"Your League Is So Cooked": The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre
4.7 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
He made nine figures by finding patterns in basketball, from the skycap counter of the Winnipeg airport to high-stakes athlete encounters in Vegas. Then Bob Voulgaris brought his dark-alley secrets to Mark Cuban's front office. Now, as scandal infects the integrity of the game, he sees a path forward — including, but not limited to, maybe turning Victor Wembanyama into The Bachelor.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pablo Toray finds out. |
| 0:01.9 | I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. |
| 0:06.4 | Your league is so cooked that you are going to have a tough time differentiating between |
| 0:11.5 | tanking for the purposes of illegally gambling or tanking for the purposes of trying to get draft position. |
| 0:18.9 | Right after this ad. I just want to point out for people who aren't watching on YouTube though, that is a fake background, Bob Volgaris. |
| 0:30.6 | It is. Yeah. |
| 0:32.6 | You're in an undisclosed geographic location. What do you got? What do you got behind you? |
| 0:56.4 | Well, this is my office, and there's a bunch of art that's like stacked against the wall. They're not hung yet, so it just looks a lot better this way. Oh, you're just embarrassed. You're embarrassed to show me what your actual residence is like, those books. The books behind you, you haven't read those books. Those are just fake books. I feel like that's kind of standard, isn't it, to have a bunch of books as like trophies. |
| 1:16.4 | People hang their books like trophies in those places. That's right. I was hoping you would have like betting slips framed in your, you ever save those? Do you even have betting slips when you were working? I never, I wasn't in the betting slip. I mean, I wasn't around for the betting slip era. I think I had phone calls and, yeah, dealing with third-party intermediaries for the most part. |
| 1:23.8 | So I should just quickly explain here that the reason I am on this call right now is because of the episode we published last week about NBA betting and these poker |
| 1:28.1 | games that allegedly involve the Italian mafia and also NBA players and coaches, and more |
| 1:33.8 | recently, the FBI. Because while I've been thinking about this scandal and the federal |
| 1:39.7 | government's concurrent pair of indictments, there is one person in specific I've been meaning to talk to |
| 1:46.3 | about it, someone I don't agree with on lots of issues, but someone whose secrets, whose perspective, |
| 1:53.6 | I always seek when it comes to these exact subjects. And so I ask this person to introduce himself |
| 2:00.2 | on camera. |
| 2:02.4 | Bob Valgaris, former professional sports better, and now current owner of a second division |
| 2:10.3 | Spanish football club, C.D. C. C.D. Cussling. That's pretty good, also wildly insufficient. |
| 2:15.8 | Okay. What was your job with the Mavericks, Bob? |
| 2:18.1 | What was your job title in the NBA? |
| 2:20.8 | I was the former director of quantitative research and development, whatever that meant. |
| 2:26.4 | It meant you, like me, talk to Mark Cuban a lot. |
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