It’s a thought that pretty much everyone who has placed a bet on sports has had:
How awesome would it be if I could bet on sports for a living?
I certainly have thought it. And if you’re reading this as someone who visits Covers, you probably have as well. Just imagine: you log onto your computer a few hours before game time, do your research, check the lines, place a few bets, and sit back and watch sports all day as the money rolls in.
Except, that’s not how it works. Not for most professional bettors, and certainly not for Spanky.
Gadoon Kyrollos, better known as Spanky, is a professional sports bettor from New Jersey. He’s been in the industry for over 20 years, with plenty of ups and downs.
He was named as the high-rolling bettor at the center of the Cantor Gaming scandal in Las Vegas back in 2012 and was also among 25 people arrested across five states in an illegal gambling ring that same year. Since then, he's kept a low profile, for obvious reasons. But with the legalization of sports betting, Spanky has emerged as a popular figure on #GamblingTwitter - a voice for the wiseguys, if you will.
I met Spanky in April 2019 at a sports betting conference at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. He was making waves by standing up during a panel and asking a sportsbook executive why his action wasn’t welcome at their establishment. Naturally, I had some questions for Spanky so we got to talking and, eventually, he extended an invitation to myself and some colleagues to visit his office.
Five months later, on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September, we arrived at the Sports Information Analysis office in Manalapan Township, New Jersey. We were greeted by Spanky, an exuberant man in his early 40s who could be mistaken as either a friendly uncle or as a mob boss, and his partner Michael Duong, better known to those around him as “Chinese Mike”.
After getting shown around the office, we sat down in the conference room and started with small talk. Spanky and Benny, a colleague of mine at Covers who has been working in the industry for more than 15 years, reminisced about the earlier, unregulated days of the industry. Names like Legends, Spiro Athanas, and the White House in Costa Rica were tossed around.
Fantastic stories, but what I really wanted to know was this: how does a professional sports bettor make his bets? What sports does he bet on? What factors come into play when he makes a bet?
Basically, I was just eager to learn. And, thankfully, Spanky was willing to teach.
We started with what he does when he gets into the office. I was imagining the first thing he did was come into the office and start adding up his winnings from the night before. Not so much.
For Spanky’s operation, everything is automatic. Custom software would log into accounts and grade winners and losers from the night before. From there, more automated processes take over, highlighting significant overnight line moves, notable injuries, and key information that fuels Spank’s sports trading. Not betting. Trading.
“Trading all day. We don’t watch any games,” he exclaims.
That stunned me. Imagine having tens of thousands of dollars on a game and not watching it. Better yet, imagine being a professional sports bettor and not watching sports. But Spanky has his model and the “eye test” simply doesn’t apply. Instead, it’s more about injuries, numbers and, of course, line movement.
“We’re in touch with several different sharp groups all over the world and we get their information as well to see what their opinions are,” he explains. “There are so many different things - but a lot of it has to do with information on just looking at lines and market movement.”
Spanky’s analysis knows no borders either. For example, he’ll closely monitor an Asian bookmaker for a sport like the NBA, knowing that the Asian market will take sharp play earlier than the North American market. If the Asian book is showing a spread at -7 and the rest of the world is sitting at -6, he’ll look to take a position on the shorter spread with the anticipation that the North America books will eventually see the same smart money and move accordingly.
“So a lot of that stuff, we’re looking at line movement and trying to beat that closing number,” Spanky says. “That’s the most important thing: beating the closing number. ‘Cause if you beat the closing number, that means you’re beating the market and you’re going to make money long term.”
Trying to beat that closing number. That’s the most important thing. I think about the majority of casual bettors and how they log on to their online sportsbooks or head to the betting counter an hour or less before game time and make their wagers. These guys are almost always betting into the closing number. But that’s clearly not the best time to place a bet.
So when is the best time to bet? Spanky uses college football as an example. Most online sportsbooks open their odds for the following week on Sunday evening. But with opening lines, they set their limits very low while they let sharps bet into the numbers, and then they readjust their lines accordingly - basically using the early opinions of the wiseguys to help shape the line. Limits increase as the week goes on but the early value in those odds is dwindling, which makes the timing of the bet a bit of an art form.
“So, you kinda wanna wait for Monday morning, around 9 to 11 a.m. ET,” explains Spanky, “cause that’s like the perfect middle ground where you’re gonna get enough down, you’re gonna get a good number - not the best number, cause usually the best number was scooped up the night before - and you’re happy with the position. It’s a fine line you gotta keep walking to maximize both the price that you get and the amount that you get down.”
That’s one piece of the puzzle for Spanky. The other piece is factoring injuries into those perfectly-timed wagers.
Today, every team - even the small colleges - have beat writers, so finding information on injuries isn’t difficult. In fact, with so much information, it can sometimes be confusing and conflicting. To sort through this noise, Spanky and his team have spent almost a decade developing software and programs that get this information quickly and accurately.
“We’ve designed programs that sort through all the bullshit to try and get the nuggets,” Spanky explains. “You’re not going to get the nuggets unless you go through the bullshit. You have to keep digging and digging and digging. But it’s worth it. And it’s easier for the program to do it. But that program took probably, seven, eight years to fine tune, to be where it’s at. It’s not easy.”
The trading room at Sports Information Analysis, where Spanky and his team do their work.
But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time before Twitter, after all. Those were the days in which Spanky would spend hours calling college newspapers and other sources across the country, searching for those “nuggets” of valuable info. Not wanting to give away his motive, Spanky would have to get creative when it came to the reasons why he wanted to know which players were in and which ones were out.
“You don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m a gambler, can I get the information?’. You say ‘Hey, what’s up man? I’m a student’, or whatever you just pose as someone else, and you ask how the team practiced today, anything of note?”
