He says he advised his co-owner client on several trades. Poker Classic. It wasn’t just a streak of bad luck, a series of randomly unfavorable outcomes that could last only so long. A man of no fixed address, he dated models and traveled the world. 1. “It’s good to have goals in life, no matter how unrealistic,” Voulgaris says with a wry grin. Walters, Kent and their syndicates stood basically alone until the late 1990s, when PCs became powerful enough to do the computation work required by predictive models, and more data became available to feed them. Negreanu earns another Deflection Badge of Honor. Click here to watch ‘Jalen & Jacoby,’ Grantland Features, and video podcasts! If his return on investment (ROI) fell from 20 percent to, say, 5 percent, that was okay. It is a paradoxical quest. What stood out was Haralabob's detachment. “He would just hold up a newspaper and get a feel for what he wanted to bet. Between the statistical analysis, the algorithms and the programming, it took two years to create their first model, version 1.0. At times they wagered together. Analytics and predictive modeling had “always fascinated me,” he says. Bob), made betting look easy, exploiting inaccurate odds on NBA points totals.. For five years, Bob made an absurd amount of money with a winning rate of almost 70% at one point! Voulgaris at another Poker event. He found a flaw in the bookies prices where the total points for the first and second half of NBA games were exactly half of the predicted game total. When he returned to gambling for the 2010-11 season, Voulgaris says Ewing clocked an ROI of more than 6 percent. Six months later, the Lakers lifted the NBA Championship and Bob’s sports betting journey took off! “We’re probably already at the point where my capability to make money is decreasing every year,” he says. Each player has two values -- on offense and as a defender -- and those values are constantly changing. At the time, though, he was going up against green-eyeshade bookmakers armed with nothing more than adding machines and intuition. Way, way, way back when I first started this blog, Haralabos Voulgaris was one of the very first poker pros about whom I wrote a post. Credit: Danny Maxwell. Maybe, he muses at one point, it will be that sports gambling is someday legalized throughout the U.S., which will unleash a thundering flood of square money from casual bettors, exponentially increasing the liquidity in the market. He couldn’t join his father on the casino floor for his blackjack sessions; he was 18 and underage. I mean, it was a joke, it was so easy.”, In retrospect, he regrets only not having bet more aggressively during this halcyon period. Ewing, Van Gundy, Morey. It all had to do with how most bookmakers set their halftime totals, the predicted number of points scored in each half of the game. As Bob’s father was a passionate gambler, it explains why Haralabos Voulgaris showed so much interest in … He needed the help of a new machine. A single human mind would be overwhelmed by the workload; only a computer program could handle it. He lost a third of his bankroll in the final month of the 2003-04 season alone. Voulgaris chose the right moment to start building a predictive model for NBA games. In 2007 the Whiz basically spun his wheels striving to build a model on his own during his first offseason in Voulgaris’ employ. He wanted to burnish his bona fides as a quantitative basketball expert. Indeed, while the wide availability of information in the Internet age and exponential increase in computer processing power have given rise to the sports gambling quant, those very same factors have made the pursuit of a sustainable edge that much more quixotic. Five months later and his time in the NBA was over, resulting in Voulgaris returning to the betting arena after he felt a sense of exclusion by the co-owner of the franchise. Du kannst deine Tweets vom Web aus und über Drittapplikationen mit einem Standort versehen, wie z.B. The elder Voulgaris … I recently finished a re-read of Charlie Munger; The Complete Investor and one big takeaway from that book was how rational Munger is. Further number-crunching revealed that different types of players, based on position and size, will reach their zeniths at different ages and on trajectories that are possible to predict. By 2011-12, it had fallen to 5.14 percent. “I mean, I don’t want to sit here and brag,” he says. Bob talks about his sports betting past, a little bit of what he's been up to since then (crypto etc.) Traditionally in any game of Basketball, more points are scored in the second half as teams use more fouls and time-outs, which results in further possessions and higher scores. So he spent most of his time in the Caesars sportsbook. Of course, the lockout-shortened season made for a bizarre outlier year, and Voulgaris and the Whiz had to adjust. From here, he orchestrates his wagering: Ewing spits out a projected score and a number representing its level of confidence for each potential wager. People are empathetic to drug addicts, but consider gambling addicts fools/deadbeats. #talent || Looking at the Trademate Sports user data, All the proof you need that Trademate Sports is profitable, Trademate user data proves