"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis

Summary

Pablo Torre Finds Out:

"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis (Nov 6, 2025)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Pablo Torre sits down with Haralabos “Bob” Vulgaris, legendary NBA sports bettor, former Director of Quantitative Research & Development for the Dallas Mavericks, and current owner of Spanish soccer club CD Castellón. They dive deep into the roots and realities of sports gambling—especially in basketball—discussing how Vulgaris made his fortune, the current NBA gambling scandal, and what legalized sports betting means for the integrity of the game. Both dissect why prop bets and information sharing have made the NBA uniquely vulnerable, debate the philosophy and ethics of advertising gambling, and brainstorm regulatory fixes to preserve fair play.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Bob Vulgaris’ Journey: From Skycap to NBA Quant

• Who is Bob Vulgaris?
  • Prairie roots, became the most successful NBA bettor of all time (as dubbed by ESPN), transitioned to front office executive for the Dallas Mavericks, now a football club owner.
  • “No, I was the most successful NBA better of all time. Let's just get it clear.” — Bob Vulgaris (03:57)
• Making a Fortune
  • Vulgaris made an average of $8–10 million/year betting NBA for 17 years, long before sports betting was legalized in the U.S.
    • Used offshore books, phone lines, intermediaries.
    • “I probably made 10 million or so a year every year, not counting like expenses and salaries… Average was like about 8 to 10, I would say.” (04:57)
  • No betting slips or easy paper trail: “This world right now is so far removed [from what I did]. Like the levels I had to go to…” (05:58)

The Art and Grind of High-Stakes Betting

• Pattern Recognition and Data Gathering
  • Vulgaris’s edge was obsessive attention to detail and pattern recognition, especially pre-advanced analytics era.
  • Archived VHS tapes, compiled his own granular data before play-by-play stats became public.
  • “If I have one talent in life, it's probably pattern recognition.” (07:32)
• The Beard Network
  • Casinos and books eventually barred him; he used “beards”—fronts for bets.
  • Notable “beards”: Floyd Mayweather (“perfect” in theory, difficult in practice), Dan Bilzerian (via his brother’s UK account).
  • “What you want for the perfect beard is… someone who looks like they have more money than they know what to do with, and they didn’t get it gambling. Ideally… someone who’s already lost money gambling or looks like a banana.” (12:51)
  • Win shared with beards: 50/50 or on a “free roll” (upside only). Even with famous beards, sportsbooks would eventually sniff out winning patterns.

The Big Edge: NBA Bench Orientation and Totals Betting

• The Hidden NBA Rule and Bob’s Secret
  • Bob’s major edge: Discovered how away teams’ choice of basket, and having their defense in front of their own bench in the second half, dramatically affected first half/second half scoring trends—especially for teams like Utah, New Jersey, Wizards (see 21:42–25:26).
    • “Almost all of the Utah Jazz games when they played on the road specifically, were going under in the first half and over in the second half… So I started just doing database work… The pace is the same. So it's an efficiency thing.” (21:42)
  • Massive market inefficiency:
    • Books set lines too high for first halves, too low for second halves; Vulgaris exploited that for millions.
    • “The right line should be 88 and a half… they were underweighting the impact.” (26:28)
    • “I don’t know, like 40, 50, 60 million [made off that edge]… It didn’t matter how much money I made. I made so much more than I should have…” (27:28)

Sportsbooks, Limiting Winners, and the American Betting Boom

• House Always Wins
  • Sportsbooks limit or ban anyone who demonstrates a real edge. “It is the ultimate disgusting, parasitic upper business in America… they’re selling gambling to the masses, and even if you win, they won’t allow you to keep betting.” (09:07)
• The Modern App Era
  • Contrast with today’s “click and bet” environment, where edges are thinner and losses likelier for the public.

Insider Knowledge, Injury Reporting, and NBA Integrity

• Vulgaris at the Mavericks & Adam Silver’s Blind Spots
  • Revealed a confrontation with the NBA commissioner about the LeBron “broken hand” cover-up in the 2018 Finals.
    • “How are you going to enforce [integrity]?... Someone has information… just doesn’t seem right.” (31:48)
    • “The ability to control that information from a gambling standpoint… There’s always going to be insider trading.” (34:03)
• Recent Scandals
  • Discussed the current federal indictments (eg: Damon Jones allegedly feeding private info), and why prop bet/availability betting is uniquely dangerous and easy to detect—but also the tip of the iceberg.
  • “It is very difficult to bet a lot of money in those props… any amount changes the market, it’s obvious… We were very fortunate that Rosier allegedly chose this method. Not everyone will be as foolish as he was.” (36:58)

Poker Parallels and Private Game Dangers

• Poker’s Cheating Risk
  • High-stakes private poker rife with cheating (marked decks, rigged shufflers, hidden cameras).
  • Vulgaris only plays games where he knows who's running them: “I would always want to take a deck home with me… want to make sure the deck doesn’t have invisible ink…” (39:18)
  • “If a game runner is inviting me to a game and doesn’t want a percentage of me, I immediately am suspicious…”(41:42)
  • Example: Antoine Walker showing up at Bellagio with a literal trash bag full of cash. (43:31)

Big Picture: Legalized Gambling and the NBA’s Cooked Incentives

• Vulgaris’s Critique—Too Much Gambling, Too Many Ads

  • “It’s completely antithetical to a functioning society to promote this to young men in particular. It’s predatory in nature. It’s highly addictive. It’s just a sense of financial nihilism.” (46:03)
  • Proposes treating gambling advertisements like cigarettes—totally barred from sports telecasts, no marketing to children.
  • “If your only attraction to the sport is the fact that you can gamble on it, there’s a problem with your product.” (46:41)

• Torre’s Counter

  • Prefers “sunlight as disinfectant” approach: regulated, transparent, with honest disclosure of harm akin to European cigarette warnings.
  • Vulgaris remains skeptical: “People just click… it’s not going to matter to them because at the end of the day, they have an impulse to bet…” (48:43)

• Dual Tanking: Gambling & Draft Incentives

  • NBA’s biggest integrity crisis may be that it’s impossible to distinguish “tanking for draft picks” from “tanking for gambling”—both incentivize intentional underperformance.
  • “Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position.” (50:06)
  • “It’s just not… not pristine. It’s not even close…” (50:53)
  • “You’d need to change the rules so that the incentives are not causing people to tank games.” (52:13)

• Practical Fixes: Hire Quants, End the Draft Lottery

  • Vulgaris prescribes hiring quantitative experts to monitor performance anomalies with NBA data (53:21).
  • Advocates ending the draft lottery: “Make the draft completely random… do the wheel… or make all rookies free agents with a hard cap.” (54:57)
  • “That solves the tanking. And then you still have the issue of these bananas who want to, like, you know, go and rig poker games when they're making 20, 30 million dollars. That's a separate conversation.” (56:43)

