My NFL Sunday with a sports betting syndicate
by David Purdum, ESPN
LAS VEGAS — The multi-story, adobe-style house is located 30 minutes off the Strip in Henderson, Nevada. Sitting on a corner lot in a gated community littered with palm trees, it’s nice, but not overly extravagant.
You certainly wouldn’t guess that crammed into an upstairs office inside is the three-man brain trust of a successful, high-volume sports betting syndicate.
There’s a former Chicago financial trader, a former high school basketball coach from Illinois and a poker pro who doesn’t even watch the games. They’re regular, easy-going guys in their 30s, who make a living gambling. And they’re preparing for the busiest 30 minutes of their NFL Sunday.
It’s an open, informal setting, with two desks, a couch and four TVs tuned into the early slate of NFL games and the final day of the Presidents Cup. There’s an oversized cutout of Tiger Woods on the wall, along with St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Celtics memorabilia. It’s not really a man cave, though, not a place to chill out, drink beer and watch football with buddies. The only food out is a bucket of ice with some Red Bulls and a box of donuts. This is very much a high-stakes grind.
When I arrive on this Sunday morning, the syndicate, incorporated as Imawhale LLC, has action on everything, except the Tennessee Titans. All morning, they had tried to bet on the underdog Titans against the Houston Texans through mobile apps offered by sports books in Las Vegas.
“Every bet was rejected,” says Jason Garrett (no, not that Jason Garrett) with a frustrated, yet resigned tone. “It’s a good thing; they’re down 24-7.”
Some books will take the syndicate’s action; others won’t. No one in the room is really happy about it, but they all seem to understand that being limited or cut off completely is part of the bettor-vs.-bookmaker battle that decides their salary.
“We provide liquidity on the side that the public doesn’t want to take,” Shane Sigsbee, co-founder of Imawhale Sports, says of the books that do take their action. “So they don’t view us as pariahs. They view us as liquidity providers.”
Garrett and Dan Thomson, both tall, slender and wearing shorts and golf shirts, are the top traders for the syndicate. Garrett was just 27 when he left his job as a high school basketball coach in Illinois in 2013, packed up his red Mustang and moved to Las Vegas to play poker, before joining the syndicate. He’s the definition of a professional gambler: a sports bettor, poker player and admitted card counter, who’s listed in the vaunted Griffin Book. Advantage players know what that is: a database that they don’t want their name in.
Thomson is entering his third year with the syndicate. He was playing poker out of Rochester, New York, when he decided to bolt to Las Vegas to join the syndicate. Besides his beloved Buffalo Bills, he admits that his sports knowledge is basic and that when he works from home, he doesn’t even have a TV in the room. He can, however, tell you exactly how much a 1/2 point is worth on a WNBA first-half over/under.
“I’m more interested in working out formulas in Excel,” Thomson says with a smile. “That’s the life of a true professional sports bettor.”
Sigsbee is on the couch in a pink, button-up shirt, slacks and baseball hat. A Notre Dame alumnus with financial background, he started Imawhale Sports in 2012 as a side project to go along with his poker-staking business. He currently stakes 75 poker players in cash games. The poker side of his corporation is more profitable than sports betting for now, but the gap is narrowing, he says.
Garrett, Thomson and Sigsbee each bet individually and share varying percentages from the syndicate’s profits. It’s a 70-plus-hour-a-week job during football season and can be an absolute grind.
“We’re not handicappers; we’re line-shoppers,” Sigsbee explains.
They do their shopping online, closely watching a few select offshore sportsbooks known to cater to sharp bettors. They know other groups are doing the same thing around town, which makes the window of opportunity to grab a preferred line just seconds-long.
“When certain offshore books that you know are sharp and move their lines first, there are books in Nevada that lag behind,” Sigsbee explains. “But the secret sauce is quantifying how large the move is and is that move great enough to overcome the vig you’re paying to make the bet. What we do better than anyone is we quantify the moves from a mathematical standpoint, of every derivative, of every single sport. We can tell you how much a ½-point is worth on an NFL total when it moves off of 45 to 45 and a half.”