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

He made nine figures by finding patterns in basketball, from the skycap counter of the Winnipeg airport to high-stakes athlete encounters in Vegas. Then Bob Voulgaris brought his dark-alley secrets to Mark Cuban's front office. Now, as scandal infects the integrity of the game, he sees a path forward — including, but not limited to, maybe turning Victor Wembanyama into The Bachelor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:19Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

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• 0:55Pablo Torre?

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• 1:38Pablo Torre?

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• 2:03Pablo Torre?

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

• 2:07Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 2:09Pablo Torre?

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

• 2:15Speaker 01

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

• 2:21Pablo 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 are just fake books?

• 2:30Speaker 01

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

• 2:35Pablo Torre?

  That's right. I was hoping you would have betting slips framed. You ever save those? Do you even have betting slips when you're working?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't in the betting slip, I mean, I wasn't around for the betting slip era. I think I had phone calls and, yeah, dealing with third-party intermediaries for the most part.

• 2:56Pablo 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.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Bob Valguerris, former professional sports better and now current owner of a second-division Spanish football club, C.D. Castelhun.

• 3:49Pablo Torre?

  That's pretty good, also wildly insufficient.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:53Pablo Torre?

  What was your job with the Mavericks, Bob? What was your job title in the NBA?

• 3:57Speaker 01

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

• 4:03Pablo Torre?

  It meant you, like me, talked to Mark Cuban a lot.

• 4:05Speaker 01

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

• 4:11Pablo Torre?

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

• 4:21Speaker 01

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

• 4:27Pablo 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 Voulgaris got insanely rich off of gambling long before the US 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

• 5:10Pablo Torre?

  is now striving to be, there were no betting slips, no legal receipts for his millions to frame.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I did it from 2000 to 2017-ish, 16-ish, whatever. Probably made 10 million or so a year, every year, not counting expenses and salaries, but actual betting net, wins versus losses.

• 5:38Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Average was about 8 to 10, I would say.

• 5:42Pablo Torre?

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

• 5:45Speaker 01

  17 years. Yeah, 17 years, 15, 17 years, something like that. Too long, how about that?

• 5:50Pablo Torre?

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

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I made a lot of money, for sure.

• 5:59Pablo 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 you 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.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  This isn't what I inspired, though. This is so far removed. I mean, I'm not to interrupt you, but this world right now is so far removed, like the levels I had to go to bet on sports to get accounts, to find people, cash in duffel bags in Canada, dealing with shady individuals, and then later on in life, dealing with 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.

• 6:53Pablo Torre?

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

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So when I first started betting, to be clear, it was through offshore sportsbooks. So it was through internet sportsbooks 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.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Online casinos, online sportsbooks that were not legal in America, but they were like gray. 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.

• 7:42Pablo Torre?

  But the idea that the MBA is a 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?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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 sportsbook. And I remember I would just sit there at the Starvest or the Caesars Palace and watch basketball that was on. I liked it and I developed an affinity for it and I 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.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I loved it. I loved the sport.

• 8:43Pablo Torre?

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

• 8:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:56Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  When 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 liked 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, et cetera. And so, yeah, that's what I was doing, just collecting as much data as possible.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  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

• 10:24Speaker 01

  and then you can't even, if you win, they won't even allow you to keep betting. They will limit you to bet.

• 10:29Pablo Torre?

  Oh, look, the whole, and I, 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 and your name, they're not going to let you do it. The reason they won't let you, Bob Voulgaris, 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.

• 10:54Speaker 01

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

• 10:58Pablo Torre?

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

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I mean, the most famous person I used 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.

• 11:16Pablo Torre?

  What happened?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know exactly what happened, but the guy who, I got in, put in touch with him. He sat next to me at a Miami Heat, funny enough, playoff game, and he like, took an interest 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 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

• 12:01Speaker 01

  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. Uh, 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.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I don't, 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 Floyd. He was not worth it.

• 12:53Pablo Torre?

  But the premise, though, the premise of why Floyd is the perfect beard is a parallel logic.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  It's because of that conversation. Yeah.

• 13:01Pablo Torre?

  But, but it's, 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, the idea that there's a very famous person with disposable income, for whom strategy is more of a theory than an actual practice.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:33Pablo Torre?

