“Floyd Mayweather was my beard,” says the sharpest mind in sport, somewhere in the middle of another chapter from his extraordinary story. The tale of Haralabos “Bob” Voulgaris is about a philosophy student, tree planter and baggage handler who bet everything on the LA Lakers, won $500,000 overnight and became arguably the world’s best gambler. How he “solved” basketball and was courted by its biggest franchises, a disrupter drafted in. And how an ice hockey fan from across the Atlantic ended up here, owner of a football team in Spain’s third tier intent on changing the game.
The way he tells it, Voulgaris would regularly lay $1m a day, beating the system, which is why bookmakers tried to lock him out and he needed “beards” to begin with, superstar names secretly betting on his behalf. A Greek-Canadian whose father took him to Vegas, he became a poker pro and director of quantitative research at the Dallas Mavericks. He travels by private jet, hangs with the famous and lives in Hollywood Hills. When he’s not on his boat, or in Mexico, Monaco or Castellón.
