The Wall Street Journal reports that Dr. Bob's recommendations for college football have beat the spread 63 percent of the time during the past three years, and 71 percent of the time last season. A gambler has to beat the spread 53 percent of the time to make money, and at least 55 percent to make a viable income. According to researchers in the field of gambling, there might be fewer than 100 people in the world who can sustain winning rates long enough to make a living off of sports betting. Dr. Bob has hovered near 60 percent for the past two decades.
The man hardly even watches the games. No real need to. For his analysis is to download team and situational data from the Internet, plug the information into his recondite mathematical model (the best formula today, according to several bookmakers) and factor out predictions. In essence, he, a statistician who dropped out of college at UC Berkley many years ago, now 41 years old, living in San Francisco and more prodigious than ever, is a computer.
And computers don't gamble, they invest. Dr. Bob says, provided that you start with a substantial bankroll (we're talking at least four figures here: enough to endure periodic losses), that you follow a disciplined approach to your betting (such as the method he employs), and that you wager a constant amount on each game throughout the season (not giving in to deceptive factors such as feeling and intuition), there is less than a 1 percent chance you'll exhaust your money. In fact, the numerical probability is that you'll increase your bankroll.
The doc won't say how many subscribers he has, nor how much money he makes, but he doesn't need to. The evidence says enough: He has a nice place overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in one of the world's most expensive areas to live, and he drives a first-rate Beamer, according to reporters who have visited him; and during this past football season, a wave of bets would run through the digital sea of Internet gambling and crash in Las Vegas' sports books every Thursday, no more than 30 seconds after the doc sent his mass e-mail predictions to subscribers. On the list: bookmakers in Las Vegas, Stoll says, for as soon as he would hit his e-mail's send button, casino sports books altered their point spreads to counter his advice.
And with good reason. The Wall Street Journal reports that during this past football season, Nevada sports books, which had made $126 million in profits in 2005, suffered a cataclysmic hit. While the heads at Las Vegas' major casinos declined to offer any concrete figures, Robert Walker, race and sports book director at MGM-Mirage, has said: "The whole thing was unreal. In 20 years I've never seen anything like it."
Nevertheless, you won't catch the doc in Las Vegas. He prefers to remain at home, computing numbers all day. There's no need for the personal interaction. Because, as Stoll has demonstrated, there is not much human about successful gambling.