The foreign sites had offered rudimentary options, but nothing like this.
There was now a breadth of new wagers to place. “But prior to 2018, that was pretty much the only way that I was able to gamble and place bets on sports,” he says. His bookie set up an online platform where he could place wagers, and at the end of each week, they’d settle up. He often worried he wouldn’t actually receive his winnings, with credit cards denied or bets lost in the ether. The websites of the offshore accounts he used were unreliable.
In college, his friend put him in contact with a bookie, and his wagers increased.īefore 2018, he explains, it was hard to bet consistently. His habit began small, with $5 or $10 bets. So while it was Weber’s love of sports that got him into gambling, he didn’t gamble on sports right away-that came later, at 18. Weber has always obsessed over sports, particularly basketball, and poker appealed to his competitive instincts it played weekly on ESPN too. Weber, who is 32 now, and a New Jersey native, grew up in the wake of the Moneymaker effect-a boom in poker interest sparked when a 27-year-old accountant from Tennessee, Chris Moneymaker, won the 2003 World Series of Poker, taking home $2.5 million. Greg Weber began gambling at 13, playing poker with his friends for small stakes after school.
