Gambling on sports has never been high-stakes or more accessible. But with the invasion of businesses in the game, the experts are feeling routinely getting banned from plying their trade and squeezed. Is this the ending of the sports bettor?
I am not a bookmaker,” Gadoon Kyrollos informs me as we walk throughout the Hard Rock Casino in Atlantic City, enjoying with penny slot machines. “I am a sports bettor.” Kyrollos is actually one of the sports bettors in the United States. He bets millions of dollars each year on sporting events, to the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest from NFL games. He is known throughout the world by the name Spanky, and in back pack, sweatpants, and his hoodie, he looks like a variant of the Little Rascal. His back pack is not currently carrying snacks and school books. It’s full of bricks of money.
“Bookmakers hang on a few,” he explains, as he pantomimes holding a gun sight up to his attention and pulling the trigger. “And I snipe’em.”
Regardless of the bag full of money, Spanky is transfixed from the penny slot machine, pumping one invoice into it after the next. On his cellphone he consults a recorder which tells him how to play this specific machine so that it is”plus EV,” or positive expected value, meaning that the player has an edge over the system over time. “Here is some true insider shit I am showing you here,” he tells me, referring to his spreadsheet, which has formulas for heaps of slot machines plugged in to it. “I mean, it is likely a border of, like, $12, but if you were walking down the road and saw $12, you’d bend down and pick this up, right?”
It’s important to Spanky that I know the difference between bookmaking and gambling, since a lot of folks do not understand or appreciate the distinction, such as the Queens district attorney, who charged Spanky with bookmaking at 2012, a fee he says originated from a widespread misunderstanding of the enterprise.

Read more: timeswireservice.com