• Transparency and De-Marketing Gambling

  • Remove betting tickers, ban betting company partnerships with leagues/networks; in short, unentangle sports from gambling marketing.
  • “Why don't we start with the ticker? Let's just remove the ticker at the bottom… maybe networks don't own gambling companies…” (57:51)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | | --------- | ------- | ----- | | 03:57 | Bob Vulgaris | “No, I was the most successful NBA better of all time. Let's just get it clear.” | | 05:58 | Bob Vulgaris | “This world [of easy app betting] is so far removed. Like the levels I had to go to bet on SP, to get accounts, to find people, cash in duffel bags in Canada… so different than people who are downloading an app and clicking buttons.” | | 10:05 | Pablo Torre | “The reason you have to use a beard, basically a disguise, someone to put the bet in for you, is because if you walk in with your face–they're not going to let you do it.” | | 12:51 | Bob Vulgaris | “What you want for the perfect beard is… someone who looks like they have more money than they know what to do with, and they didn’t get it gambling.” | | 21:42 | Bob Vulgaris | “[Re: Jazz games] Almost all of the Utah Jazz games when they played on the road specifically, were going under in the first half and over in the second half… I wonder if there’s other teams that have similar tendencies.” | | 26:32 | Bob Vulgaris | “Nobody had a clue how big… [the bench orientation effect] is.” | | 27:28 | Bob Vulgaris | “I don’t know, like 40, 50, 60 million [made off that edge]… It didn’t matter how much money I made. I made so much more money than I should have…” | | 31:48 | Bob Vulgaris | “How are you going to enforce [integrity]?... Someone has information… just doesn’t seem right.” | | 36:58 | Bob Vulgaris | “The player props are very easy to identify and monitor for several reasons… We were very fortunate that Rosier allegedly chose this method. Not everyone will be as foolish as he was.” | | 46:03 | Bob Vulgaris | “Legalize gambling should not be in the way the manner it is right now in the USA… It’s predatory in nature. It’s highly addictive. It’s just a sense of financial nihilism.” | | 50:06 | Bob Vulgaris | “Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position.” | | 54:57 | Bob Vulgaris | “Just make the draft completely 100% random… Or, make every rookie a free agent with a hard cap.” | | 57:51 | Bob Vulgaris | “Why don't we start with the ticker? Let's just remove the ticker at the bottom. Maybe networks don't own gambling companies… Like, how about someone just wants to watch sports without being inundated?” |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Bob’s backstory & betting feats (03:15, 04:57, 07:32, 09:07)
• Beard stories: Floyd Mayweather, Dan Bilzerian (10:41, 13:27)
• Secret NBA scoring edge (bench orientation) (21:42–27:15)
• Poker cheating analogies (39:18–45:22)
• Legalized betting problems & advertising critique (46:03–47:07)
• Tanking, incentives & NBA’s “cooked” integrity (50:06, 52:13)
• Practical fixes: quants, end the draft, free agency instead (53:21–57:51)

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Episode Tone

• Irreverent: Sarcastic, self-deprecating, and at times darkly funny.
• Technical but Accessible: Bob goes into detail, but Pablo ensures concepts are clearly explained.
• Cynical yet Motivated: Bob’s a reformer, but deeply skeptical about the willingness of powerbrokers to act in good faith.
• Candid and Unfiltered: Both are open about the flaws, dangers, and paradoxes inherent in both their business and the NBA itself.

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Conclusion

This episode pulls back the curtain on the hard realities and unresolved incentives in the gambling-sports-media complex, as seen by the sharpest mind to ever beat the NBA legally (and, as Bob makes clear, often quite illegally by today’s standards). While Pablo argues for sunlight and honest regulation, Bob insists that the current system—driven by profit, addictiveness and broken incentives—undermines the very soul of sporting competition. Both agree: as long as tanking and prop markets remain this easy to game, and as long as the NBA weds itself to gambling money, the integrity of the league is, well, “so cooked.”

If you want a window into the real-world, high-stakes chess game happening just beneath the surface of every NBA game, don’t miss this conversation.

Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Toure and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position right after this ad.

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[Bob Vulgaris]

You look the same.

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[Bob Vulgaris]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

I just want to point out, for people who aren't watching on YouTube, though, that is a fake background Bob Vas.

[Bob Vulgaris]

It is, yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

You're in an undisclosed geographic location. What do you got? What do you got behind you?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, this is my office and there's a bunch of art that's, like, stacked against the wall or not hung yet. So it just looks a lot better this way.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, you're just embarrassed. You're embarrassed to show me what your actual residence is. Like those books, the books behind you. You haven't read those books, those fake books.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I feel like that's kind of standard, isn't it, to have a bunch of books as, like, trophies. People hang their books like trophies in most places, so.

[Pablo Torre]

That's right. I was hoping you would have, you know, like, betting slips framed in your. You know. You ever save those? Do you even have betting slips when you were working?

[Bob Vulgaris]

I never. I wasn't in the betting slip. I mean, I wasn't around for the betting SL slip era. I think I had phone calls and yeah, dealing with third party intermediaries for the most part.

[Pablo Torre]

So I should just quickly explain here that the reason I am on this call right now is because of the episode we published last week about NBA betting and these poker games that allegedly involve the Italian Mafia and also NBA players and coaches and more recently the FBI. Because while I've been thinking about this scandal and the federal government's concurrent pair of indictments, there is one person in specific I've been meaning to talk to about it. Someone I don't agree with on lots of issues, but someone whose secrets, whose perspective I always seek when it comes to these exact subjects. And so I asked this person to introduce himself on camera.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Bob Vulgaris, former professional sports better and now current owner of a second division Spanish football club, CD Castellan.

[Pablo Torre]

That's pretty good. Also wildly insufficient. Okay, what was your job with the Mavericks, Bob? What was your job title in the NBA?

[Bob Vulgaris]

I was the former director of quantitative research and development, whatever that meant.

[Pablo Torre]

It meant you like me talk to Mark Cuban a lot.

[Bob Vulgaris]

You probably talked to Mark Cuban more than I did. To be fair, Mark's a big texter. He's a big text guy.

[Pablo Torre]

You are also, according to both, I would say, historical record and legend, one of the most successful NBA betters of all time.

[Bob Vulgaris]

No, I was the most successful NBA better of all time. Let's just get it clear.

[Pablo Torre]

And he's not wrong, by the way. ESPN called Bob in 2013, quote, the world's top NBA gambler, meaning that, yes, he is the only NBA better who became an NBA executive in large part because of his success betting. He also is a highly competitive poker player and now the owner and operator of that European soccer team that he mentioned in Spain. But what is crucial to establish here is that Bob Vulgaris got insanely rich off of gambling long before the U.S. supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in May 2018. Meaning that when Bob was becoming the guy that every legal sports gambler you know is now striving to be, there were no betting slips, no legal receipts for his millions to frame.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I mean, I did it for from 2000 to 2000, 17ish, 16ish, whatever. Probably made 10 million or so a year every year, not counting like expenses and salaries. But actual betting net like wins versus losses.

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Average was like about 8 to 10, I would say.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay, so for about how long? I'm trying to do the math.

[Bob Vulgaris]

17 years. Yeah, 17 years. 15. 17 years. Something like that. Too long. How about that?

[Pablo Torre]

But we're getting into very clearly the nine figure winnings territory is what we're talking about.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, I made a lot of money for sure.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah. Just like the trajectory of guy without money who is desperately trying to get some to guy who uses sports gambling, particularly on the NBA, to get more than he ever dreamed and now is in this position in front of this fake ass bookshelf in which you can survey the world that you kind of inspired on the Internet, people trying to be like you.

[Bob Vulgaris]

This isn't what I inspired though. This is, this is so far removed. I mean, I'm not to interrupt you, but this, this world right now is so far removed. Like the levels I had to go to bet on SP to get accounts to find people cash in duffel bags in Canada. Dealing with shady individuals and then later on in life dealing with, you know, VIPs who had access to large casino accounts is so different than people who are downloading an app and clicking buttons and using their credit card.

