Speaking of degens, we are joined as always by The King himself, Gary Margolis, legendary southern California gambler, sports bettor and raconteur.
Tell me something good in 25 words or less, King.
Well, before we get into this weekend’s picks, I want to talk about a couple of gambling things that caught my attention this week.
In Florida – and I believe Florida might have the highest degen rate in the nation – there is an interesting lawsuit.
A former employee of Oake Farms claims the company’s vice president suck him with a massive tax bill from the IRS for gambling winnings that are not his.
According to onlinepokerreport.com, Andrew Moste says he was pressured by Steven Veneziano to allow Veneziano to use his DraftKings DFS account.
Veneziano won $216,000 and owes $93,000 on those winnings.
But it was on Moste’s account, so he got the tax bill.
The lawsuit alleges Veneziano won’t make good with his employee and instead attempted to convince Moste to participate in tax fraud with him.
Anyway, as Alex Weldon of onlinepokerreport.com points out:
Under no circumstances should you let anyone else use your online gambling account.
Anyway, I let King use mine all the time, but you’ve never posted a winning week, have you?
Poker players are often textbook degens.
Many poker players also compete in DFS, and many are excellent.
Two of them are Dan Smith and Aaron Jones, who have been risking up to $175,000 a week on head-to-head DFS football contests.
Another DFSer, who goes by the name Empiremaker2, started making noise about wanting to risk a million head to head against Dan Smith.
So Smith tweeted he would increase his bet to 500k and if Empiremaker2 wins, he said he’d give him the deed to his condo.
How did Empiremaker2 respond?
He told Smith tat he should’ve rented, rather than bought, and that real estate is negative EV, which is expected value.
So I guess that was a NO on the condo bet.
EV, by the way, a term used in poker a lot:
The average return on each dollar invested in a pot.
The average result of a given play over the long term.