Gambler: Secrets From a Life at Risk
by Billy Walters (Avid Reader, $35)
“Billy Walters is a complicated character,” said Rick Maese in The Washington Post. “Regarded as perhaps the most successful sports bettor the country has known,” the humbly born 77-year-old Kentucky native is also a convict, a philanthropist, and a friend to celebrities, billionaires, and politicians. In his best-selling new autobiography, he maintains that he was innocent of the insider-trading charges that in 2018 put him in prison for 31 months. “He has spent a lifetime among pool hustlers, card sharks, down-on-their-luck gamblers, and desperate addicts.” He was also chased for decades by prosecutors who suspected his gambling operations were criminal but failed to prove it. But he appears to be singularly disappointed in golf legend Phil Mickelson, a former friend and gambling partner whose name has won the book most of its headlines.
Walters’ life makes for “an extraordinary rags-to-riches tale,” said Tom Kershaw in The Sunday Times (U.K.). He was 9 when he made his first all-or-nothing bet, a $125 wager on the 1955 World Series that he lost. But the kid, who’d been raised in a home without running water, was hooked on the thrill. He became a top car salesman at 19, was known as the biggest gambler in Louisville by 20, and was busted for bookmaking in his 30s, forcing a move to Las Vegas. There, he joined a betting syndicate, the Computer Group, that used analytics to identify favorable betting odds and raked in tens of millions in annual winnings. In his account of the journey, the confessed former problem drinker “doesn’t attempt to varnish all his own flaws.” Yet Mickelson comes off worse.
Walters’ chief gripe against Mickelson is that the golfer passed up an opportunity to testify on his behalf in the insider-trading trial, said Andrew Beaton in The Wall Street Journal. Two of Walters’ adult children died during their father’s subsequent brief prison stay. But news outlets have taken more interest in Walters’ claims, thus far undisputed, that Mickelson bet more than $1 billion on sports in the past 30 years, probably endured losses above $100 million, and once even tried to place a $400,000 wager on a Ryder Cup tournament he was playing in. “Shockingly,” Walters also devotes several chapters to explaining his own gambling methods, said Ryan D’Agostino in Men’s Health.
But don’t get too excited about that. Once amateur gamblers see “the sheer number of data points” and the complex computations behind Walters’ bets, “most will come away with the crushing realization that they could never, ever do it themselves.”