[Pablo Torre]

The way though, that you had to do it, put us in the timeline here. When did you place your first NBA bet? So we can get a sense of what you had to do from there.

[Bob Vulgaris]

So when I first started betting, to be clear, it was through offshore sportsbooks. So it was through Internet sports books or telephone, like 1, 800 numbers. But there would be like, you know, ads in Pro football weekly, some 1, 800 number. You'd go get a money order through Western Union and send it to some jabroni in the Caribbean named like Victor Sanchez or something. And then I graduated from that. And that was, I would say that continued for a very, very long period of time. Online casinos, online sports books that were not legal in America, but they were like great. They called them gray area until the World Sports Exchange guys got indicted. That was a big thing that happened. And then in addition to that, when I was in Canada, I was dealing with like local bookmakers.

[Pablo Torre]

But the idea that the MBA is the thing you're going to start putting these bets on such that you have a facility with it. What was the reason why you chose the mba and what was, if you were to diagnose it in retrospect, what was your competitive advantage? Why were you actually good at this?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, I mean, my competitive advantage is that I just have like a real, real good attention to detail when I'm doing something. And I probably am decent at pattern recognition. I think if I have one talent in life, it's probably pattern recognition. But I just started watching NBA Basketball because I was in Vegas at the time and it was one of the. I was under the age of 21 and it was one of the few places I could park myself in a casino without being bothered was in the sports book. And I remember I'd just sit there at the Stardust or the Caesar's palace and watch basketball that was on. I liked it and I developed an affinity for it and it wasn't actually good at it. And then I decided this is something that I really enjoyed. I somehow got satellite TV through the, those little dishes that came out and started watching a lot of NBA basketball and it became like something I was obsessed with. I loved it. I loved the sport.

[Pablo Torre]

You're trying to find patterns in all of these games and you're sifting through like granule, as granular data as you can get.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, I'm trying to collect as much data as possible. And in the time there wasn't a lot of data, there was the box score and that was about it.

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, in 1999, the NBA started publishing play by play data, which is a description of what happens on the court, including where the shots were taken, the location of the shots, who got the rebound, you know, time of possession, when the shot was taken, so you could get some detailed information. And that became more and more detailed. And I would say up until around 2016, that's all you had was play by play data. But what I was doing is I was watching a lot of basketball, recording a lot of games on vhs. I had like four VHS machines. I would record all the games. I like focusing on the west coast teams just because it was just easier. There was fewer games and it was later on in the evening. So I was able to focus more on those games. I found it just worked better for me. There was like. And I enjoyed watching like the Clippers, the Lakers, Golden State, etc, And so yeah, that's what I was doing, just collecting as much data as possible. I wasn't just like, you know, winging it and watching games with my friends. Like, like people think it's easy to bet on sports and it's not easy to bet on sports. You have to be able to win like, you know, roughly 53% just to break even on a straight wager. 52.38. I think something like that. And that adds up over time. The other part, I think that's interesting too, Pablo, is like, let's say you do do all that. This is the part that is really like, forget about, let's say you are Just good at it. And you have a talent and you're better than you know, you're better than you can. You can beat the sports books. Like you just can't win. That's the thing that people don't realize. They will not allow you to win. It is the ultimate disgusting, parasitic upper like business in America, I think, like this idea that they're selling gambling to the masses. And then you can't, even if you win, they won't even allow you to keep betting. They will limit you to bet.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh look, the whole. And I need people in the general audience to understand and appreciate this. The reason you have to use a beard, basically a disguise, someone to put the bet in for you because if you walk in with your face in your name, they're not going to let you do it. The reason they won't let you buy Vulgarists do it is because at some point you reveal to them in the course of your track record that you might actually have the ability to win money.

[Bob Vulgaris]

The moment you show an ability to win, you will be, you'll be limited and you'll be shown the door in.

[Pablo Torre]

The pre legalized gambling era, which is the era in which you're coming to have this success.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Who's the most famous person that you used as a beard?

[Bob Vulgaris]

I mean, the most famous person I use as a beard, but it only lasted for like an afternoon was Floyd Mayweather. But that was like literally it lasted for like an afternoon and a half.

[Pablo Torre]

What happened?

[Bob Vulgaris]

I mean, I don't know exactly what happened, but the guy who I got and put in touch with him, he sat next to me at a Miami Heat, funny enough playoff game and he like took an interest to the, with the person I was with and I was just, she was just a friend of mine. So I had no problem with him like getting her number and talking to her and whatever. We switched seats. So he was, she was sitting next to him at halftime. He asked me what I did and I told him and, and, and somehow we got in touch and then I put him, then there was, then he was in Vegas and a friend of mine who was a poker player funnily enough decided he was going to link up with Floyd's people in Vegas and give us, you know, we would give them the picks, he would bet them for us. And by the way, I'm sure Floyd Mayweather's bearding for other people. Like, I don't want to blow up his spot or whatever, but I'm, I would, he would be the perfect beard for, like, if you're, like, an amazing. Like, I don't know this to be the case, but I would. I would bet that. That there's a good chance that he was bearding for someone else. But he's very difficult to deal with, I will say that much. So my thing was, was I gave him a game that I wanted to bet. One game, we bet it, then we gave him the next game to bet. And it was. I forget what the team was, but let's just say it was Denver versus San Antonio. And we wanted to bet Denver. And he'd be like, no, no, I like San Antonio. I was like, okay, cool. But we like Denver. So you're. You know, we would like for you to bet Denver for us. Like, no, no, I. I think that's. I want to bet San Antonio. And I was like, okay, well, then why don't, you know, you just, like, bet Denver for me, and if you want, we can just bet against each other. Like, why don't we just bet against each other? No, no, I don't want to do that. You always win. I don't. I don'. That was how the conversation went down. And I was just like, yeah, I don't have time for this. And I was just. Basically, I just pulled the plug on the floor. He was not worth it.

[Pablo Torre]

With the premise, though. The premise of why Floyd is the perfect beard is parallel logic is because of that conversation.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

But it's the idea that the athlete. And this also has some resonance with the poker stuff, which we'll get to, but just the idea that there's a very famous person with disposable income for whom strategy is more of a theory than an actual practice.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, what you want for the perfect beard is. What you want is you want someone who looks like they have more money than they know what to do with it, and they didn't get it. Gambling. And ideally, what you want is someone who's already has a track record of losing money gambling or looks like a banana or looks like someone who's not very smart. Like, Dan Bilzerian was a beard of mine.

[Pablo Torre]

Wait, though. The Instagram guy?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, he was. He loved the cross.

[Pablo Torre]

Excuse me? That's how I know of Dan Bilzerian. Now he's. Now he's, I believe, perhaps the next Secretary of the Treasury. I don't know what Dan Bazerian's up to now, but he was. He's.

[Bob Vulgaris]

He's fighting his own battle, I think, is what he's doing, no matter what. Exactly.

[Pablo Torre]

Wait a Minute. So tell the Dan Bilzerian story. How does that happen?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Dan was, like, around in the poker. He. He showed up in poker. That's why I met Dan. In fact, if you read Dan's autobiography, I think I'm a character in the book. And I was like, do not use my name under any circumstances. I don't know what you're writing, but I don't want to be affiliated with this at all. And so I think there's a character in there that, like, knows all the angles and set up accounts. But yeah, so some. Somehow Dan got an account with bet365 in the UK through his brother. But, yes, that's what happened. So I met Dan in poker. He was hanging around the Bellagio. He was playing high stakes poker. He was around. You know, he's also someone who likes to make money, and we use that account to bet. That's just how it went down. So they thought Dan Balzerian was making the bets, but it was me or Dan's brother.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. How successful was that?