Perhaps the final ingredient to Spanky’s recipe for sports betting success - after getting down on the best line at the best time and calculating the impact of injuries - is the weather. It’s also one of the toughest factors to quantify and predict heading into a game.
Spanky recalls a group of seasoned gamblers he’s familiar with that would go above and beyond to know the exact game-time conditions, especially when it came to the erratic weather patterns at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
“They would actually hire a guy to go to batting practice at Wrigley,” he says. “And they were paying him, I think it was $50,000 a year, and he’d have to go to 81 games, and he’d just watch every batting practice and just take notes on how many home runs were hit during batting practice, how far they were going, and that information was worth so much money back then. Now, everything is online.”
Spanky doesn’t dive too far into the game-time weather, outside of extreme circumstances like hurricanes or bigger storms hitting outdoor venues, but admits it’s always something he keeps an eye on.
I’m starting to understand Spanky’s way of betting and the type of model he uses: line movements, bet timing, injuries, and, to a lesser extent, weather. But still, there must be thousands of games each week that involve line movements and injuries.
Spanky’s method for measuring games isn’t too far removed from what I or another casual bettor may follow when getting action down, expect he’s doing it with the force of a factory and digging deep with a much bigger (and complex) drill. But given those advanced tools and all the unearthed information, how does he choose which games are worthy of a wager?
For him it’s all about college athletics: football and basketball. He rarely dabbles in NFL, admittingly not a profitable market for him, but when he does bet on pro football it’s more out of courtesy for the sportsbook itself - basically taking a few losses on NFL in order to keep his accounts in good standings and not shuttered after winning big on NCAA sports.
“It’s a ‘one hand washes the other’ type thing where, if the bookmaker is letting me bet my college football, I’m going to want to give him a courtesy NFL play, even knowing I don’t have an edge on that, just so that I can be kept around a lot longer,” Spanky explains. “A lot of people don’t think like that. They just want to go for the jugular and try to attack props or attack Japanese baseball and shit, and they’re going to get kicked out immediately. We’re trying to make things last and trying to just keep on going.”
Spanky literally makes bets that he knows may very well lose just to keep the bookmakers happy. But he’s big on the importance of the player-bookmaker relationship. He gives an example of how this worked at a recent trip to the South Point Sports Book in Las Vegas.
“I was there for a week in Vegas and (the oddsmakers at South Point) were giving me $1,000 on college basketball totals, which they don’t give to many people,” he recounts. “But I was giving them $20,000, $30,000 NFL side plays. So if I’m giving them those big pieces, there’s no problem. They’re going to let me bet and fire away on the college hoops, knowing full well that they're not going to beat me on that. They’ll use my info but I’m giving them, in return, a lot of NFL plays that they need. It’s one of those things.”
Spanky obviously understands the importance of keeping a good relationship with sportsbooks and their operators. After all, if he gets limited or kicked out, he loses a revenue channel. He strongly believes there’s a misconception when it comes to the relationship between sharp bettor and bookie, and says many inexperienced bookmakers instantly make it an adversarial relationship rather than see the long-term benefits for both parties.
“You don’t just look at it as one bet, we’re looking at it as a relationship type thing. So there are going to be some bets that I’m going to get the best of it on you, some bets you’re going to get the best of it on me, but working together we’re both going to make money. It doesn’t have to be adversarial, it doesn’t have to be conflicting, it doesn’t have to be hostile.”
Spanky has figured out — and continues to figure out — how to win. His biggest problem in 2019 is getting bets down as more and more sportsbooks adopt the European model of limiting or even banning winning sports bettors. If he was consistently betting sports like the NFL or English Premier League soccer, finding the desired limits wouldn’t be an issue.
The problem for Spanky and many other professional sports traders is that they want to bet the lesser-known events, like college football and basketball, where sportsbooks are more vulnerable to errors in their odds and therefore hesitant to open up their risk by taking larger wagers from pro players.
For a guy like Spanky, his hold at the end of the day is between 1 and 2 percent of his total wagers placed. For every $100 bet, he’s only holding $1 or $2. For a $1,000 bet - also known as a dime bet - he’s making roughly $10. He earns his money based on the size of the gamble, and when he can’t get down the required limit, all of that effort gone into making that bet - the computer models, the line monitoring, the news crawlers, the injury databases - just doesn’t add up to a profit.
“I gotta put a lot of money down to be able to make it worth my while. Guys taking $500 bets and stuff, that doesn’t work,” Spanky laments.
One thing seems clear from everything that Spanky is saying: between the wealth of information available to all, the speed at which markets react, and the growing trend of sharp bettors being limited by sportsbooks, it’s tougher to be a professional sports bettor today than it was 25 years ago.
“It gets harder every single year,” Spanky says. “But with the proper work ethic, just because it gets harder, doesn’t mean it’s impossible, cause we’re still doing it.”
Spanky continues to work hard and improve his craft. He also believes that sharp bettors are part of the future of regulated sports betting in the United States, whether sportsbooks want them or not. He truly believes that bookmakers can learn from sharp action and become smarter because of it.
To illustrate, he turns to one final analogy where a basement in Seattle keeps flooding. To fix it, the homeowner can do one of two things: the cheapest way would be to hire a bucket brigade to keep scooping out the water each time it rains. But it rains a lot in Seattle, so that’s not a long-term solution. Instead, Spanky says that the better approach is to hire an engineer to redesign the house to re-route the water. Find ways to funnel that rainwater, so you can use it to water your garden in the summer.
“So, the engineer is going to be your skilled bookmaker. And the rain is your sharp bettors. The sharp bettors are never going to stop coming. I love that analogy. I think it just makes sense to me, it’s logical. Why keep scooping out the water?”