  Wait, though, the Instagram guy?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he loved the cross.

• 13:36Pablo 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 Bilzerian's up to now, but he was.

• 13:43Speaker 01

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

• 13:47Pablo Torre?

  Wait a minute, so tell the Dan Bilzerian story. How does that happen?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Um, 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 used that account to bet. And that's just how it went down. So they thought Dan Bilzerian was making the, the bets, but it was me or, or Dan's brother.

• 14:34Pablo Torre?

  Right, how successful was that?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  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 Roman.

• 14:51Pablo Torre?

  Oh, the late Jackson Roman.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the guy who, who died. Um, yeah, really sad story, but he, anyways, I, I'm, 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.

• 15:07Pablo Torre?

  I never saw you there, I never saw you there, Bob.

• 15:09Speaker 01

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

• 15:14Pablo 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.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:27Pablo Torre?

  You have a very distinctive dog.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  I did then, yeah, that was a different dog, but yeah.

• 15:31Pablo Torre?

  Excuse me.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  That was Coltrane.

• 15:33Pablo Torre?

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

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't, I was, it wasn't living the French Riviera lifestyle back then. I was more hard scrambled, living in Malibu in the summer.

• 15:45Pablo Torre?

  That's right. That was before you had your own yacht. Excuse me. This was the pre, this is the poverty era of Bob.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Poverty area. This is still Deca or Centimillionaire.

• 15:54Pablo Torre?

  That's right. It's embarrassing.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:01Pablo Torre?

  Yes. Rest in peace, Coltrane.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:04Pablo Torre?

  The relationship, the financial dynamic with the beard. The beard, of course, gets a cut of the winnings. That's how that works?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  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, we're 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 is going to figure it out and be like, okay, well, why is Dan Bolzarian betting the first half under on this Utah Jacks game?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  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 liked the under, we wouldn't bet it with him. So it looked like we were always just betting the over and we looked like we were 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 quote 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.

• 17:31Pablo 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.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:39Pablo Torre?

  You want to throw them off the scent that you know anything about anything.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:43Pablo Torre?

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

• 17:47Speaker 01

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

• 17:50Pablo Torre?

  Oh, good.

• 17:52Speaker 01

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

• 17:55Pablo Torre?

  Your dog, your dog, well, I was gonna say. Yeah, oh, look.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  He's almost there. He's like a hologram. He's like most of my life, just an illusion. Most of my life's an illusion.

• 18:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's never been a bark. He's just quiet. He's like, he's too up to date for that.

• 18:15Pablo Torre?

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

• 18:19Speaker 01

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

• 18:31Pablo Torre?

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• 20:13Pablo Torre?

  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 twenties to making more than a hundred million dollars betting on the 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.

• 20:54Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  I was working as a skycap at the airport and I'd 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'd 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,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  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?

• 22:13Pablo 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.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:21Pablo 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?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Correct. And I think the key reason is, is because, in general, defense is so important, and so most coaches want their defense in front of them in 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.

• 23:47Pablo 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.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  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 they do do it.

• 24:12Pablo Torre?

  Right, along the sidelines, the bench can try to interfere.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  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, et cetera, New Jersey Nets, Byron Scott, that's the other one.

• 24:30Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  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 sports books started to figure out that the easiest way to do it was to, was to, was to shade the lines based on home, away, first half, second half, the over-unders. That started to happen around 2007, 2008.

• 24:55Pablo Torre?

  Wait, explain what that means. Explain the adjustment that the sports books made in response to this pattern.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Well, the sports books, 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 better under, 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.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  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, 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 still have a massive edge.

• 25:58Pablo Torre?

  They were underweighting the impact of having the bench on the side of the defense.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Nobody had a clue how big of, yeah, nobody was, had a clue.

• 26:05Pablo Torre?

  I never thought about it.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  How big it is.

• 26:06Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Well, the perfect, yeah, the perfect example of 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 in 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.

• 26:45Pablo 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?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:24Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  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 called them outlaw bookmakers, maybe not illegal. But you're betting and you're settling up on a week to week basis. And so I could bet if, let's say like if my bank, 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 200 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.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And I'll, I'll explain to you why this was, this 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 [BLEEP] 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

• 28:51Speaker 01

  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 4.5% or 6%, I was able to bet more comfortably.

