Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2107 - Billy Walters
Uploaded: 2024-02-23T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2107 - Billy Walters' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2107 - Billy Walters' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2107 - Billy Walters

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's happening, Billy? Good to see you.
It's good seeing you, Joe. It's good being here. Thank you.
So you know George Knapp. That's crazy.
I do know George, yes.
Did you get involved in the whole UFO thing with him?
Not really. I knew George, got introduced to him, you know, the way he pays the
bills.
He covers the news in Las Vegas and does a lot of feature stories.
And that's how I met George.
And we've become good friends over the years.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for George and the work he does.
He's a great man.
Yeah.
A real good guy, too.
Did he cover your story?
George has covered a lot of stories involving me over the years.
I've been to Las Vegas.
I moved there permanently in 1982.
And since I've been there, I've been involved in a lot of different things,
indictments.
I did, I've done quite a bit of business there.
The biggest business mistakes I've probably made, I did some business there
with, I did some public-private partnerships with local government.
And I didn't make any money.
As a matter of fact, I lost quite a bit of money.
But I got quite a bit of notoriety that I wasn't looking for.
I got involved in a world that I didn't totally understand until I got into it.
I got into it for business and found myself wrapped up in a political world.
And that wasn't good.
They think gambling is a dirty business.
The political world, that's the real dirty business, right?
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I've met a lot of people over the years in that world and have a lot of respect
for some.
And, of course, I withhold my thoughts and comments about others.
That's a game that you don't want to bet on, right?
That is a rigged game.
Yeah, that's a pretty tough game.
That one there, that one's pretty much over before you get involved, I think,
most cases.
So I've been paying attention to your story, and it's pretty wild, man.
You essentially started gambling in a pool hall when you were about six years
old.
That's right, yeah.
That's a very young age to get the bug.
Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting how I got there.
You know, my father passed away when I was a year and a half old, and my mother
left to find work.
I was born and raised in a small rural town in central Kentucky, a little town
called Mumfordville.
And I was lucky.
I had two sisters who were older than me, and my grandmother on my father's
side took my oldest sister.
My aunt on my father's side took my other sister.
And my mother, my grandmother on my mother's side took me to raise me.
And luckily for me, I could have had four parents.
I couldn't have had a better role model than her.
She worked two jobs.
She was an extremely proud lady.
She wouldn't have taken any assistance from anyone if her life depended on it.
And so I learned a lot of things from her early on in life that have been
extremely important to me
and have kind of carried me through to where I'm at today.
And she worked these two jobs.
I mean, the first places, Joe, I ever went when I left my home were a Baptist
church.
You know, Sunday school on Sunday morning, you know, church afterwards,
training union on Sunday night, prayer meeting on Wednesday night.
And I went to a Christian youth organization on Sunday night called the Royal
Ambassadors.
But when I was around four, my grandmother, she had these two jobs.
And she had to have someone to keep an eye on me while my Uncle Harry had a
pool room.
So she started dropping me off at the pool room when I was four years old.
And my Uncle Harry, he went to the back pool table.
He put up a couple old wood and Coca-Cola cases, handed me a pool stick, and he
went back to work.
And I actually started banging pool balls when I was four.
And by the time I'm six, I'm racking balls in Uncle Harry's pool room and
playing penny nine ball.
My life when I was six, I'm in church five times a week.
And I'm in my Uncle Harry's pool room, and I just began the first grade.
So that was my life.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then you went on from that to be arguably one of the most successful gamblers
ever.
I did and I have.
Excuse me.
There's been a lot of ups and downs.
I've got a lot of knots on my head in between.
I'm sure.
But, you know, someone asked me how I became so good at gambling.
I told them I became good at it by losing.
And, you know, I think my life, Joe, when you kind of look back on it, the
thing that's sustained me has been perseverance.
You know, I learned from my grandmother at a very early age, you know, you don't
quit.
You know, if you make a commitment to anything, you keep it.
Come, you know, come hell or high water.
And so when I look back on my life and I look back through where I began in
gambling and, you know, where I'm at with it today, I literally almost can't
believe that sometimes I didn't quit.
And I tried to figure out, OK, why didn't I quit?
Well, the bottom line is I loved it.
I had a passion for it.
It was something that I really enjoyed doing.
I don't think there's any question in my mind.
At one time, I was addicted to it.
And then, of course, I was determined to be successful at it.
And fortunately, I was and am.
So talk me through how does it start?
So you're a little kid.
You're playing penny nine ball.
And then how does it go on to big million-dollar sports betting?
Well, I started off playing penny nine ball.
And by the time I was nine or ten, I'm playing, you know, five and five dollar
nine ball.
And and as I got older and I made more money, the amount of money I was
gambling for increased because I had more money to gamble with.
And then and as I became proficient at it, became good at it, it's like
anything that you want to do, that you're investing in, if you feel if you're
confident and basically certain that you're going to be successful, you want to,
you know, win as much as you can.
