Gadoon 'Spanky' Kyrollos: The Computer Scientist Who Bets Like a Trader

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Most famous bettors are known for picking games. Gadoon Kyrollos, known everywhere as Spanky, is known for picking prices. His operation watches the odds at dozens of sportsbooks at once and bets wherever a book is out of line with the market. It’s a trader’s approach to sports betting, and it came from a trader’s background.

Cards, Rutgers, and Wall Street

Kyrollos grew up in New Jersey. His mother taught him arithmetic with playing cards when he was four, and the nickname came from her too: after the Little Rascals character, because he was always in trouble as a kid. He played backgammon and poker young, and in high school he was already dealing parlay cards.

He went on to Rutgers, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in computer science and finance, and spent about three years at Deutsche Bank in Manhattan. He was betting on the side. He and a partner each started with $8,000, and by the time they quit their jobs the bankroll had grown past $1 million. In 2003, making more from betting than from his salary, he left finance to bet full time.

An early influence was an old book, Jack Moore’s The Complete Book of Sports Betting, which pushed him to focus on the lines themselves and on the differences between them.

A top-down bettor

Kyrollos is the best-known example of what bettors call top-down betting. A bottom-up bettor builds a model and asks who will win. A top-down bettor asks a different question: which sportsbook’s price is wrong?

His methods, as he has described them over the years, include:

• Scalping and arbitrage: taking both sides at different books when the prices allow a guaranteed edge. See our arbitrage guide.
• Middling: betting different lines on each side so both bets can win. We explain middles in how to calculate an arbitrage bet.
• Chasing steam: when a sharp book moves a line, betting the same side at slower books before they catch up.
• Taking positions where his own numbers disagree with the market.

He has said college sports, especially college basketball Saturdays, are where he does best, because bookmakers can’t keep up with the sheer number of games.

Building the tools himself

To do all this, he needed to see every price at once. So he built Spank Odds, a real-time odds screen showing lines across many sportsbooks. He describes himself as “a computer scientist disguised as a sports bettor.”

By 2023, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that his operation had 14 full-time employees and hundreds of betting partners around the world, and that he wagered hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

BetBash and the Hall of Fame

In 2021, Kyrollos founded BetBash, a conference for serious bettors. The first one, in Jersey City, drew about 220 people. It later moved to Circa in Las Vegas, and by its fifth edition in 2025 it drew close to 700.

At BetBash in 2023 he launched the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame. Its first class included Billy Walters (profiled here), oddsmaker Roxy Roxborough, and bookmaker Jimmy Vaccaro.

Limits, bans, and controversy

Kyrollos is one of the loudest critics of sportsbooks that limit winning players, and he has posted videos of books cutting him off for being too sharp. He has argued that sharp bettors help books by sharpening their lines and growing handle. According to GGB Magazine, US regulated sportsbooks have restricted him, and he does much of his betting offshore. He has also talked openly about placing bets through other people, a practice that breaks the terms of regulated US sportsbooks. We cover what’s allowed in our account limits guide.

In late 2022, shortly after filming promotional content for the betting exchange Sporttrade, he was banned by Bally’s Atlantic City, the exchange’s New Jersey partner. Bally’s cited anti-money-laundering compliance. Reporting at the time noted a 2012 bookmaking case in Queens; Kyrollos said he was never convicted of money laundering and pleaded to a charge of promoting gambling.

What you can borrow from Spanky

1. Ask which price is wrong, not who will win. That’s the core of +EV betting and arbitrage alike.
2. See every price. His edge started with an odds screen. Accounts at many books and a way to compare them are the modern equivalent.
3. Go where books are stretched. High-volume slates with hundreds of games create more stale lines than marquee matchups.
4. Accept thin margins and big volume. Top-down edges are small per bet. They pay through repetition.
5. Expect to be limited. Winning this way gets noticed fast. Plan for it.