Billy Walters is a man of many stripes. Recently released from federal prison after having been convicted on various charges of insider trading, Walters (now 73) was and in my respects still is, considered the greatest sports bettor who ever lived.
His is a story of having over the course of nearly four decades bet more money and with greater success than any other bettor in the entire history of sports betting. Throughout the course of his sports betting career, he’s bets have raked in literally hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. Countless bookies and bettors have tried cracking his secret code, hoping to duplicate for themselves even just a fraction of his success.
Every last one of them failed. Dismally.
Billy The Beater Of All Odds
The really interesting thing about William T. “Billy” Walters is that he constantly beat the odds just about everywhere – not just sports betting odds. Billy beat the stock market, he beat real estate at its own game, he even did more than just a once over on criminal proceedings. He beat every conceivable odd under the sun and to the extent that right up until his federal incarceration, Billy owned an entire fleet of car dealerships, more than just a couple of elite golf courses, a private jet and an entire arrangement of multi-million dollar luxury homes in rich-man valleys like Cabo San Lucas and Palm Desert.
Billy never let anyone in on his secret to sports betting success – not even once. He was however quite open about the nature of his humble beginnings and upbringing and would speak openly about his early life growing up in rural Kentucky. Born to a young teenage mother, Billy ended up living with his grandmother, who raised him until she died. Billy was only 12 when his grandmother and primary caregiver passed away. After having only just managed to make ends meet by hook and by crook, Billy Walters eventually headed for Vegas.
It Started In Vegas, Baby
And it would become Vegas to eventually mark a turn in the road for Billy Walters. Once in Sin City, he met up with the people who would eventually help turn his love of gambling and betting into a full-on career.
The year was 1980 and Billy had met up with Michael Kent and Ivan Mindlin, the two men who would eventually go on to form the Computer Group. The men had devised a system effective at applying algorithms to sports betting with super successful outcomes. Michael Kent was after all a man with a solid background in nuclear submarine technology.
It wasn’t too long after he accepted employment working the bet lines for Kent and Mindlin that Billy emerged a 100% member of the Las Vegas elite. And even today, fresh out of prison, many regard Billy Walters to be exactly that: the cream of sports betting’s elite.
Even to this day, Walters continues to stick to his story: his success in business and in betting is the result of an acumen for accurately analysing risk. Billy Walters has never – at least not to his own mind – veered from the straight and narrow. Not in betting and not in life.