[Bob Vulgaris]

That account was good. I think. We won, like, we won a lot. We won like 10 to 15 million pounds before they quit us, I think. And I think how they quit us was because I was friends with a good friend of Dan's. Actually, this is interesting because he was a former NBA basketball player, this guy named Jackson Vroman.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, the late Jackson Vroman?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah. The guy who died. Yeah. Really sad story. But he. Anyways, I'm pretty sure how our account got discovered was Jackson, who was always in Dan's Instagram stories, and I was never in Dan's Instagram stories.

[Pablo Torre]

I never saw you there. I never saw you there.

[Bob Vulgaris]

The main reason, like, because we weren't really hanging around a lot, but the other reason would be, like, it would kill the beard situation.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. Also, you weren't. You weren't a woman in a bikini, so it was less useful for you to be in the Instagram stories.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But I think what happened was Jackson posted a picture of my dog on his Instagram, like, the next week or so, our account got shut. I don't know if that's why it got shut down, but it got shut down.

[Pablo Torre]

You have a very distinctive dog that I did then.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, that was a different dog, but yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Excuse me. Coltrane, I believe. Distinguished. I don't know if Coltrane was wearing the luxury Hermes scarf in the.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, I wasn't. I was. Wasn't living the French Riviera lifestyle back then. I was more hard scrambled. Living in Malibu in the summer that's right.

[Pablo Torre]

That was before you had your own yacht. Excuse me. This was the pre. This is the. This is the poverty era of Bob Poverty area.

[Bob Vulgaris]

This is still deca or Sent a millionaire.

[Pablo Torre]

That's right. It's embarrassing your dog.

[Bob Vulgaris]

No, I was not Come up. Yeah, Coltrane was a good dog, but he was very iconic. Everyone knew who Coltrane was. Rest in peace, Coltrane.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes. Rest in peace, Coltrane.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

The relationship, the financial dynamic with the beard. The beard, of course, gets a cut of the winnings.

[Bob Vulgaris]

That's how that works different. It works so you do two things. You can do 50, 50 share or some percentage, depending on what their risk appetite is, where they. Where they. They're just a partner. And so whatever amount of money you win, they get their percentage. Whatever you agree on, whatever money you lose, they lose their percentage. So usually the standard agreement with someone is 50, 50. And then the other agreement we do is the free roll, which is 25. We were doing 25 to 30%, usually 20 to 30, depending on what the account situation was. Whereas they just get the upside. And if we lose money, they're not responsible for it. Even if you have a beard who looks good, if you're winning bets, the casino's going to figure it out and be like, okay, well, why is Dan Bulzerian betting the first half under on this Utah Jazz game? It doesn't make sense. So you have to do other things to keep the account going. So you just have to be smart about it. With that guy, what we did was we bet basically primarily at post time because that's what he liked. He wouldn't let you bet early in the day. But the way we kept that account was, was we bet primarily overs and favorites. If we had a game that we like the under, we wouldn't bet it with him. So it looked like we were always just betting the over. And we look like we're just like a fish on a heater, always betting over. And it got to the point where the guy was, like, shading the lines a little bit. So when we wanted to bet over 210 and he would code us 212 and a half, and the line was 210 everywhere, then we would start throwing some unders his way just to kind of keep him off balance. But that's one way to keep the account going.

[Pablo Torre]

So I have two questions. One, it just seems to confirm, like, a big part of bearding then is to perform the theater of incompetence. Yeah, you want to throw them off the scent that you know anything about anything.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Correct.

[Pablo Torre]

The second question is, is that the Feds or is that your dog?

[Bob Vulgaris]

It's an outside dog. It's not my dog. My dog's just sitting here. Hey, come up here.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, good.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Come up here. Come on, up, up, up. Give me a hug.

[Pablo Torre]

Your dog? Your dog. Well, I was going to say.

[Bob Vulgaris]

He'S like a hologram. He's like. Most of my life it's just. Just an illusion. Most of my life's an illusion.

[Pablo Torre]

Allegedly beaming in is the co owner of a Spanish football team, Bob's dog.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But yeah, he's never gonna bark. He's just quiet. He's like, he's too opiated for that.

[Pablo Torre]

The perfect accomplice. He's just gonna stay quiet and trill out. Correct.

[Bob Vulgaris]

He knows all the secrets but doesn't talk. That's what you want. Foreign.

[Pablo Torre]

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[Bob Vulgaris]

You look the same.

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[Bob Vulgaris]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

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[Pablo Torre]

You're a guy who just wants to look nice. The kind of nice where you might get a nice compliment on the niceness of your nice new outfit. Good thing Men's Wearhouse has everything from polos to jeans and yes, suits. Plus a team to help you find the perfect fit to make sure you look nice. Nice. Love the way you look. Men's Warehouse so one of the secrets that Bob was just referring to earlier, one of the biggest reasons he went from working at the Winnipeg airport in his 20s to making more than $100 million betting on NBA is an insight that he kept silent about for years and years and years. But then he told me about it one day several years ago when we were randomly having lunch in Boston, I think. And to fully understand this secret, I just need to explain to you a couple of Sports Betting 101 terms, because in case you didn't know, an over is when you bet that the total number of points a team scores will be over the line, the number that a bookmaker sets. You can bet overs or unders on individual halves of games. But what happened is that one day while he was, you know, getting his sports betting career going, Bob realized something, something nobody else did.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I was working as a sky cap at the airport and I bet some Utah Jazz games under, and I went to go work my night shift at the airport thinking I had won the bet because they had scored like 72 points in the first half and the game total was 195 or something like that. And then I came home to realize I lost. And then it happened again the next night. And then I started to look a little bit closer and I realized almost all of the Utah Jazz games when they played on the road specifically, were going under in the first half and over in the Second half. And a lot of times the game would go over no matter how low scoring the first half was. And so I kind of thought, well, that's interesting. I wonder if there's other teams that have similar tendencies. And so I started just doing, like, pure database work and seeing what teams are averaging in the first half and the second half. Not just by overall, but also home and away. So at first I thought, like, they're just playing slower, but then the data shows you that the pace is about the same. So it's an efficiency thing. The shots aren't as efficient in the first half as they are, which sounds crazy. How could that be?

[Pablo Torre]

And eventually, Bob wound up staring at a simple NBA rule that I personally had never spent a single second thinking about. Because you may generally know that NBA teams home and away switch baskets at halftime. But the thing I never thought about is that in any given game, the away team, the visiting team, gets to choose which basket they're gonna shoot on first, which means that the visiting team will have their bench where the other 10 guys on the team are sitting for the entire game alongside the entire coaching staff, right in front of their defense in the first half, or far more commonly, if they so choose, in the second.

[Bob Vulgaris]

And I would say 90% of the teams, when I was coming around in 95, like, there was three teams who wanted to have their defense in front of them in the first half. Usually you want your defense in front of you in the second half. And so those three teams were the teams. Utah Jazz, New Jersey Nets, Washington Wizards, who had that first half under, second half over profile in away games.