more trades = more profits. The stats nerds have no chance of ever becoming general managers. Their models (and their identities) are shrouded in secrecy. He won’t quantify exactly how much he gave back to the bookmakers all told except to describe it as a catastrophic time. This is a lifestyle not exactly conducive to relationships: He partly attributes his recent breakup with a girlfriend of five years to his odd hours during the season. Then it would need to judge the likeliest outcome of each possession: Score or no score; one point, two points or three; micro-forecasts ascertained from historical performance data. Mulling things over, he realized he needed a new approach. Exasperated, his patience gone, he started to “tilt,” boosting the volume of his wagers in an effort to win back what he’d already lost. They’re just being used as a resource to mine.” At the end of the contract’s term, in the summer of 2010, Voulgaris decided to end his NBA flirtation and go back to being a gambler. and how he manages his life and work. His ROI was slowly decreasing year on year, meaning he would have to take an even higher volume approach to his betting, but he felt he was delaying the inevitable. He has had contact with other NBA executives; he has met, for example, Daryl Morey. He is a playwright, holds a degree in philosophy, and his goals reach far beyond the green felt. “But this is literally, like, the greatest thing ever when it comes to sports betting.”, Despite believing himself to be in possession of the world’s most lethal gambling device, Voulgaris, in the middle of Ewing’s second season on the job, nearly walked away from it all. After five years of success, Bob hit the wall in 2004 when he went on a long run of losses, losing a third of his bankroll in one month. The relationship got off to a rocky start. “If you think about it,” he says, “you’d be a slave to the game of basketball otherwise.”. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's March 4 Analytics issue. It would also have to take into account a vast number of potential occurrences, each missed shot or successful rebound creating the possibility of still other occurrences -- a garden of explosively forking paths, as if in parallel universes. Like a lot of pro sports bettors, Voulgaris has also dabbled in the world of poker, finishing fourth in the 2017 World Series of Poker’s Big One, bring his live winnings to $3 million. Voulgaris’ confidence in his model has only increased since then, and has described Ewing as the “greatest thing ever when it comes to sports betting.”. 2.28K. Haralabos Voulgaris ('Haralabob') joined Bill Simmons for a Round 1 Playoffs basketball podcast. “Don’t write ‘degenerate,’ ” Voulgaris tells me. Now, says Voulgaris, they’ve adjusted Ewing so that it predicts the player most likely to be fouled on any given individual possession, then uses that player’s specific free throw percentage to run its simulation. For starters, Haralabob reveals he could have bought up to 3% in Full Tilt in 2004 but declined after meeting “buffoon" Ray Bitar. “There’s a real disconnect between the basketball people, the business people and the -- for lack of a better word -- stats nerds. The reality is that a … Yet, there are others, such as Haralabos Voulgaris who was betting millions on NBA games because he had spotted a flaw in the way sportsbooks set halftime lines. That database, less intricate than the other two, they at times jokingly referred to as Morey, as in Daryl Morey, the quant-minded GM of the Rockets. But incredibly, bookmakers at the time didn’t account for this fact; they simply arrived at a total for the full game and cut that figure roughly down the middle, assigning some 50 percent of the points to the first half and 50 percent to the second. One veteran Las Vegas handicapper, who goes by the pseudonym Steve Fezzik, laments, “They’ve left me, and others like me, in the dark ages.” Bayesian methods, Monte Carlo methods, Markov chains, k-nearest neighbor algorithms, Chapman-Kolmogorov equations -- the key advances in statistical analysis, probability theory and predictive modeling have been marshaled toward the object of beating the bookies out of a dime. Haralabos "Bob" Voulgaris (born April 7, 1975) is a Greek Canadian former professional gambler, primarily a sports bettor and current Director of Quantitative ... en.wikipedia.org In a season, he now regularly puts down well over 1,000 individual bets. In more advanced versions of Ewing, they would jettison this primitive free throw method. The elder Voulgaris had risen from poverty to become a successful Winnipeg entrepreneur. Rival gamblers spot the same edges -- or copy them -- and bet the line back to plumb. They’re learning the right way to make a line. The prospect makes Voulgaris as giddy as it’s possible for him to be. I found it interesting that the Lakers one of the few Western Conference team (i think) to not send a representative to SSAC .. And then I read an article that Kevin Ding has written detailing how the Lakers have tweaked their defense to adjust to the modern game. When they finished, they called it Ewing. He was also, his son now suggests, the consummate square. Responding specifically to the money they saw