Joe Rogan Experience - Billy Walters

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hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-02-25 14:43:58
Rating: 7.00

Notes:
Billy's 77 and it is good that he's telling stories before he gets much older. It's good to listen to the greats and respect that we stand on their shoulders and we advance from all of the work they did before us. That said Billy says some absolutely wild things in this podcast that are borderline insane. I’m just going to hope/believe he’s headfaking us with some of the things he says because I refuse to believe he believes some of the things he says.

7:00 - Billy agrees with Joe's interpretation of Billy's pool acumen as a "solid shortstop". I'm not a billiards guy, hadn't heard the term before, TIL.Basically a local who is too good for the locals, but not good enough to beat the traveling pros consistently.

8:30 - 1982, worked with one math guy, eventually added 6 more. Eventually worked with ~50 originators, all whom lost their edge eventually. Was spending $6-8 million in R&D every year allegedly. Says he's spending $1 mill on R&D now.

11:45 - Betting into NFL Thurs-Sun not earlier due to limits.

12:20 - "The NFL is the least vulnerable sport of all it's the toughest of all to beat in the world as a matter of fact most of the guys that gamble for a living they don't bet the NFL it's just too tough to beat." I'd like to point out that the pod I listened to just before this one (not reviewed yet for many, many reasons) had the guest say that the NFL market wasn't efficient, you could beat it at post and it's egotistical to think otherwise and that's just the duality of man I guess. Either that or there's possibly some other, more obvious explanation ...

14:00 - Billy sort of making the argument that bookmakers want equal action on both sides. Hmm.

18:15 - Gives props to Circa as a real bookmaker.

20:30 - Talks about a program they have built that scrapes all beat writers. Billy and I out here grinding the same way. Wonder which one is better.

23:00 - 1400 NFL players, 600 that are above replacement value (or have some value). I thought this was interesting because I’ve never actually looked to figure out what % of players are +replacement value, seems a tad high.

23:20 - OH NO BILLY. "We follow Dr David Chao quite a bit we think he does an excellent job." Is this the headfake of all headfakes? The "DD"? There's no way Billy can be serious and if he is it's time to get Billy to bed.

24:00 - Billy starts talking about his "Qualitative Guy". He knows all the players, what their value is (like he's Sean McVay naming off the Bears defense). "He watches every game and charts every play." Here we go again with the charting claims. I’m going to save my charting rant for another podcast review that’s upcoming, but the TLDR here is that as someone who has a team of 4-12 (fluctuates for very funny reasons) that’s been charting for 7 years now, some of these charting claims are just fantasy level claims. I’ll give Billy the benefit of the doubt that with his high R&D budget that he’s bridging the gap between reality and fantasy through capital investments in computer vision & already cleaned/checked data feeds.

25:45 - Talks about filtering out luck/variance from overall statistics gives the Aiyuk catch as an example.

26:30 - TJ Watt on/off talk. Billy's just like me fr fr.

33:30 - Biggest bet ever, 4.5 million - Saints to beat the Colts in the SB. Billy talks about making his fair without knowing what the line is and Rogan interjects with "WOAH, that's some high level sh*t!" and it's just high comedy.

36:15 - For the Colts/Saints SB, he thought the line was 7 points off. In the Super Bowl. Sure why not.

40:30 - Billy tells the story of the Arizona State NCAAM betting scandal and contacting Steve DuCharme about what he was seeing. It's wild how this one incident continues to pop up in my life as one of the guys convicted for this scandal ends up working with Reggie Fowler of Crypto Capital fame which is just an insane story of gas stations, bad loans and sex toys. Reggie Fowler goes on to blow up the AAF and crypto in 2018. If you don't know the Arizona State story, that's one to definitely read about. Says he said something to Gaming Control because he's protecting his business.

53:00 - PacMan being injured before the Mayweather fight, they bring up the concept of injury disclosure in MMA/combat sports. Interesting question.

15 minutes of meandering fight talk, none of it is particularly interesting.

1:11:00 - Joe asks BW what he went to jail for. BW hops around from the Ichan investigation, to Dean Foods to getting indicted for criminal conspiracy for betting in the 90s. Gets indicted 3 more times for similar charges.

1:18:10 - Not sure I knew that while BW was in prison his daughter committed suicide. Billy then does 10 minutes on prison vocational school efforts.

1:30:00 - goes through the Dean Foods stuff, obviously Billy's version which he gives in a very convincing manner.

1:56:00 - Brings up Phil Mickelson. Nothing we didn't already know, but hearing how Billy's demeanor changes is pretty telling.

2:19:00 - BW in a trunk of a car, robbed, inside job story. Says he's 99% sure he knows who did it. Mentions Sam Angel (RIP) who was a two time WSOP event winner, both in Razz, who was selling fake watches and jewelry. Robbers don’t steal Billy’s fake Rolex.

Ends the pod with a great quote talking about his prolific life -

"I got my money's worth, if it were all in tomorrow, I didn't get shortchanged".