Watch the most feared bettor in Vegas put $2 million at risk every Sunday - through people who use fake names so no bookmaker can trace a bet back to him.
An hour before kickoff, Billy Walters sits at a wall of phones and screens, running his book like a quant fund. He never places a bet himself. His partners sit inside the sports books under code names, jbird and Wolfman, and fire his orders the second he calls.
His analysts are mathematicians who have worked for him 30 years and never met each other. They model weather, injuries, line moves - everything. Only Walters sees the full board.
He isn't picking teams on a hunch. He's pricing games better than the bookmakers and betting when the math says the line is wrong. Any book that realizes he's behind a bet stops taking it. So he stays invisible.
30 years. Never a losing year. A gambler who runs on numbers, not luck.
Warren Buffett on what actually makes a life successful:
1. "if you get to be 65 or 70 and the people you want to love you actually love you, you're a success."
i've met very rich men. testimonial dinners. schools named after them. and nobody loves them. their own kids say "he's in the attic."
2. the best investment you'll ever make is in yourself.
learn to communicate. on paper and in person. if you can't get your idea across, it's like winking at a girl in the dark. nothing happens. get good at it and you raise your own value 50%. and nobody can ever take it from you.
3. you get one mind and one body.
that's the whole deal. say i gave you a car and told you it's the only one you get for the rest of your life. you'd read the manual. keep it in the garage. baby it. you get exactly one body like that. you can't start caring for it at 50. by then it's rusted out.
4. you become whoever you spend your time with.
you drift in the direction of the people around you. so pick people better than you. the biggest pick of your life is your spouse. marry someone a little better than you. and hope they don't figure it out too fast.
5. with money, doing nothing beats doing something.
a farm or an apartment, you can't sell it tomorrow. so you just hold it. stocks you can sell in a second. so people can't help themselves. but moving your money around isn't smarter than leaving it alone. buy a piece of america and stop touching it.
Because of Stacey, we as Bulls fans know “it’s a simple game.”
Because of Stacey, we always have hot sauce ready.
Because of Stacey, we like our meatballs spicy.
Because of Stacey - and the joy he brought - this goodbye hits so hard.
Drive home safely, Stacey. Beep Beep.
A friend of mine used to say: “Show up on time, with a good attitude, and do what you said you’d do. That’s it. That’s 90% of winning in life." The older I get, the more I realize just how right he was.
It is absolutely terrifying that a man can sacrifice his youth, work 60-hour weeks, and build an entire estate, only for a woman to decide she is "bored" after four years, file for a no-fault divorce, and legally walk away with half of everything he built. Marriage was supposed to be a partnership, not a risk-free lottery ticket where you get to cash out on a man's net worth simply because you fell out of love
Being 43 is wild. People your age are living completely different lives.
Some are grandparents. Some are raising toddlers. Some are newly divorced. Some are newly engaged. Some haven’t slept in three years. Some are in St. Tropez posting Aperol spritzes from a yacht.
Some look 25.
Some look like they personally remember the invention of Tupperware.
Nobody got the same assignment.
POWERFUL: Legendary #NFL TE Greg Olsen with a beautiful message at the Miami commencement speech.
“Your pursuit of greatness… don’t forget to also be good.”
“Go live your life. Go make mistakes. Go start a business. Travel the world.”
Amazing 🙌🙌🙌
Ted Turner was one of the great entrepreneurs…
My 10 favorite quotes of his I go back to again and again… RIP Ted
“Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”
“You cannot be a risk taker without taking risks.”
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.”
“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
“If you’re going to have a major impact on the world, you have to be willing to be criticized.”
“Most people think small because they’re afraid to fail.”
“I was willing to bet the company over and over again.”
“The world is run by people who show up.”
“I learned that persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong.
The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t.
I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.
Courage beats intelligence.
Conan O'Brien says he has "incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country" after traveling to Ireland and seeing his great-grandfather lived.
"I went back to Ireland and I [saw] a great genealogist who said, 'I found where your great-grandfather’s home was.' The home is gone, but he found the little spot where he lived, near the Galbally Mountains. He said, 'I’ll go there and show it to you,' and I said, 'We’ll do it on camera.'
"I was expecting to have these jokes loaded up; we had props and funny things we were going to do... But I got there, and I did not expect this because I'm not someone who wears my emotions on my sleeve, but I got emotional. It was very powerful.
"This was a very small plot of land. He was a tenant farmer, so it wasn't his. He didn't have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn't working; probably not enough to eat, couldn't sustain. So, he left and went to America, and here I am a couple of generations later.
"What's amazing to me is when you have that experience and you stand there, I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country. It takes an entire lifetime to go to a country where, often, people don't speak the language. They have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation; it's a whole lifetime that you're feeding into this process.
"I was just thinking about this guy, whom I'll never meet, who had to do that. I think I was overcome by the fact that there's a lot of sadness in that story, and in a lot of these stories. People leave not because they think, 'Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.' They leave because they have to."
(via Jimmy Kimmel Live)
The ability to quickly reset and recover. From a bad interaction. From a bad day. From a missed workout. From a poor decision. You can start over whenever you want. You can't always control what happened, but you can control how long you carry it.
Your entire life will change the day you realize real confidence is less about knowing you’ll win and more about knowing you’ll bounce back even if you don’t. Real confidence is resilience. Adaptability. Tolerance for uncertainty. Fear loses when you know failure is never final.
"Your wife is not your best friend. Your dog is. Lock the two in the back of a trunk, come back two hours later and see which one is happy to see you". Coach Lou Holtz
RIP Coach Holtz. The best motivational speaker I've listened to
Warren Buffett: "I would ask anybody to challenge me on whether being kind can hurt them in any way — and whether the net happiness of the world wouldn't be better if every morning they said to themselves, 'I'll have things that are good and bad that happen to me today, but I can be kind to everybody.'"