Rather than lease the land, he bought it from the city - for an estimated $1.5 million less than it had cost the city. As the Royal Links took shape, Walters reshaped the deal. In 1996, for instance, Walters won a city contract to develop a golf course on municipal land. “The fact the public didn’t get the best of it rarely crossed the minds of mesmerized members of the City Council and County Commission.” “His golf course land proposals at the city and county were tailored like Sinatra’s suits to fit his needs,” wrote the Review-Journal’s Smith. He routinely outthought the person sitting across the table, whether that was a fellow gambler, a casino manager or a government official. And his assault on the Golden Nugget came after his research found that older roulette wheels had a statistical bias toward certain numbers. His “Computer Group” used rented mainframe computers to analyze data and calculate odds. In the pre-Internet era, he dispatched members of his gambling syndicate to the airport, where they gleaned intelligence from travelers’ out-of-town newspapers. If quick to take a calculated risk, he does everything possible to sharpen those calculations and minimize the risk.

Walters has played table games, once advancing to the finals of a two-day Texas Hold ’em tournament before falling to Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston. A $1,000 fine later, he moved to a city where gambling was not only legal but celebrated: Las Vegas. In 1982, while selling cars wholesale to dealers, he set himself up as a bookie - breaking Kentucky law. The Dodgers won in seven games, but the boy was hooked. Billy made his first wager at the age of nine, staking his paper route money on the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. His family was poor - his childhood home lacked indoor plumbing - but his father was an avid poker player and an uncle a professional gambler. Walters, 67, grew up in Munfordville, Ky., a town of 1,600 an hour’s drive south of Fort Knox. “Didn’t they know that, with very few exceptions in his life, Billy Walters always gets the best of it?” “When I heard their theory, I shrugged,” Smith wrote. Smith remembers people guessing that Walters’ lucky streak was about to be snapped.

Before the show aired, Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. In 2011, “60 Minutes” looked into this high-roller’s checkered past and colorful present. Yet the odds have an uncanny habit of tilting in Walters’ favor. Walters has suffered major setbacks, both as a gambler and - at a profound, heartbreaking level - as a father. Walters did not respond to interview requests for this story. Mickelson and Walters, as previously reported by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, still face an investigation over trades they made in Dean Foods.Īuthorities will neither confirm nor deny this probe’s existence.

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