According to an announcement, Billy Walters will publish his book Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk on August 15, 2023.
The book was written in collaboration with journalist Armen Keteyian.
The book will reveal “the secrets of Walters’s proprietary sports betting system, which will serve as a master class for tens of millions of recreational gamblers in America and around the world.”
Walters has placed hundreds of millions a year in gross wagers, including a $3.5-million bet on one Super Bowl alone. Jack Binion, the longtime owner of Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, said of Walters: “If there’s a Mount Rushmore of sports gambling, there’s only one face on the mountain, and that’s Billy Walters. No one else is close.”
Walters also breaks his silence about his long and complicated relationship with Hall of Fame professional golfer Phil Mickelson.
Casual betting on professional and college athletics has exploded in recent years. In the first eleven months of 2022, Americans wagered $83 billion legally on sports—an increase of 65 percent from 2021, according to the American Gaming Association.
Wagering is now legal in sportsbooks and on betting apps in thirty-six states.
Raised by his grandmother amid poverty in rural Kentucky, Walters became a pool hustler by the age of nine. As an adult, he set records as a used-car salesman, hustled golf, and dabbled in bookmaking.
Walters eventually moved to Las Vegas, where he changed sports betting as a member of the famed Computer Group, the first syndicate to apply sophisticated algorithms and data analysis to sports gambling.
Walters later applied his data expertise to stock trading and built a business empire that included seven golf courses, twenty-two automobile dealerships, and a string of other investments. However, Walters was convicted of insider trading in the Southern District of New York in 2017 and served 31 months in federal prison.
Keteyian, a longtime CBS News correspondent and contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes Sports, is the recipient of eleven Emmy Awards.