Voulgaris minting -- though, for the most part, they didn’t yet know the identity of the gambler winning with such consistency -- they forever altered the method by which they set their NBA halftime totals. Voulgaris has only a blurry eye on his own future; Ewing’s simulations can’t help with that sort of prediction. — Haralabos Voulgaris (@haralabob) September 20, 2012 I tell ya what gotta love this edog, gets a 2m loan, receives 4m by mistake, and is still broke enough to file for bankruptcy. So Voulgaris and the Whiz created, for Ewing, an aging component. Subscribe today! Nevertheless, Voulgaris remembers those Vegas days fondly. “Every time you make a bet, you’re educating the people taking the bets. Player, coach, GM. Then he and his father made a trip to Las Vegas, where they lived for most of the next two months at Caesars Palace. Kent eventually moved to Las Vegas, where a betting syndicate -- the legendary Computer Group -- formed around his work, winning untold millions for its members well into the 1990s. “He was like, ‘You could be my GM someday; we can do this together.’ It was this whole spiel.”. Predictions. Voulgaris spent five months working for the NBA franchise. His net worth grew into the millions; he also happened to be an avid gambler. This time it was a blog post from Haralabos Voulgaris (linked below) calling out “Kid” Poker for his less then enthusiastic response to Erick Lindren being a deadbeat, broke dick. Bob made all of his sports betting fortunes from Basketball. But after the disastrous end to the 2004 season, with his edge gone, he decided that he should increase his betting frequency by an order of magnitude but decrease the sums he was putting at risk on each wager. The owner, according to Voulgaris, made certain alluring pledges. Home TagsHaralabos Voulgaris. He had begun betting on sports in the late 1990s, and within five years, before he had reached his 30th birthday, Voulgaris had accumulated a fortune. Like the advanced trading systems operating on Wall Street, the models used by this technologically adroit breed of sports bettor are sometimes called black boxes. Ewing betting model 4. The program would run tens of thousands of simulations for each matchup, discarding the most outlandish or improbable results. “Because Howard is a unique player, and you need a big to defend him.” Likewise, according to Voulgaris, Celtics seven-footer Jason Collins is “useless every game, except when he’s guarding Howard, which he does really, really well.” Player values also change across a season and a career. using sports betting principles, Article 10: The life story of Trademate’s co-founder, Jonas Gjelstad, Article 11: Alan Woods, the master of quantitative betting. The model, in other words, was recommending that Voulgaris bet the over in every single game. Arrogantly, after spending so much time watching and analysing Basketball, Bob believed he could put together a better squad than any general manager in the league. As time went on Bobs’ goals changed, especially after seeing Tony Bloom take over EPL side Brighton FC. Four years earlier, in the 2002-03 season, the league had for the first time made play-by-play information available to the public, whereas before only box scores were published. “If we’re wrong, we lose money. Haralabos Voulgaris - Wikipedia. I was reading a really great article recently about Haralabos Voulgaris who is well known for being a poker player in the states but also, more interestingly for us, a high rolling professional sports bettor.. The marketplace evolves. (Voulgaris has assured me that it wasn’t the Rockets he consulted for.) And with each passing year, their sophistication mounts. Since birth, he seems never to have lacked for self-confidence. Haralabos Voulgaris says DFS Players getting “Fleeced” We’ve all seen the countless commercials that play for DraftKings and FanDuel on a daily basis, where some smuck with a backwards baseball cap wins $1 million through a daily fantasy sports (DFS) tournament. And lose big. He made his fortune betting on Basketball and still continues to do the same to this very day. Some who formulate the opening lines (only a few still do so; all the others simply copycat) have engineered their own sophisticated models. They figure s -- out based on what you’ve already figured out.”, If, year after year, his margins are deteriorating, Voulgaris must increase the number of bets he makes in order to account for that slippage, just as he did when he moved from a subjective to a quant approach. Like their brethren inside hedge funds, these gamblers are known as quants. “You’re not even improving it so much as trying to stop it from getting worse.” Like a fund manager, he must cope with the fine line between ROI, the number of bets he makes and the natural volatility caused by the random. Voulgaris continued to bet subjectively, marking time until the model was ready. Kent fed his algorithms, inscribed on punch cards, into a rented mainframe that had less processing speed than today’s high-end laptops. But Voulgaris had something in mind, “a long project, like a six-month-long project, to model a certain part of the game of basketball.” He and the Whiz spent the offseason pursuing this mysterious