• 29:19Pablo Torre?

  Right, right.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:36Pablo 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 were with the Mavs?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, I mean, you had to fill out, you had to do like a workshop and fill out a question, like not a questioner, 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 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

• 30:42Speaker 01

  talk about certain things. And this was the year after the Cavs lost to Golden State, the year that LeBron, they lost, they got swept or lost four games. I forget which one was, but it was the JR Smith moment where JR Smith didn't shoot the ball and held it after the missed free throw or whatever.

• 30:59Pablo Torre?

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

• 31:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, he showed up with the air cast.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Right. And so my question was like, if we're going to do all this talk about, like if we're going to 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 this guy talking about? But he was like, very like adamant that I was, what I was saying was absurd. 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

• 32:00Speaker 01

  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 going to get in bed with gambling, how are you going to 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, and I talked about how, because I know, actually Casey Smith was in the room also, and he was the Mavs athletic trainer 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, et cetera, et cetera.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  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, it 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, cause I was quite out and 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, then 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

• 33:26Speaker 01

  to be some level. But I think they underestimated how pervasive it could be in basketball.

• 33:33Pablo Torre?

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

• 33:38Speaker 01

  It's just about a bunch of different things, but yeah, yeah.

• 33:40Pablo Torre?

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

• 33:45Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah. I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't the first year I was with the Bows. Maybe it was the second year. I forget when it was, but it was definitely after that. Because I remember, I thought 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 a hundred percent sure that that never got leaked?

• 34:02Pablo Torre?

  And now we look at this indictment and we see that allegedly Damon Jones, who was 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, uh, being with, with LeBron James allegedly, being at the center of the biggest gambling scandal in the history of the NBA, this side of allegedly Tim Donahue, right? And so you have, you have this.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  The Tim, by the way, the Tim Donahue, not to bring, but not to interrupt you, but the Tim Donahue 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 intact, 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 Rozier and Jontay 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.

• 35:25Pablo Torre?

  Unusual betting activity on obscure players.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  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 the 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 is this guy want to bet on Terry Rozier's 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.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  So that's like the dumbest way to cheat.

• 36:14Pablo Torre?

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

• 36:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:25Pablo Torre?

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

• 36:28Speaker 01

  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 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 this is a successful way to point shave and not get caught. We were very fortunate that Rozier allegedly chose this message. Not everyone will be as foolish as he was allegedly. That's what I wrote.

• 36:51Pablo Torre?

  Who did you send that to?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  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 your sport as well as making sure the integrity is as highest level.

• 37:12Speaker 02

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• 37:50Pablo 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 profited off of too.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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, oof, 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 would always want to take a deck home with me.

• 38:39Pablo Torre?

  Because?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:49Pablo Torre?

  The Deck Master, yes, that's right. The Rig Shuffler, yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Rig Shuffler, which that's something that I wouldn't, if like, the last time I played a home poker, I knew that that deck had the ability to do that. I didn't realize the level of which 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 deck made to in seat one or seat whatever, and just plug something into the USB. That's something that would get me.

• 39:23Pablo Torre?

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

• 39:28Speaker 01

  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, 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 was then giving him the information this year. 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 been people who want to cheat.

• 40:03Pablo Torre?

  I mean, 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.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  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?

• 40:28Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  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,

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I immediately, I'm 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.

• 40:47Pablo Torre?

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

• 40:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:55Pablo Torre?

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

• 41:11Speaker 01

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

• 41:16Pablo Torre?

  But, but, but the premise.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  These people are just like so, I mean, I don't have, like, bad mouth the kids who lost money playing poker, but like, come on, like.

• 41:25Pablo Torre?

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

• 41:30Speaker 01

  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, like.

• 41:43Pablo Torre?

  But isn't the theory that you think, you hypothetical poker player, think you can absolutely pants the NBA guy?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  But how much money are they gonna lose, is like, my thing, like, like?

• 41:56Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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 a, on a Dan Lebatard show, curiously, interestingly enough, but Antoine Walker showed up literally with a garbage bag full of cash one day, and started playing.

• 42:16Pablo Torre?

