We continue our series looking at great professional gamblers of past and present with a look at Billy Walters – who is estimated to have won £200 million gambling.

William “Billy” Walters has said that there is nothing he wouldn’t bet on. To prove it, he’s had a distinguished and varied gambling career for over three decades. Professional gamblers consider him the most successful gambler in the world. He has never had a losing year.

Gambling has made Billy a very rich man. He owns seven homes and his fortune is worth $200 million. But Billy’s life wasn’t always so glamorous or rich. Billy spent his childhood in Mumfordville, Kentucky. Raised by his grandmother, he lived in a house without indoor plumbing. He came by his gambling prowess naturally: his dad was a poker player and his uncle was a professional gambler. While other kids played basketball on the playground, Billy bet on the pro games. Billy lost bets but he never lost the love of the wager.

A Step Ahead of the Game – the Computer Group

In the 1980s he was selling cars in Kentucky but decided to become a bookie. That was an illegal enterprise in Kentucky so he moved to Vegas where gambling is the heart of the culture and the economy. This was at a time before the internet took shape but that didn’t stop Billy from becoming one of the first gamblers to use computers to formulate strategy around bets. He was part of a gambling group called the Computer Group. These innovative gamblers fed all the information they compiled from newspapers and other leads about gambling into a computer. They were so successful, the Vegas authorities thought they were running an illegal gaming operation.

Although Billy may have come by his gambling desire naturally in his DNA, we can trace his success to his love of research. One of his most successful gambling moments came about because he learned that the Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, used an older roulette wheel than other establishments. That wheel had a bias toward paying off on certain numbers. Billy gambled on his research information and won millions from the Golden Nugget in 1986.

Public Information Only

Today, Billy bets so successfully on football and basketball that Vegas is afraid of his bets. He still relies on research but he has sports analysts who help him now with that chore. Despite rumors of insider information, he maintains that he relies on public information for his betting. It’s a pretty sure bet that a lot of the sports intelligence that would help with betting strategy (like injuries, etc.) is available online. He keeps all of his analysts/partners and associates separate. They do not know each other and he doesn’t place his bets personally.

Of course, Billy wouldn’t be much of an inveterate gambler if he limited himself to sports betting. He also bets at the casinos on craps and blackjack and at the horse races. He wins at all of those activities. He says he has a 57% winning ratio. He has, however, made his fortune on sports betting. His super bowl bets alone have garnered him $3.5 million. He also won as much as $4 million on a single casino weekend.

The Power to Move Markets

Walters’ betting sometimes has a big effect on the payoff spread of various games. If he doesn’t like the payoff on the favourite, he will bet on the underdog until the bookies change the spread. Then, he’ll tell his associates to place his bet on the favorite at the margin he wanted. That is a gambler’s gambler.

Billy is so successful at gaming that he has become security conscious as an important part of his business. People try very hard to learn how he does what he does. They want his system. They invade his privacy. So he runs his business from his home via computer network and phone network, using code names to shield his identity. There’s a price to pay for success even for a gambler.

So there you have it – one of the most successful gamblers of all time and certainly a gambler for all occasions – Billy Walters.

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Following on from our article about Racetrack King Bill Benter, today we continue our series looking at the great figures of professional gambling with a look at Kerry Packer – Gambling’s Big Man. 

Australian Kerry Packer had an up and down life. He was born into one of Australia’s most wealthy and influential families, the scion of media barons. Yet he had severe problems with health, starting with polio and an iron lung in his youth and extending up to multiple heart attacks in later life. His relatively poor health was given as one reason for his relative estrangement from his father, who derided him for his poor health and anointed his brother the heir to the family media enterprise. When he died in 2006, though, Kerry Packer had certainly earned public respect. Australia held a state funeral at the Sydney Opera House.

Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer was among the world’s richest people. In 2004, his net worth equaled roughly $5.5 billion. Some of it he was born to. But much of it he earned through his own enterprise. At his death, notes the British newspaper The Guardian, he had “transformed a magazine and television business worth millions into a diversified enterprise worth billions, (and) became his country’s richest person.” He was instrumental in founding World Series Cricket, for example, broadcasting it to people worldwide. This financial interest was fueled by his love of sport. Packer was an avid sportsman, participating in cricket, rugby, and golf, among other games.

Packer’s up and down life wasn’t confined to oscillations between poor health and a wealthy family, however. His gambling wins and losses were legendary. At the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, for example, Packer at one point could count nearly A$33 million in winnings. Yet during another Las Vegas trip, he lost more than $27 million. Packer visited Britain on a nearly annual basis to play in professional gambling events, where he often won approximately $7 million. (Most of these winnings went to charities.)

And the up and down nature wasn’t confined to the U.S. or the U.K., certainly. He was an equally exuberant bettor on his home turf. According to one observer, Packer suffered huge losses in the late 1980s. During one race, the Golden Slipper at Rosehill, Packer bet $2 million on Christmas Tree, one of his horses. Christmas Tree lost, and so did Packer—a loss not confined to one horse, as his total losses equaled $7 million. But he won big as well. In the same period, he picked three winners in a row after betting $10 million.

Kerry Packer’s total bets on races are estimated to have sometimes neared $60 million. Over 3 days in the early 1990s, for example, he is rumored to have lost $55 million on races. It should be noted that these losses were amounts he could afford to lose given his vast wealth. Indeed, The Guardian characterised his investment behaviour as “like the many successful sportsmen he admired, he had a developed sense of timing, and knew when to get in and out of investments to maximise his return.”

The size of the bets affected not only his winnings but activities at the tracks themselves. He traveled with a large entourage, and they in turn were followed by many at the track, wanting some information or rumor of where Packer was placing his wagers. In the words of one observer, “Packer’s bets were so large that they would immediately make a horse unbackable, as the odds dropped steeply as the bookies attempted to balance their books.”

Stories of Packer’s outsize horse racing behavior abound. In one, he had his own horse, Major Drive in a 1980s race, yet bet another horse, Myocard. Myocard lost Packer $7 million—yet he still invited Major Drive’s jockey, Greg Hall, to his Australian home and shook his hand for winning.  In another, he paid a bookmaker $5 million rather than the $5.3 million owed, growling that he only dealt in round figures.

Though Australian television featured interviews with many of Packer’s business associates, friends and family on the complicated nature of the man, there are indications that he liked speed and racing in all things. His one-time daughter-in-law Johdi Meares, for example, is quoted as saying “Kerry and I were both revheads and we shared a passion for fast cars. Kerry liked everything fast, you know and he liked to take risk, I think he enjoyed the adrenaline.” Similarly, his friend Phillip Adams noted “Kerry had to have the fastest car in Australia. He had to have the biggest, the loudest, the longest, whatever, of anything. And he’d take me for these terrifying drives around Sydney, shouting joyously over the engine like Mr Toad.”