project, the precise nature of which Voulgaris will not discuss. Billy Walters, a core member of the Computer Group, has, however, stayed in the game; he now has a staff of consulting mathematicians who have built advanced predictive models to project scores. As a preteen, he had won national math contests; he had been the subject of awestruck articles in major newspapers. Another chapter in the life of Bob, who is now working for Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban, in the hope of finding a statistical edge for the NBA franchise. Asher Potu August 2, 2019. Already he sensed the inevitable. Instead, he’s a highly successful sports bettor who offers strategy bits through interviews and TV appearances. The bookmakers, meanwhile, have joined the quantitative battle. His eyes flit. During the NBA regular season, which he splits between any number of North American and international ports of call, he watches as many games as he can, clocking more than 80 hours a week. Voulgaris’ biography 2. From the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s, Haralabos Voulgaris (a.k.a. The betting public, square though it may be, is better informed than ever before: Reams of team and player statistics reside in the cloud, awaiting download. The post was titled “Hilarious Haralabos.” In fact, looking back I think that was probably … From the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s, Haralabos Voulgaris (a.k.a. Haralabos "Bob" Voulgaris started betting on the NBA in the late 1990s. He made millions exploiting his edge of observing game-management tendencies by three head coaches, Eddie Jordan , Jerry Sloan , and Byron Scott . Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street trading firm, started a division called Cantor Gaming in 2008 to operate a sportsbook business in Las Vegas, then acquired the consulting firm that had been the oddsmaker of record for the gambling world. Van Gundy, in turn, required its own feeder tool, one that would track the overall roster patterns for each team, the trades, the draft picks, the midseason player-acquisition tendencies. He's one of very few people -- Voulgaris estimates there may be as few as four or five -- who have achieved a high level of success betting full-time on the NBA. Even then, as a pup bettor, he had a dim view of this group: “Most people who are in a sportsbook in Las Vegas spouting their opinions are morons.” His father would join him at night. This poker tyro brings a lot more to his first WPT final table than meets the eye. He had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT when he was in seventh grade. To stay in shape, he doesn’t consume food after nightfall. It would be a black box -- prophecy as output. If we’re right, we make money.”. If Ewing has a secret sauce, it’s just this sort of thing: Finding scraps of information, sliced and diced ever more finely, that reveal something about how a system -- in this case, a game of pro basketball -- will operate in the future. 5. But while many people, if faced with Voulgaris’ early experiences, might have renounced the gambling life with the fervor of a prohibitionist, Voulgaris seems to have gleaned a kind of edge from it. Bob), made betting look easy, exploiting inaccurate odds on NBA points totals. "Voulgaris says his father went broke twice, both times sending the family into near destitution. They called that model Van Gundy. Work at Mavericks 4.1. In truth, though, what Voulgaris says he missed most during his five-month hiatus from gambling was the gamble itself: “I was bored out of my tree.” Little wonder, given the frisson of his betting sessions. Years later and fresh out of college, Bob put all of his life's learnings AND savings on one bet: the Shaq/Kobe Lakers to win the 2000 NBA Championship. But he also felt excluded, held at arm’s length. Tag Archives: Haralabos Voulgaris. “Unless you know what you’re doing.” By the time the younger Voulgaris was enrolled at the University of Manitoba, working as a skycap at the airport and betting small amounts on the NBA and CFL, he and his brother -- two of four siblings in all -- were paying their parents’ rent. “I’d always wanted to have a model of sorts.” Throughout his career, Voulgaris had been what is known as a subjective bettor, albeit one so astute that he became a whale. Voulgaris does not wish to have the name of this math whiz appear in print, presumably out of fear that some rival will attempt to find the whiz -- let’s call him the Whiz -- and poach him. ESPN’s Scott Eden wrote a feature on Voulgaris in 2013. Haralabos Voulgaris Poker Spieler Profil. when I visit him at the house he was then renting in the Hollywood Hills for $12,500 a month. In one unguarded moment, he tells me, “You can’t do this forever.”, When I visit him in LA over the summer, he and the Whiz are working to finish several potential alterations to Ewing, incorporating offseason player movements and adjusting the model to account for the weird data produced by the 2011-12 campaign. Check out our other articles in the 10 People Who Got Rich On Sports Betting series: Article 1: Brighton FC owner Tony ‘Lizard’ Bloom, Article 2: Brentford FC owner Matthew ‘Moneyball’ Benham, Article 4: Horse Racing millionaire Bill Benter left $118 million in Hong Kong, Article 5: Card-counter Edward Thorp was nearly killed by a casino, Article 6: From the most feared sports bettor in the world to prison, Billy Walters, Article 7: Australian Zeljko Ranogajec who sent a betting exchange bankrupt, Article 8: Taking the emotion out of betting, the story of Jeff Ma, Article 9: James Holzhauer made $2.4M on Jeopardy! “The marketplace will always catch up.”