He made $100m betting on the NBA… here’s how

**Haralabos Voulgaris** (0:00)
This was the biggest, greatest edge in the history of gambling edges, I can promise you. But I've never uttered this in public to anyone ever before.

**Shaan Puri** (0:07)
You want to nuke it? Let's nuke it.
So we got to tell your story because your story is... You basically did what me and probably 50% of other young guys wanted to do in their life. It's like, oh, what if I could take a few thousand dollars, find an edge, beat the house in Vegas and turn a few thousand dollars into millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, and ultimately, I believe, over hundreds of millions of dollars, not by counting cards in Blackjack, first by sports betting. And then you get recruited by Mark Cuban to go work for an NBA team at one point, you're now on your own soccer club. So you've had this really cool life and career.

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
You're like a comic book character.

**Shaan Puri** (0:54)
Yeah, you're like your man cave came to life, you know, like it worked. So that's dope. But, you know, of course, no story is perfect. You know, there's ups and downs and it's not all not like you planned it out this way. But what we like most on this podcast, this podcast, mostly a business podcast, so somebody comes on and they tell us about their company or their investments or whatever. And but what we like most is people who play their own game. What I like about you is you play your own game. You're a pretty independent thinker. And so I want to kind of walk through the story.
So what I'll call Chapter 1 is stumbling into gambling and figuring out how to have that edge. Can you tell a little bit about that story? Because I think I know a little bit of it, but I know, Sam, you don't know any of that story, right? Like how he first got and made a name for himself doing this.

**Haralabos Voulgaris** (1:40)
No. Yeah, I mean, I grew up around gambling. My dad was, I use the term unsuccessful gambler. Some people might refer to it as degenerate. He was someone who gambled a lot unsuccessfully.
And, you know, had a lot of, caused a lot of problems in our family. Not the sugar coat, it was bad. But I grew up around the horse racetrack. And I grew up around watching football, NFL football on Sunday, basically trying to like help my dad make picks.

**Sam Parr** (2:06)
What city?

**Haralabos Voulgaris** (2:08)
I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. So I was at the Astiniboya Downs racetrack from, I guess it was every Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, for most of my teenage years, I would say, 12 to 16, 17, 18 And so, yeah, I just kind of was around. That's how I kind of, and I always thought it was rather interesting. I also saw like, first thing I didn't realize when I was younger was just how it was near impossible to beat the horses just because of the takeout. The VIG is so high. It's like 30 to 36 percent. They got to pay for everything, the stables, the horse approvals, all of it. But I just thought, well, these people don't know what they're doing.
They have no process. They don't know what's happening.
They're very emotional. I grew up, I'm a Greek family. So you would hear these people, they just were not in control of their emotions in any way. They would be upset when they win, they would be upset when they lose, they would be arguing with each other. They'd have, I'm very low key. So to me, it was very different for me.

**Sam Parr** (3:08)
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**Haralabos Voulgaris** (3:40)
So that's how I got started. And then at some point, after I graduated from high school, I went to Vegas with my dad. He was there and I went there for like a month or so.

**Sam Parr** (3:52)
He was there gambling?

**Haralabos Voulgaris** (3:55)
Yeah, my dad was, it was daylight hours and he had money in his pocket, he was gambling.

**Sam Parr** (4:02)
What was his occupation?