[Pablo Torre]

So the three teams wanted to have their bench on the side of the court in which their own team would be playing defense in the first half.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Correct. And I think the reason is. Is because in general, defense is so important. And so most coaches want their defense in front of them the second half, which is. That's the winning time. So every team does that. And for whatever reason, these three teams flipped it on its head. And so it just. It creates a little more randomness. It's a lot harder to defend because you can't call out the coverages.

[Pablo Torre]

So that's the key insight, though, is that if you have your defense in front of you on the side of the court that your bench is on, the coaches can communicate with the players more effectively, more clearly.

[Bob Vulgaris]

There's so many level layers to it. There's like, you get more fouls because you're yelling at the refs, and the refs are influenced by you yelling at them. There's the bench defense where these clowns shut in the guy's ear, which is a joke that teams do this, but.

[Pablo Torre]

They do right along, along the sidelines. The bench can try to interfere.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, especially on the side you're shooting on. So there's so many layers to it that creates this, this, this massive efficiency difference. Now the other thing that's interesting is like Utah, the Wizards, etc, New Jersey Nets, Byron Scott, that's the other one. They did it almost like I would say every road game there was other teams that kind of dipped in and out and they sometimes they would do defense first, then if they lost, they would switch. And so that was where it was really interesting because that's where you really had an edge. Because after a while the sportsbook started to figure out that the easiest way to do it was to, was to. Was to shade the lines based home away, first half, second half, the over unders. That started to happen around 2007, 2008, 6.

[Pablo Torre]

Explain what that means. Explain the adjustment that the sportsbooks made in response to this pattern.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, the sportsbooks, when they make their lines, the way they do the totals, for instance, is they will set the game total what they think the game total will be. Let's say 200. Let's just keep it simple. Even though now it's like 240, 250 because the NBA is so high scoring, but back then it was around 200. Then they'll usually think, well, the first half's generally higher scoring. So maybe we'll make the first half like for Most teams, average team 101 or 102, the second half 98. Then some teams would be really, really high scoring in the first half and they'd make it higher, but they'd rarely go like lower until the end of the year. They would see, okay, these teams, they would start to figure out these teams are getting bet under, under. Then they would do like some basic database work maybe, but it was not enough like the amount that they were. I Even remember in 2005 getting frustrated because the lines had adjusted. So the Utah Jazz number on a 200, let's say away was like, would open 98 and a half in the first half on a line of 200. And that was irritating me. But then I did the math and I was like, well, the right line should be 88 and a half. Like you saw the massive edge they.

[Pablo Torre]

Were underweighting, the impact of having the bench on the side of the defense.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Nobody had a clue how big of. Yeah, nobody was had a clue. I never thought about how big it is.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, genuinely, it seems when you spell it out obvious like when the coaches can more closely communicate with the players and the bench itself can help play defense.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, the perfect, yeah, the perfect example to this is in college, every, every team plays defense in front of the bench in the, in the first half in college basketball, I believe it was when I last was betting whenever that was. So that's why college games are so low scoring in the first half and so high score in the second half. Everyone assumes the reason why they're so high scoring the second half is because of fouling, which definitely is a factor, but it's not the factor. The factor most I can assure you is, is bench defense orientation.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. The structural choice that has an enormous impact that was so underweighted that you made. How much money do you think you made on this specific insight that no one else was really seeing as clearly?

[Bob Vulgaris]

I don't know, like 40, 50, 60 million something. I don't know. The point is, is that a lot of money. But the point is that you all. I was also able to become extremely wealthy quickly because I could not. I mean I was taking massive chances in the sense like, I don't know if you guys, your readers know what Kelly Criterion is, but Kelly Criterion, if you want to pull it up, is like you're supposed to bet your a percentage of your bankroll based on the derived edge you have.

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

And my derived edge was so big. And the way you gambled back then was you, you were gambling through illegal bookmakers for the most part, they call them outlaw bookmakers. And maybe not illegal, but you're betting and you're selling up on a week to week basis. And so I could bet if, let's say like if my bank, like when I first, the first year I started doing betting really, really big, my banker was probably like 500,000, 500 or 600,000, but I was putting in two or 300,000 or more every night in action because I would just bet as much as I could on these games knowing that by the end of the week it was like a statistical impossibility for me to lose. And I'll explain to you why this was particular one was so special was because you had that massive, massive, massive mathematical edge. But then you also had the edge of like overtime counts for the over. So you're betting the over and like four and a half percent of the games are just randomly going to overtime. And that's A bonus for you. So you're never getting by overtime. Then you got the fouling situation where teams just foul. Like the Utah Jazz, especially with Jerry Sloan, would foul down 10 with like 0.5 seconds left. Like, just never give up ever. So that was like, also in your favor. So you just had a lot of. Of things that could. Like, I remember the average team would play, what is it, 40, 41 road games. And the first half, if you were like, to break down, like, on average, the first half would go over like maybe 12 times and go under the. The remaining 29 times. Like that's how big the edge was. Or like, let's say 10 and 30. And the second half would be about the same 30 overs and 10 unders. So you just. My point is, it didn't matter how much money I made. I made so much more money than I should have because then it also gave me more confidence to bet other stuff and gave me a bigger bankroll. So, like my other edges that were only 5% or 4 and a half percent or 6%, I was able to bet more comfortably.

[Pablo Torre]

Right, right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

And then that also allowed me to develop like, the programs that I developed and the algorithms I developed and the models and Sims that I developed in 2009 with, with like mathematicians to now not just bet that specific thing, but now actually bet everything on NBA basketball and develop a really good simulation model.

[Pablo Torre]

So by the time you get to the Mavericks and you have this title, Director of Quantitative Research, in which you're talking directly, certainly to the coaching staff, you're helping advise them on NBA strategy using data, using your models, but you also have this perspective from the world of betting. To what extent did betting come up at the highest levels of conversations that you had while you're with the maps?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, not. I mean, you had to fill out a. You had to do like a workshop and fill out a question, like, not a questionnaire, but like a. Get exposure to what gambling was and then agree to not partake in it and understand what's illegal, what isn't. Like, even WNBA betting was. Was frowned upon or whatever. But yeah, there was. There was a moment where I don't think it wasn't centered around gambling, but like, at the start of my first year with the Mavericks, all the stakeholders or the key employees of the Mavericks were invited to speak to the commissioner who came and met with, I think it was myself, Coach Carlisle, some of his assistants, and I don't think there was any other front office people just because of the timing of it. It Was like. It was weird. It was like after practice or something. And it was at aac, but, yeah, we got to meet with them and just talk about certain things. And this was the year after.

