It is what he has done, after all, and what he still does.

The cliché of all cliché advice, and yet coming from Walters, it doesn’t sound that way. Walters attends the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame induction ceremony on August 11, 2023, alongside fellow inductees Scotty Schettler and Richard Schuetz. “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

“Well, it’s work, work, work,” he says in the grainy Kentucky drawl he hasn’t lost after 35 years of living in Las Vegas. He’s wearing a golf shirt, untucked, and khakis, legs spread. “The one…” He holds the mic to his mouth, trails off, thinking. In his low, husky voice, shuffling his notes, Spanky-real name Gadoon Kyrollos, host of the podcast Be Better Bettors-asks the fucking man one final question, and it’s not exactly a zinger but it’s the one all of the men would ask if they could: What’s the one piece of advice he has for aspiring sports bettors?īilly Walters, 77, looks out at the room for a minute, searching for something meaningful to say. A man who has won and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, who is beyond rich, who is a convicted felon and a respected philanthropist, and who is, in the eyes of the men in this room-the 1,000 eyes fixed upon him in the ballroom of the Circa Resort & Casino-not just a man. A man without whom there would be no sports gambling as we know it today! A man whose memoir hasn’t even come out yet but is already charting on Amazon because yesterday the news broke that in the memoir the man alleges that golfer Phil Mickelson (the man’s former gambling partner) has bet $1 billion on sports and once tried to bet on his own team (Mickelson responded to the allegations here). On the riser up front: A heavyset, dark-eyed man who goes by Spanky, himself the mastermind of the three-day sports-gambling conference called Bet Bash, is conducting an obsequious half-hour Q&A with a titan of the industry-the man everyone calls the best, the most successful sports gambler of all time. Men in their 20s, in their 50s, in their 70s, wearing golf shirts and chinos and shorts and hats on backwards, sit and listen. To read the rest of the stories, click here.įIVE-HUNDRED MEN sit in chairs arranged in rows on the geometric-patterned carpet of the casino’s Grand Ballroom. This piece is part of a series of stories about today's sports-betting boom and how to combat a gambling addiction.

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