He Claims He’s the ‘Sports Betting King.’ What Are the Odds?

Mazi VS — “Mazi” as in Maserati, “VS” as in the grade of diamond — pulled up outside my hotel in Las Vegas behind the wheel of a red Lamborghini Aventador and suggested that we go for a drive. A thing no one tells you about traveling via Lamborghini: Getting into your seat is like spelunking into a crevasse, and getting out is like climbing out of a coffin. Lambos also were not put on this earth for lurching through rush-hour traffic, and so every time Mazi tapped the accelerator after a light turned green, the car’s 6.5-liter V12 engine (behind us) snarled in my ears like a caged tiger. The Aventador has a top speed that exceeds 210 m.p.h., but it drops to 0.1 m.p.h. for speed bumps, and this car has a Blue Book value of more than $250,000. Imagine what it costs to fix a dent.

Mazi seemed untroubled by the risk, though. He was accustomed to having six figures on the line. At that very moment, a Wednesday afternoon in mid-March, the day before the start of the first round of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, he had a total of $1.1 million riding on a three-leg parlay, a high-risk, high-reward sports wager that most pro gamblers tend to shun, not least because you must win all multiple individual bets to collect, while the house has to win only once. Later on, Mazi showed me the actual betting slips: $600,000 at Caesars Sportsbook and $500,000 at Circa on the same three-way outcome, wins for North Carolina, Purdue and Kentucky. All three were heavy favorites in their games, and all they had to do was win, not cover a point spread. But this was March Madness, when upsets happen all the time, and it would take only one to make Mazi $1.1 million poorer. He also stood to win just under $1.35 million, and Carolina had already done its job during a play-in game the night before.

“I got three teams that should be blowouts,” he said. “So we lookin’ good.”

Mazi has 2.5 million followers on Instagram, his social media platform of choice, and a key ingredient in his mystique is that he is always somehow looking good, despite operating in a cutthroat, quasi-legal industry in which fates inevitably turn very bad. All the other suckers out there lose on a regular basis, but not Mazi, and he seems to have the betting slips — and the Lambos, the Maybachs, the private jets to Miami, the limited-edition Chrome Hearts jeans that can go for north of $10,000 and the $180,000 diamond chain by the jeweler to the stars Eliantte — that say so. Mazi has taken to calling himself the “Sports Betting King,” or “S.B.K.,” initials that are inked on his left hand. In a 2024 podcast, he claimed to have won $25 million the previous year alone.

The most respected pros in this world build complex statistical models, scrutinizing micro-movements in betting lines, grinding out tiny advantages, winning pennies on the dollar, and in an excellent year they might get about 55 percent of their picks correct. Mazi claims his win rate sometimes reaches 70 percent, sometimes even higher. His process? Getting “locked in” at the desk of his home office, then scanning the lines on his phone and picking the ones that look “too good to be true.”

“Just literally in February we went on, like, an 18-1 run,” he told me as we inched along Las Vegas Boulevard so low to the ground that all I could see around us were the wheels of other cars. “Right now we’re on an 8-3 run.”