[Pablo Torre]

The.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Cavs lost to Golden State, the year that LeBron. They lost. They got swept or lost four games. When I forget which one was, it was the J.R. smith moment, where J.R. smith didn't shoot the ball and held it after the miss. Free throw or whatever.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah. I can only imagine being a gambler on that game, by the way, and watching that happen and just be like.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Well, yeah, well, I. What interested me about that was after the fact, the legend was that LeBron punched a blackboard after that game because he was. Or punched something. A wall, and his shooting hand was injured.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, he showed up with the air cast.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Right. And so my question was, like, if we're gonna do all this talk about, like, if we're gonna embrace gambling and talk about gambling, which was kind of like. The topic of my questions to him were just like, how are you going to enforce this? And do you have. Are you worried at all? And I was kind of like. And I don't mean to disparage Adam, because he. I just think he was kind of like, what the is this guy talking about? But he was, like, very, like, adamant that I was. What I was saying was absurd. And my point was, was that the Cavaliers knew about this. This was the biggest betting event in the NBA. It's the Finals. And only. Only after the fact was it released that LeBron had that. And I get why you would do that, because as a Cleveland Cavaliers coaching staff, you don't want your opponent to know this, because now you can lay off LeBron. You can, you know, guard his drives more. You can not worry about him shooting all this other stuff. And so my point was just like, hey, if you're gonna get in bed with gambling, how are you gonna deal with this? Because I promise you, this is affecting the integrity of what you're trying to do, the game. Someone has information, and it's one thing to monitor point shaving. It's one thing to monitor this. It's one thing, but that's a big part of it. And so I just brought it up, and I talked about how. Because I know actually Casey Smith was in the room also, and he was the Mavs athletic training at the time. And Casey was very diligent about the injury report. It was always released at the same amount of time. It was always released with accurate information, etc. Etc. And some Teams are not. So my point was there was no standardization between that and that's something that you, you know, that could infect the. Could affect the integrity of the game. And so I was just kind of bringing that up and was kind of scoffed at in front of everybody. But then afterwards, I think he did say something to me and, and because I was quite adamant, I was like, look, like you don't. The sport isn't as on the up and up as you think it is. Clearly not nothing to do with gambling, but just like someone's going to have that information and that just doesn't seem right. Like you're selling to the fans that you're betting on something that is pure in the sense that they have as much information as they should have. And my point is just the ability to control that information from a gambling standpoint. It's not like stock options or. It's not like there's always going to be insider trading. There's always going to be inside information. There's always going to be some level. But I think they underestimated how pervasive it could be in basketball.

[Pablo Torre]

But to be clear about your conversation with Adam Silver and when she's talking to the Mavericks, it was just about.

[Bob Vulgaris]

A bunch of different things.

[Pablo Torre]

But yeah, yeah, but that, that's after the 2018 finals, presumably, just to put us in the timeline there for sure.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah. I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't the first year I was with the battles, maybe it was the second year. I forget when it was, but it was definitely after that because I remember that's the point I brought up was, hey, like, that's kind of weird. Like people watching the finals didn't even know about this. But also someone had access to the information. Are you 100% sure that that never got leaked?

[Pablo Torre]

And now we look at this indictment and we see that allegedly Damon Jones, who is serving as this like, weird volunteer, like shadow assistant coach around the Lakers, allegedly fed information that this player who was identified by the powers of logic and deduction is LeBron James, was not going to play in a game. You have a real time example of player availability being with. With LeBron James allegedly being at the center of the biggest gambling scandal in the history of the NBA the side of allegedly Tim Donaghy. Right. And so you have, you have this.

[Bob Vulgaris]

By the way, the Tim Donaghy. Not to bring, but not to interrupt you, but the Tim Donaghy thing was way worse than this. Like, in terms of what we know now, I think there's probably much worse things that we don't know about. And just to be transparent, I reached out to, I sent, I sent the league an email a week ago, like, offering, like, hey, like, if you are interested, I'd be happy to help you protect the integral. Like, not like an official role, but just like, some ideas because there's lots of things they could do to improve the integrity of the game and the things that they responded with recently about Terry Rosier and John Tay Porter, like, with all due respect to their partners in gambling and their people at Sport Radar, whoever's doing their integrity, that's like the easiest thing in the world to catch.

[Pablo Torre]

Unusual betting activity on obscure players.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I'm not even obscure, just on player props. Like, if you think like, I had the best beard network in the world, probably for basketball, and if you think I was getting down money on player props, like, no, because I knew there's no point in trying to like, yeah, could we beat player props? Probably. Our model was predicting lots of things. We could certainly beat player props. But what's the point? You're never. That's like the dumbest thing because first of all, the books, there are people who beat props for a living and they're good at it. And it's like the worst thing you can put in an account because it's like, why does this guy want to bet on Terry Rosiers under. My point is it's just easy to catch. Like, the line is going to move, it's suspicious, and then the player happens to pull out with an injury. So that's like the dumbest way to cheat, right?

[Pablo Torre]

It's the most linear set of footprints left in the snow for what happened.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Like, I forget what my exact words were when I emailed, because I did. I sent an email and I know I was just being very friendly.

[Pablo Torre]

Who'd you email? Who do you. No, no, I'm curious about.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I just wrote, like, I just wrote like, the player props are very easy to identify and monitor for several reasons, not the least of which is it is very difficult, difficult to bet a lot of money in those props. They are lightly bet and any amount changes the market in such a manner that makes it obvious nobody with a brain thinks it's a successful way to point, shave and not get caught. We were very fortunate that Rosier allegedly chose this message. Not everyone will be as foolish as he was. Allegedly. That's what I wrote. Who did you say?

[Pablo Torre]

Who did you send that to?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Doesn't matter. And then I wrote, if I was in your position. I'd want to identify ways and prevent other ways of altering the alchemy of your sport, as well as making sure the integrity is its highest level.

[Pablo Torre]

Dude.

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[Bob Vulgaris]

You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

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[Pablo Torre]

Your response to poker's interwoven sort of dynamic in these indictments, speaking to the world that you also clearly moved in and played in and profit off of too?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, I've I played in high stakes. I played in high stakes poker games. But my thing is is like I won't play in a high stakes poker game unless I know intimately who's running the game. And I also, I've had situations back in 2000 and what year was this 10 or 2011 when I played in a game in LA with some characters and if they wouldn't allow me to take a deck home with them like in the middle of the like everyone like I basically like I had to feel like I I would always want to take a deck home with me because, you know, I want to make sure the deck doesn't have invisible ink on it or doesn't have like the RFID scans. Now the new Latest thing is The Shuffle Master 2.

[Pablo Torre]

The Deck Master. Yes, that's right. The rig shuffler.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, yeah, the rig shuffler. Which. That's something that I wouldn't if. Like, the last time I played a home, I knew that that deck had the ability to do that. I didn't realize the level of what you could program it via usb. And I wonder how many people were doing that. I don't think it was a lot. But if you. If you. That would have got. That would have gotten me. Because I could get you in a casino, too. You could be at a casino in Vegas, and if someone was able to access a decimate 2 in seat 1 or seat whatever, and just plug something into the USB, that's something that would get me.

[Pablo Torre]

Right, Right. The ability to just predetermine which cards are going to which players in which order.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Correct. But there's other ways people are cheating too. Like, you know, I remember playing in a poker tournament in Europe and then playing in cash games later, and the guy had a camera on his ring and he was sitting one, always wanted to sit in seat one or seat 10, and he was catching the cards as the dealer was dealing them out via camera and then sending that to someone else who's then giving him the information in his ear. So to make a long story short, poker is very treacherous. And I feel like if you're playing in poker games, you need for high stakes and high amount, lots of amount. You have to be very, very careful. Because as long as poker's been around, there's people who wanted to cheat.

[Pablo Torre]

I mean, part of. Part of the function, though, of, like, a private game is that it's not ostensibly in a casino with a zillion cameras and some amount of regulation around it.

[Bob Vulgaris]

You just have to be someone who's just very trusting or unsophisticated or just, like, naive maybe in some ways. Like another thing I'd always say is, like, when I was playing in poker is why would someone want me to play in this poker game?

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I'm someone who's probably like, if I'm a professional poker player, I'm someone who probably rates to win. And if a game runner is inviting me to a game and doesn't want a percentage of me, I immediately am suspicious because say what you want about me. I consider myself to be a winner. I'm trying to win. I'm not trying to give money away. I'm very competitive.