And as, you know, my bankroll got bigger, as the amount of money that I had to
bet with became bigger or got bigger, my bets became much larger.
And so there was a combination of confidence and access to capital and access
to markets.
So how good were you at pool?
I could beat all the local guys and like a solid shortstop.
Yeah, like a solid shortstop.
I couldn't beat a good player.
I played Alan Hopkins once.
Oh, no kidding.
He robbed me and I played Steve Maserick once and he robbed me, too.
I couldn't beat players of that caliber, but I could beat players that, you
know, local guys.
I was a solid shortstop.
That's a very good description, Joe.
I used to play a lot of pool.
Yeah, yeah.
When I lived in New York, I was playing eight hours a day.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
We probably know a few guys.
I'm sure.
I know Alan Hopkins.
Yeah.
And I met Steve Maserick once.
Yeah.
I played in a tournament with him in West End Billiards in New Jersey,
Elizabeth, New Jersey, in like 1990.
I used to go to Johnson City.
That was probably a little bit before your time.
Oh, I've heard of Johnson City.
That must have been amazing.
It was amazing.
And then, of course, you know, over the years, Ronnie Allen.
I'm sure you know Ronnie Allen.
Sure, sure.
There's—we probably know some of the same people, but I'm sure I was never as
good a player as you.
I quit playing pool when I was like 15, 16 years old.
And then you got into heavy sports betting.
What was, like, the first thing you really got into where you, like, had to do
research?
Because I know the way you would study, like, a team when you're placing bets,
very meticulous.
You're looking for injuries.
You're looking for every possible advantage.
You essentially had an algorithm before there was algorithms.
Well, actually, I got associated with a guy who had an algorithm, and I was
handicapped in sports, and I was doing it with a pencil, piece of paper, as
everyone else was at that time except one guy.
And I met this guy indirectly through others in the late 70s and became more
directly involved with him in 1982 when I moved to Las Vegas.
And then by the mid-'80s, he and I were sole partners.
The other people involved initially were all gone except he and I.
Then I realized, Joe, during that period of time that he was going to
eventually lose his edge.
And I recruited six other guys that had similar backgrounds to his.
And they did—you know, they did their analysis independent of what he was
doing.
The only person they talked to was me, and they provided me with their
information.
I knew each—I knew their strengths.
I knew their weaknesses.
And I would take a look at seven different pieces of information and then
decide what I was going to do.
And then over the years, like anything else, I got a little bit better at what
I did.
And luckily, you know, I've worked, Joe, over the years with probably a minimum
of 50 handicappers.
Every one of them have basically gotten to the point to where they couldn't win.
You know, in order to win handicapping, you have to come up with new ideas.
And you have to come up with new ideas that are relevant that mean something.
And because the people making line are getting smarter.
The competition is getting smarter.
So whatever edge you start off with, that's going to erode.
Other people are going to catch on, okay?
Well, over the years—and when I was in my heyday, I was spending $6 to $8
million in research and development.
Oh, yeah.
Every year?
Every year, yeah.
And now I probably spend at least a million now.
And as an example, football season is over.
We're already working on next season, the day the season is over.
We're doing simulations.
We're running lots of different things to go back and see if we can find
something that would have made a difference in a game
or will make a difference in a game going forward as far as the prediction is
concerned that's relevant, that we can quantify, that makes sense.
And if we can, then that, you know, our information, it will strengthen our
information and allow us, allow me to continue to be able to bet on sports.
I only bet on sports, Joe, today.
I love it.
If I didn't, I didn't have the passion for it.
I couldn't do it.
But I still win and I have an advantage.
And if I get to the point that I don't have that advantage, I'll quit, okay?
But I still have the advantage.
But in order to maintain that advantage, I continually have to be able to
recognize, find things that make a material difference
or, you know, that quantify a difference with the outcome of a game to stay
ahead of the herd, so to speak.
Because you've got really smart people making a line.
You've got other really smart people betting.
Okay, I'm the guy, I don't bet on Monday or Tuesday or Sunday night when the
line's soft.
I'm the guy, I bet on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Why do I bet on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday?
Because that's when you can bet the most money.
Early in the week, you can only make small bets.
I'm not interested in making smaller bets today.
Why do they have it set up like that, just in case something happens, someone
gets injured?
No.
When the line originally comes out, say on Sunday night or Monday morning, and
all sports are different.
Some sports are more vulnerable than others.
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 or call
themselves professional handicappers,
they don't bet the NFL because it's just too tough to beat.
Okay, if that line comes out on Sunday or Monday or whenever it comes out,
that's your best chance of finding something there where that odds maker missed
something.
Okay, but by Tuesday, that's gone.
Okay.
Now, different sports, you know, college football, a non-Power 5 conference
team,
you know, you may find more of an advantage with that early on or even later on
because in the colleges, you know, they're making a line on, you know, 130
games,
and it's much more difficult for them to make the line on 130 games.
You know, you've got pers