The “Greek Freak” Giannis Antetokounmpo became only the second European player to win the coveted NBA Most Valuable Player Award after the NBA season 2018-19. Perhaps it is not a wonder that the person widely acknowledged as the best basketball bettor in the world has also Greek family roots.
Meet Haralabos Voulgaris, Greek Canadian sports bettor and current Director of Quantitative Research and Development for the NBA team Dallas Mavericks. “Bob” Voulgaris is widely considered one of the most prolific bettors in the world.
After high school, Voulgaris left his native Canada to travel on a gap year. His destination was Las Vegas, where he and his father basically lived at the legendary Caesars Palace. Voulgaris senior was an entrepreneur running restaurants, and also a keen gambler. In Las Vegas Bob was watching NBA games while his father played blackjack.
A few years Bob, who had just graduated from college, was investigating NBA Championship odds season 1999-2000. The 6.5-1 odds for the Lakers with Shaq and Kobe Bryant seemed too good to be true, even though the previous season they were eliminated in conference semifinals against San Antonio Spurs in four straight games.
Voulgaris put his life savings of $70,000 on the line. Six months later, he was $500,000 richer. He won big again the next season when Lakers repeated their title.
After these early big wins Voulgaris started focusing on individual games, betting on hundreds of games per season, often on quarter and half totals as he noticed systematic errors in bookmakers odds that did not take into account the differences in scoring expectations among quarters and halves.
Voulgaris’ story illustrates how successful bettors need to develop all the time in order to retain their edge against the market and bookmakers. The market caught on and Voulgaris had to change. He hired a quantitative analyst from a hedge fund in 2017 and together they began to build a model simulating the most likely outcomes of each NBA game.
Voulgaris and his partner developed the model for over two ears, after which they totally crushed the market during the second half of the 2009 season. At that point they were betting over $1 million in a single day on the NBA, and on over 1000 games during the season.
Voulgaris attributes his success to his work mentality and claims that he is watching more basketball than any human in the world. While living the life every pro and amateur sports gambler is dreaming of, his life revolved almost exclusively around watching games, binge watching basketball for more than 80 hours every week.
For the 2009-10 season he took a break from gambling and started advising NBA team, as another step towards accomplishing his big dream: one day becoming a General Manager of an NBA team. However, time was not yet ripe for the quantitative revolution of basketball and Voulgaris soon returned to betting. Besides basketball betting, Bob enjoys poker and has collected several big prizes including finishing fourth in the World Series of Poker’s Big One for the Drop $1 million buy-in event in 2017. His lifetime winnings as poker player exceed $3 million, including multiple money finishes and two final table finishes at World Poker Tour events.
Voulgaris may now be again closer to his ultimate dream, as NBA team Dallas Mavericks and its billionaire owner Mark Cuban hired the legendary bettor as consultant. Time will show whether Voulgaris can repeat what another legendary gambler, Tony Bloom has achieved with the English football team Brighton & Hove Albion.