[Pablo Torre]

I haven't noticed yet. Bob, I didn't know that you were competitive.

[Bob Vulgaris]

No, no, But I mean, like, a lot of people think, like, oh, yeah, I'm not a very great poker player. And maybe, maybe not. But I'm also not someone who punts off a lot of money.

[Pablo Torre]

But wait, hold on though, because the whole notion here though, is that we can try to entice Bob Vulgaris by providing. Hey, look. Look who's here. It's allegedly Chauncey Billups. It's allegedly Damon Jones. It's here. Here you have.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I can't imagine why. Oh, I would be so excited if Damon Jones was at a poker game.

[Pablo Torre]

But, but, but the premise, these people are just like.

[Bob Vulgaris]

So, I mean, I don't want to like, badmouth the kids who lost money playing poker, but like, come on.

[Pablo Torre]

Like. Well, the idea is, the idea is these people were whales, were bait for.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But they're not even whales, though. Like, that's the thing. Like, get me. Let me think of like, I don't know, like a. Some dude, like a hedge fund guy with a ton of money who's like, but like just some random NBA guy.

[Pablo Torre]

Like, but isn't the theory that you think you hypothetical poker player think you can absolutely pants the NBA guy.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But how much money are they going to lose is like my thing. Like, like, yeah, yeah. Like that's the part that people don't. Like they're not. Like they're wealthy, but they're not. I don't know. I will say that I guess I should take it back because I remember sitting at the Bellagio and I got called out on it on a Dan Lebatard show, curiously interesting enough, but. And Antoine Walker showed up literally with a garbage bag full of cash one day and started playing and started Antoine.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, no. Friend of the show. Antoine Walker had a right.

[Bob Vulgaris]

He said that. That's not true. But I can promise you it was true. He showed up with a bag. There was cash in it. No one knew how much money it was. And every time he lost, he duck. He reached down and put more money on the table. I remember I paid. It was a 25:50 game at the Bellagio in the upper limit area. I remember paying someone either 5 or $10,000. The buying was 5,000. I gave someone more than the buy in to sit, to jump the list and take his seat with. Because I saw the bag. I was like standing over him and I saw the bag and everyone else just like, he's only. Antoine's only sitting there with like 5k or 7k in front of him. Like, what's the point? But I saw the bag. And I was like, there's a good chance there's going to be more money.

[Pablo Torre]

Hold on. So in NBA betting, you were like, oh, the bench being on the same side as the court with the defense. In poker, you're like, I see a garbage bag full of literal money. That is my competitive edge.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I think it actually was a garbage bag. Like, I'm not even lying. I think it was like a, like a, like an actual garbage bag. Like, it might not have been like a black husky or whatever, you know, stretch bag or whatever, but it was a garbage bag. It was like. It might have been like one of those white ones from the. It was weird. He had a lot of money in that bag and so. Guess so, I guess. Yeah. Maybe some of these guys do have a lot of money that they can lose. I don't know. But just, just, just the crew that was running those games, though, like, just to. Just to be clear, like, the people around the games, I didn't know them because I wasn't. I wasn't around this scene in 2025. Yeah, there was a scene in 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, that had the poker guys, like Paul Pierce, for instance, was playing a lot back then, and there was a. Those people running those games I, I did not trust. And so I'm not saying those games are cheated because I have no idea. And I didn't play in them and I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't personally play in those games.

[Pablo Torre]

But speaking of what Bob refuses to do at this point in the episode, you probably have a pretty decent sense of his vast store of knowledge and money when it comes to gambling in the NBA. But the other thing you should know here is that given that background, I did find something kind of surprising, which is that on the subject of legalized sports betting and how America should approach it now, Bob thinks that the whole thing is a really, really, really bad idea. My position has been I think we should legalize it and regulate it. Your position is what?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Legalize gambling should not be in the way the manner it is right now in the usa. It just should not. It's completely antithetical to a functioning society to promote this to young men in particular. It's predatory in nature. It's highly addictive. It's just a sense of financial nihilism.

[Pablo Torre]

And that is just the beginning, by the way, of what the greatest NBA better of all time thinks about this industry's very public relationship with not just the NBA, but also the media. All of which left me feeling somehow less paternalistic than the guy who once used Dan Bilzerian as a beard.

[Bob Vulgaris]

It should not be partnered with the league and it should not be marketable. And it should not be a big part of all of your sports content. I don't think you should be able to advertise this stuff. People want to gamble on it. Great. It should not be advertised. Shouldn't be like, on the bottom of the screen while you're watching the sporting event. Like, come on, this is a sport. It's not like if your only attraction to the sport is the fact that you can gamble on it, there's a problem with your product.

[Pablo Torre]

You're suggesting that the thing that you made your money doing as a premise is destructive enough to want to not merely regulate, but return us to the prohibition era. That's your current view?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah. Or make it like cigarettes where it's not marketed to young people.

[Pablo Torre]

Personally, I find myself not being as much of a moralist on this stuff. My philosophy in general when it comes to gambling has been that as with the legalization of other vices like alcohol and marijuana, sunlight is a preferable disinfectant to the alternative. And that most Americans really can enjoy this stuff responsibly. And that pushing people towards black markets run by even more criminal figures without any legal oversight or taxation does seem worse.

[Bob Vulgaris]

So you want to legalize and regulate. It is regulated and it is legal. So what more regulation would you want?

[Pablo Torre]

I think you need to have rigorous and well funded research into the harms of gambling in which we are now following, by the way, the parallels to the regulation of cigarettes. I mean, look, the European system, Bob, which I think you're familiar with for cigarettes, is what. What do they put on the boxes?

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, the Europe, I mean, it's bad, it's got the whole cancer, whatever they.

[Pablo Torre]

Put the graphic images of. This is what can happen to you if you develop an addiction to this product. And I think some disclosure around that, that to me, it's always about disclosure. It's about, here are the risks.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I don't think so. Okay, so you're going to be inundated. People just click. Like pornography is a good example. Like, you must be 18 years old, people know, but. And they just click on it. Like if it's just something that pops up in their phone and shows the risks of it, it's not going to matter to them because at the end of the day they have an impulse to bet. And the other part of it is, is like maybe it'll help you catch more people through because it's legalized, sure. But it's also going to create more people wanting to do things that they would have never have thought of doing in a million years, which is rig games, point, shave, share information like that. For sure, I believe with 100% certainty. Crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

[Pablo Torre]

All of which is to say that I did find this conversation both fascinating and useful, especially on the question of what enormous legalized menus of prop bets on individual players, their unders especially, have done to incentivize illicit underperformance in games. Which did lead Bob and I to agree on one thing as far as NBA incentives are concerned. Because we both think that the league now has a genuine problem in trying to distinguish between two different types of NBA, one legal and one illegal, that both underperform on purpose.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Just think about this for a second. You have like the Troncy Billup situation. Yeah. Where he's alleged to have given information that some players would not be playing, presumably because they were going to tank the game for draft positioning. Right. And my point was like, your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position. So good luck proving that in a court of law.