. By the middle of the 2012-13 season, Voulgaris will only say, “This has been one of the more difficult years.”. The quant revolution in sports at large has brought these two worlds closer together than ever before, at least intellectually. From the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s, Haralabos Voulgaris (a.k.a. Take a look at some of these videos/articles: Jonas Gjelstad Documentary Series - from 10k to 1m. Haralabos Voulgaris. He would have dreams, with, like, numbers and colors in them, and that would influence him.” Voulgaris says his father went broke twice, both times sending the family into near destitution. At the time of his interview with Voulgaris, he had just quit a high-paying job designing algorithms for an East Coast hedge fund with a roster of Nobel-grade quant talent. When Voulgaris was 18, he took a gap year between high school and college. The predictive tool will end up responding in a very predictable way: Its margins will continue to narrow. As his move to the NBA suggests, there is today much common currency between the analytical work of the sports gambler and that of an increasing number of professional teams’ front offices; one of the chief goals of both, after all, is to value players. Haralabos Voulgaris leads a rare life. Bob’s father was an avid gambler, which was the reason for this interest in the betting world. Then he and his father made a trip to Las Vegas, where they lived for most of the next two months at Caesars Palace. Early Wednesday morning, Haralabos Voulgaris, a former professional poker player who is considered to be one of the best NBA handicappers in the world, posted a blog … (Voulgaris’ legal first name is Haralabos.) When Ewing went live with actual betting for the first time toward the end of the 2008 season, Voulgaris was not yet sold on its powers. Haralabos Voulgaris says DFS Players getting “Fleeced” Tuesday, October 13th, 2015 We’ve all seen the countless commercials that play for DraftKings and FanDuel on a daily basis, where some smuck with a backwards baseball cap wins $1 million through a … Voulgaris was well aware of these predecessors. This trove of fresh information had no immediate practical value, except perhaps to assuage fan curiosity. (Voulgaris’ legal first name is Haralabos.) Case in point: One of Ewing’s most important functions is to assign values to players. Every score the model spit out was higher than the average lines produced by the bookmakers -- the standard by which they would be judging themselves. As with everything Voulgaris does, it was a calculated move. Soon after announcing Ewing’s profound success, Bob then took a break from betting to work as an advisor on player trades for an anonymous NBA franchise. Like baseball after sabermetrics, like Wall Street in the 1970s, sports gambling over the past decade has undergone a quantitative revolution. • If you're into sports or you're just a Haralabos Voulgaris groupie this video from the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is a must-watch. He has the canny, quick-minded air of a merchant in a bazaar in the Eastern Mediterranean. A specialist in the NBA, his sports gambling success was almost completely the result of a kind of studied perspicacity, born of a talent for pattern recognition and the stamina to watch uncountable hours of televised basketball. And the only market that’s liquid with money flows in the billions is the betting line, where opinions have a daily price. May 20, 2007. Gus Hansen and Haralabos Voulgaris are interviewed by Tournament Director Matt Savage on break from the 2010 LA Poker Classic Main Event. • "High Maintenance" is a funny, well-done web series about the life of a marijuana delivery man. Even though Bob had the aspiration to own a basketball team, he took on the role of Director of Quantitative Research and Development for the Dallas Mavericks in 2018. If not maybe all.”, In pursuit of this, in 2010 Voulgaris broke one of the cardinal rules of the sharp sports bettor: He sought publicity, conducting interviews with gambling and NBA-centric blogs. And that’s when Voulgaris started to lose. He developed commercial real estate; he owned and operated a Greek restaurant called Hermes -- the patron god of (among other things) games, sports and sudden enrichment. By the time he was 25 he had amassed a fortune and was regularly placing $1,000,000 in bets during a single day of NBA games. The more he wagers, the more he courts ruin. The way he sees it, the best and perhaps the only way to test one’s theories about player value is to take those theories to market. Discover and follow Haralabos Voulgaris on the poker social network: and international ranking, results, tournaments, blog, pictures and endorsements.
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