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If you’re going to spend time writing about gambling, it helps to know people who do it well. One of them is a sports bettor in Vegas who we’ll call Big Man.
We were on the phone last week, chatting about a few things when he happened to mention his gambling endeavors and the need for whale flipping. To be honest, it’s a term I never heard before.
Big Man explained that flipped whales are necessary for people who win more than the sports books wish they would. At a certain point, the bookies stop taking your cash and that is when whale-flipping comes into play.
“We find whales,” he told me, referring to gargantuan gamblers who are generally losers, “and do our betting through them.”
How Whale Flipping Was Born
Curiosity piqued, I reached out to Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos.
Spanky is amongst the world’s most successful sports bettors and the founder of Bet Bash, an annual Vegas gathering of professional sports bettors, which takes place in August.
“I coined the term,” he told me. “Whales are big, docile sea-creature. We give them teeth and turn them into sharks.”
They’re a necessity for guys like Spanky who have, as he puts it, “large appetites for sports betting.”
He explained that it works like this: “We align with gamblers who are known losers. Then we tell them the bets to make, they make those bets out of their accounts and turn into winners. Then we split the money 50/50.”
Of course, nobody wins all the time, so the losses are split as well. In the long run, though, betting the Spanky way is a sure route to profitability.
Spanky acknowledges that he’d much rather be able to do his own betting. But the problem is that online sportsbooks would rather deal with habitual losers than precise betting winners.
While maintaining a school of flipped whales is profitable, Spanky acknowledges that the relationships can be far from perfect.
For the most part, though, one-time losers are happy to be transformed into winners. Keeping them looking like suckers, though, can be a bit of a challenge.
But such is the life for winning sports bettors. Not only do they need to beat the games and overcome the 10-percent sportsbook advantage, they also need to play the game within the game, which allows them to get down against entities that only want to deal with stone-cold suckers.
“We do what we have to do,” said Spanky who’s always fishing for fresh whales to flip. “We use every tool in the shed.”
