a cashier’s came was mailed to our home in the amount of $7500 from a company named Pokerstars. The return address on the envelope was from Isle of Man (50 points to the reader if you can tell me where that’s located!) Obviously I had done pretty well to run up such a large sum, a lot of ‘penetrate you’ money for a 16 year old anyways. My mom cashed the check for me, but I never saw any of the funds. She told me it was going to be placed in my “college fund” and I’d thank her in the future. My mom had always been very financially smart and organized.
Fast forward a couple of years to about the time I’m 19 years old, I had an online account with a bookmaker located in Costa Rica, two live bookies that would settle with me on a weekly basis, and also another online book that strictly used bitcoin. For the book located in Costa Rica, I was making deposits via ** at the nearest Albertson’s to my home in Seattle, WA. This book in particular was providing games at (-105) instead of the usual (-110) and any gambler can tell you what a drastic difference that is. It’s funny, I remember how the book would give you instructions to send money to a random given name, typically it was like Fernando Javier Rodriguez located in Manila, Philippines. So I’d scrounge around, save up a few hundred dollars and send it to Fernando. I recall doing this 20-30 times. They all had the same result with a $0 in my online account balance a few days later. I had a few thousand dollars in my bank account, mostly leftover from my part-time job in high school at the community library. I was the one that put the books away after you finished reading them.
Sometime during the end of my freshman year at the University of Washington, I remember finally catching a heater and running a sports roll up to around $15,000. It was my first run at a real bankroll, finally breaking 5 digits. When you first break into the ten thousands, you realize you can have a few more splurges, perks, and can take a few more shots to get even higher. You aren’t really that excited, but you’re just a bit more comfortable. You’re not excited because you actually have an upgrade in lifestyle, but rather just secure knowing that you could buy things if you needed to having that extra cushion. Most professional-level sports bettors wager 1-3% of their bankroll per bet. This is called a unit. The maximum unit (bet size) should not exceed three percent of your bankroll. So technically, I wasn’t supposed to be betting more than $450 per game at this point.
I was betting $2500 per game at this point.
I remember betting so many over/unders, 2nd half spreads, full game totals and being on the right side of the variance often winning by half a point. It felt like sports betting was my secondary source of income now, and I loved it. I wasn’t a big spender by any means, but by sports betting, I was researching data no one else was looking at, applying the analytical use of my brain, and competing with myself to win. After depositing $250-$1000 with Fernando Javier Rodriguez so many times before (hell, with our paper trail, you’d think he was my second-cousin that lived abroad), it finally felt like I had recovered all that money and he was just holding onto it for me. Sports betting wasn’t about making money, picking the right team to win, or being able to say “I told you so” after the games concluded… it was about not losing.
The 2017 World Series of Poker was the first live circuit tournament I ever attended. I rented a pretty big house house with 7 other poker friends just off the strip and had decided to stay in Las Vegas for the entire summer. My friends were all professional poker players, grinding away, trying to hit that one big score during the summer. If they entered a tournament with a $1100 buyin, with a field of 1000-2000 players, it was possible to win a few hundred thousand dollars for 1st place. But the chances were small with tough fields and poker players progressively getting better all-around. Needless to say, I spent more time in the sportsbook than at the poker tables.
The summer turned out to be a pretty good one. I made about $25,000 playing tournaments and cash. I was dabbling as high as $40/$80 NL in the live game. It was pretty neat because I sat along stars that I usually watched play on TV. This was the first time I saw them in person, let alone play at the same table. I was sitting side-by-side with Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, and Doyle Brunson.
But MLB season was in its prime during the summer, and I was a huge baseball follower. I ended up making about $100,000 betting almost strictly baseball by the end of the WSOP. I continued to move up, as I started to win more, the bet sizing went up. I started dabbling with some larger sized bets (my bankroll management skills still weren’t mastered).
All those countless $250 and $500 deposits in my teens were starting to piece together and become experience points that helped me make better predictions now. I was starting to look deeper into matchups and searching for lines that seemed off. I don’t want to go too far into how I analyzed matchups, but the key to successful betting is finding value, reflecting a probability that is less to the actual probability of the outcome occurring. If I was choosing an underdog getting +250 to win straight up, but I thought the actual chance of that occurring was 2 to 1, I’d be taking that team all day.
Towards the end of 2018, I started taking bigger shots and putting more of my bankroll at risk. Soon $10k wasn’t enough, it had to be $20k to get my fix, and then $30k per game. I was winning more than I lost, and this time there was no turning back. My drive to “not lose” was getting stronger. The games were becoming more real. In February 2019, in one week alone, I made $110,563 over the course of seven days. When I bet games, my wagers were immediately sending the spread or over/under a point in the other direction; I was starting to become an influence.
If you got this far reading, I hope a few pieces were able to speak to you or at least you found it entertaining. Writing like this helps me as well. I don’t know quite what I want in life yet and I’m far away from having everything figured out. Lately I’ve just been bouncing between America and Asia and making the most of my 20’s. I don’t know what’s best for my life or career at the moment, but I’m trying to make the best decisions day by day.
I love sports betting, I’m a people person. I love chatting with other people about sports or the analytical side. SBR has provided me alot of good reads, good analysis, and interesting betting info.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to chit chat with you guys. Take care.
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