[Pablo Torre]

It is very funny, by the way, that the overlooked subplot of this indictment that you're referring to is that the government basically establishes as a matter of observable fact that the Blazers were tanking games. And that's now on the record for all time.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Basically everyone in the league knows, every player in the league knows that tanking exists. And therefore the integrity of the game is in. Is. Is. Is. It's just not. It's just. It's just not there. It's not pristine. It's not even close to being pristine. How about that? Like the spurs with, you know, one of the greatest coaches in NBA history, or if not the greatest, were openly trying to get, you know, they did it with Tim Duncan and they did it again with Wembanyama. You know, not lose games on purpose while they're playing. I'm not alleging that because I don't know that's to be the case. And I doubt that that is because I just don't think that. But you certainly field players that are not NBA caliber and then you tell them to go out and try and win. That was my experience with the Mavericks is you just kind of like played like a bunch of G league players and you just put them in positions and they just go out there and that's just the way the game is. So my point is, is, is that when you have that it's hard to tell a player then that the integrity of the game matters. And don't tell your friends, hey, like, I'm probably going to pull out this game, or hey, like bet the under this game or hey, my whatchamacall, LeBron's not playing Mazda, go out and get yours. Like, there's just no basis for integrity for the sport. There's no basis that the sport is, is held to a high standard and you're out there to compete every single game. It just becomes this progressive weakening of the integrity of the sport.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. Look, as somebody who like exhaustively reported on the process and the Sixers, I mean, my solution to all of this has never been teams should be allowed to tank with impunity. My solution has been you need to change the rules so that the incentives are not causing people to tank games. The real like, upshot of what you're saying is if you're going to have a position that says the integrity of our sport is paramount and fair play is paramount, then you need to also be consistent in terms of the ways in which you are enabling the forces that eat away at integrity and fair play. Where I fully agree with you is the appropriate amount of pressure to put on the NBA to catch this stuff needs to go up. Right. So the question is, how do you incent that?

[Bob Vulgaris]

They need to hire quants. What they need to do what? The NBA. This is an NBA thing. It's going to solve the NBA and then you're going to have ncaa. Then you're going to have collegiate football, you're going to have NFL, you're going to have.

[Pablo Torre]

But what would you do? What would you do if you actually.

[Bob Vulgaris]

I would hire quants to, to build models with the, the best available data that the NBA has to look at the G. Like someone who knows what they're talking about with gambling. Someone who knows. And I'm not trying to sell me because I'm not interested in this. Yeah, I don't have any interest in doing this, but yeah, they need to hire someone who can actually identify performance downgrades via a model using their data. But then it's like you're going to do all of that and half of it's going to be the teams that are tanking. And now you're have to have a conversation and be like, hey, were you guys Losing this game on purpose because gambling or were you losing this game on purpose because you're trying to tank for a draft spot? Oh, just a draft spot. Okay, that's okay, that's cool.

[Pablo Torre]

But that, but hold on because I love that this conversation keeps on going back to tanking, which I think is an under discussed aspect of the entire conflict of principles involved. You're saying over and over again that if you cannot distinguish between behavior that would be incentivized.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Why you're losing a game on purpose. Yeah. Why you're. Why you're.

[Pablo Torre]

By betting or by getting a draft pick like Victor Wembanyama, you're kind of from a first principles perspective. And so you gotta sort of change the incentives with draft picks and tanking. That's actually where you would. If, if Yemen.

[Bob Vulgaris]

That's what I would focus on if I cared about the. Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

If they're gonna say Bob, please help us. You would say it's time to do what? It's time to remove the draft lottery as a mechanism.

[Bob Vulgaris]

There's several ways you just make the draft completely 100% random. That's one way. That's not the most sophisticated way. You can do the wheel where every team is guaranteed a spot every 30 years.

[Pablo Torre]

That's more Mike Zarin, Celtics. Exactly.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Mike Z's wheel thing is not bad.

[Pablo Torre]

Wheel thing.

[Bob Vulgaris]

That thing's not bad. You can make every rookie a free agent with a hard cap. Why not just give these kids the ability to go wherever they want and make the salary cap hard? With no hard, hard salary cap. No salary limit on individual players, but a hard cap similar to other sports. Like you could. You, you don't even have to be bright to be an NBA. And I guess I fell as NBA gm so that, that says a lot about me. But like, oh, this guy's a max player. How much do we pay him? Well, let me look up with the maxes for his contract. Like, like the level of creativity that's required to build the team in American sports is zero. Especially in the NBA. You're told what you can play the player. You know exactly what the, what the mid level exception is. You know exactly what the. Depending on years of service. You know what the rookie minimum wage scale is? The rookie maximum scale is. So yeah, if you want to just bring back the integrity of the game without jeopardizing your golden goose gambling over there that you're so happy to, to, to, to, to. To cap for over and over and over again, then yeah, you and you don't Want to go with Mike Zarin's wheel, which. Which seems you just make it so that there's no draft.

[Pablo Torre]

Like, I'm. I'm personally in favor of free agency for all incoming rookies, and I'm in favor of a zillion mini television shows in which they all get to make their individual decisions. I want rose ceremonies. I want the Bachelor for. I want Victor Wembanyama of 2027 to have his own rose ceremony.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But why shouldn't they be able to do this? And then. And then if. And then if you're. If you're the Milwaukee Bucks and you've got 250 million in salary that you can spend, you can decide to give Victor Weminyama 125 of a year.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah.

[Bob Vulgaris]

And build the rest of your roster up. That's. That's an easy way to fix that. That's a very simple one. No, no. Like a very, very hard cap, but no max salary. And all NBA rookies are free agents. And that seems to be a simple way. And then that. That solves the tanking. And then you still have the issue of these bananas who want to, like, you know, go and rig poker games when they're making 20, 30 million dollars. That's a separate conversation.

[Pablo Torre]

On some level, though, what we are reckoning with is the inability to solve for people being idiots.

[Bob Vulgaris]

But I think also, like, honestly, like, I know you're not big on this, but, like, yeah, I'm a big free market. People should be able to do what they want to do. I'm. I agree with that, but I don't. I don't think that should include gambling companies marketing to vulnerable people. A dream that isn't even realizable.

[Pablo Torre]

By the way, I'm open to all of these suggestions of, like, what you can and can't do, such that the access to addictive substances is disclosed as a matter of risk and then limited as a matter of law.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Why don't we start with the ticker? Let's just remove the ticker at the bottom. With the gambling odds, that could be a big thing. How about maybe the networks don't own gambling companies? Like, I think it was ESPN Bet. Is that what it's called? Like, yes. How about someone just wants to be able to watch sports without being inundated with gambling? That seems like a good thing. Easy for me to say now that I've made it and all the other guys are still trying to call your way up.

[Pablo Torre]

But that's right. Now that. Now that you can, you can pull the ladder out from everyone else.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Clearly. Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Behind what you can't see behind Bob's bookcase is that in his home in an undisclosed location is a bunch of ladders that he collected that I've.

[Bob Vulgaris]

That I'm collecting and pulling up from.

[Pablo Torre]

Everybody that otherwise young men across America were going to use to become him.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Correct.

[Pablo Torre]

Bob? I am glad we had this conversation. I look forward to the NBA responding to that email.

[Bob Vulgaris]

Maybe me too, I guess. I don't know. They. They could definitely figure it out if they really wanted to. I suppose. It's not that hard.

[Pablo Torre]

So in other words, you're glad to be in the scandal free and corruption free world of European soccer.

[Bob Vulgaris]

A whole different conversation. I'm not going down.

[Pablo Torre]

This has been Pablo Torre finds Out a Meadowlark Media production and I'll talk to you next time.

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[Bob Vulgaris]

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[Bob Vulgaris]

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[Pablo Torre]

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

[Jessie and Lenny Ware]

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[Pablo Torre]

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