  Antoine, oh no, friend of the show, Antoine Walker, had a garbage bag full of cash?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  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 ducked, he reached down and put more money on the table. I remember I paid, it was a 2550 game at the Bellagio in the Upper Limbourn area. I remember paying someone either five or $10,000, the buy-in was 5,000. I gave someone more than the buy-in to sit, to jump the list and take his seat. And with, because I saw the bag. I was like, standing over him, and I saw the bag, and everyone else was just like, he's only, Antoine's only sitting here 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 gonna be more money.

• 42:57Pablo Torre?

  Hold on, hold on. So in NBA betting, you were like, ooh, the bench, be 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.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I think it actually was a garbage bag. Like, I'm not even lying. I think it was like, like, 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 um, 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 the, just the, 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.

• 43:41Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  There was a scene in 2008, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 that had the poker guys, like Paul Pierce, for instance, was playing a lot back then. And there was, 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.

• 44:08Pablo 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 kinda 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, uh, I think we should legalize it and regulate it. Your position is what?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Legalized 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.

• 45:08Pablo 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.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  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. It shouldn't be like [bleep] 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.

• 45:53Pablo 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?

• 46:06Speaker 01

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

• 46:13Pablo 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.

• 46:49Speaker 01

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

• 46:55Pablo 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?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Europe, yeah, it's, it's bad. It's got the whole cancer, whatever thing.

• 47:16Pablo Torre?

  They 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. To me, it's always about disclosure. It's about here are the risks.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Okay, so you're gonna be inundated. People just click, like pornography's a good example. Like, you must be 18 years old. People know, but 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.

• 47:51Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  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 rigged games, point shave, share information. Like that, for sure, I believe, with 100% certainty.

• 48:03Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

• 48:07Pablo 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 teams. One legal and one illegal that both underperform on purpose.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Just think about this for a second. You have like the Tracy Billups 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 court of law.

• 49:24Pablo 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, basically.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Everyone in the league knows, every player in the league knows that tanking exists. And therefore, the integrity of the game is, it's just not, 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...

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Trying to get, you know, they did it with Tim Duncan and they did it again with Wemba Yama. 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 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, what's called LeBron's not playing. Might as well go out and get yours. Like, there's just no basis for integrity for the sport. There's

• 50:48Speaker 01

  no basis that the sport 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.

• 50:59Pablo 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, um, 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 gonna 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.

• 51:53Pablo Torre?

  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?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  They need to hire quants. What they need to do, what the NBA does, 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, and you're going to have NFL.

• 52:15Pablo Torre?

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

• 52:18Speaker 01

  I would hire quants to build models with the best available data that the NBA has to.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Look at the get 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 model using their data. But then it's like you're gonna do all of that and half of it's gonna be the teams that are tanking. And now you're gonna 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. Oh, okay. That's okay. That's cool.

• 52:58Pablo Torre?

  But that, but hold on, that 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.

• 53:17Speaker 01

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

• 53:20Pablo 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 what you would. If the M P were to say.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Focus on if I cared about the.

• 53:36Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Yeah. 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.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  There's several ways. You can 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. That's more.

• 53:51Pablo Torre?

  Mike Zarin Celtics, uh, exactly.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Mike Zarin's wheel thing is not bad.

• 53:56Pablo Torre?

  Wheel thing. Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  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 salary, 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, 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 what the max is for his contract. Like, like the level of creativity that's required to build the team in, in American sports is, 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.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Jeopardizing your golden goose gambling over there that you're so happy to

• 54:49Speaker 01

  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 like.

• 54:57Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  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 Wembanyama 125 of the year.

• 55:29Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:57Pablo Torre?

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

• 56:03Speaker 01

  But I think also, like, honestly, like, I know you're not big on this, but like,

• 56:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:23Pablo 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.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Oh, do we start with the ticker? Let's just remove the ticker at the bottom with the gambling odds.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  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, 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 claw your way up, but.

• 56:58Pablo Torre?

  That's right. Now that now that you can you can pull the ladder out from everyone else.

• 57:03Speaker 01

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

• 57:05Pablo Torre?

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

• 57:14Speaker 01

  That I had collecting and pulling up from everybody.

• 57:16Pablo Torre?

  That otherwise, young men across America were gonna use to become him.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:23Pablo Torre?

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

• 57:29Speaker 01

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

• 57:34Pablo Torre?

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

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Whole different conversation I'm not going down.

• 57:52Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 57:58Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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