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.”
‘He is where he is for a reason — he’s the best marketer in the business.’
Ryan Noel
By “we,” Mazi was referring to himself and to his clientele of amateur sports gamblers who are so convinced of Mazi’s singular abilities that they pay him for advance access to his picks. Within the industry, the polite word for people like Mazi is “handicapper,” or “capper,” a word he says he didn’t even know until a capper friend introduced him to capping shortly after he arrived in Las Vegas a decade ago. Mazi told me that his real name was Chris Anderson, that he was 31 and that he grew up shuttling with his family between Marietta, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala., but no one here in Vegas knows him as anything but Mazi. The friend who introduced him to capping is also named Chris — Chris Hamersley — but this coincidence was news to Hamersley when I told him.
Hamersley, who goes by Hammer, is a successful capper — according to financial documents he shared with me, he made about $90,000 last year from selling picks and slightly more from his own gambling action — but his former mentee is operating on a totally different level. Hamersley’s pick subscriptions start at $99 per week, while Mazi’s cheapest offering, the “V.I.P. Plays of the Day,” costs $200. Mazi’s “Exclusive Play of the Day” is $1,500, making his five-day “Week of Exclusive Plays” package a relative bargain at $5,000. According to Mazi, he currently has 28,000 paying clients.
“He is where he is for a reason — he’s the best marketer in the business,” says Ryan Noel, a 24-year-old actuary turned professional sports gambler from Boston who is known as Elf online and hosts a popular chat show on X Spaces (formerly Twitter Spaces) that has become a nightly destination for sports-betting insiders. But Noel says that would-be clients should ask themselves, when they’re looking at an Instagram page like Mazi’s: “What are they really selling? Are they selling sports picks or are they selling lifestyle? If you’re an uninformed gambler, you’ll look at him and be like, ‘Damn, this guy has the life.’ And he does. He has the life,” Noel says. “But that’s what he’s really selling. And that’s what the people purchasing his picks really want.”
In sports-betting circles, the impolite word for people in Mazi’s line of work is “tout” — a hustler, a talentless gambler who peddles picks to naïve marks by hiding his losses and projecting a carefully manicured image of lavish success. It’s an angle as old as gambling itself. But the combined forces of social media (giving touts limitless reach to trawl for clients) and the sweeping legalization of sports betting (stocking the pond with limitless clients) has been a bonanza for the trade, especially for someone like Mazi. “Old wine, new bottle,” says Joe Brennan Jr., who co-founded the New Jersey-based Prime Sports, one of the most respected books in the industry. The knock against touts is that if they were truly as successful as they claim, then why are they selling picks at all? If you’re nailing 70 percent of your bets, you should just get filthy rich and tell no one.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Who’s the best sports bettor in America?’ and I’m like, ‘Some guy you don’t know, because he doesn’t want you to know him,’” Brennan says. “Not because he’s organized crime or anything like that, but because he knows his information is potentially gold for people who could trail his picks.”
Mazi, meanwhile, prefers grandiose stunts, like slapping his face on a billboard near the Strip, for which he says he spent $10,000 a month for a year. Or going out to nightclubs and ordering bottle service delivered by servers in lingerie carrying a marquee light box that reads “MAZI VS BETTING KING” He appeared as a contestant on the viral YouTube dating series “Pop the Balloon or Find Love” early this year, a couple of weeks before Dave Chappelle lampooned it on “Saturday Night Live.” His social media blasts arrive in all caps, as if he’s trying to shout over the din at the club: “GAME OF THE MONTH CASH IT !!!!!!!!!” “BOOOOMMMM !!!!!!! PERFECT SWEEP YESTERDAY!!!!”
I’ve subscribed to Mazi’s mailing list for months — he uses it to tease when picks become available for paying subscribers and to harangue stragglers — and so far, the man has not suffered a single losing day, which is, of course, impossible. (“Ridiculous,” as one top bettor put it to me.) His critics also point out that he’s a serial practitioner of the dubious tout trick of posting only snapshots of his winning tickets, never his losers. Mazi believes he’s being unduly maligned: “If anybody can show me a video saying that I’ve never lost a game, I will literally give them $1 million. I never said it.” Didn’t he just tell me he was on an 8-3 run right now? That’s three losses!
Even Mazi’s harshest critics seem to believe his riches are genuine. What they question is how he earns them — whether they come from winning his bets, as he claims, or from selling his picks. He insisted that it’s both. “In this business, people don’t buy if you don’t win,” he told me. “I’ve had clients for two or three years. I’ve made people a lot of money.”
Mazi presents himself online as a man with nothing to hide. When accused of renting his Eliantte chain, he produced an Instagram story showing the certificate of purchase for $180,000. But question him about the details of his business, and he clams up. He was forthcoming about having 28,000 clients, but he wouldn’t tell me what packages they’re buying or even give me a general sense of his monthly revenue. He responded promptly to texts, but whenever I asked whom he had money on that night, he went silent.
Today’s original plan was to visit one of Mazi’s preferred sportsbooks — Circa or Caesars, for instance, the two casinos where he had bets in progress — and watch one of his picks in action. But a few hours before he picked me up at my hotel, he called to say that on the advice of his lawyer, he needed to stay out of all casinos pending the resolution of a “payment issue” with an unnamed casino. An issue with them paying you, I asked, or you paying them? Them paying him, he said. But when I pressed for further explanation, he declined. “Long story,” he said in the tone of someone sparing you the interminable details of what’s really all just a big misunderstanding.
And so instead, we just drove around, and he told me his story — how he transformed himself from an aspiring fashion influencer in suburban Atlanta into Mazi VS, the Sports Betting King. He spoke in a slow, syrupy Georgia drawl with a textured buzz in his voice that reminded me of his hometown legend, the rapper Big Boi of Outkast. Under city conditions, Lamborghini Aventadors get an average of nine miles to the gallon, so after about an hour of talking, Mazi announced that we were stopping for gas. While the Lambo refueled, we made a plan to meet the following day and watch the second leg of his parlay at some noncasino location to be determined. He would think about it and text me overnight.
Which is how I wound up the next morning at 11 a.m. drinking coffee with Mazi at the Trump International Hotel, a tall gold slab with no casino attached to it and possibly the only commercial establishment in Las Vegas where none of the televisions were showing college basketball.
The Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is not the Trump International Hotel and Casino because Donald Trump didn’t exercise the gambling license he had acquired for it before construction began in 2005. By then, he had all but given up on doing business in Atlantic City, one of the final straws being a failed bid in New Jersey to legalize sports gambling in the aftermath of the sweeping federal legislation — the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, or PASPA — that essentially outlawed it everywhere except in Nevada.
For the next 26 years, PASPA was the law of the land. If you wanted to gamble on sports in the United States during this period, almost all of your legal options required a trip to Nevada. So much has changed about American culture in the last decade that it’s easy to overlook the trigger for one of its most consequential sea changes, particularly among men: the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2018 to repeal PASPA. Seemingly overnight, sports gambling moved from the shadows — something your degenerate co-worker did online through a bookie based in the Grand Caymans — to the very heart of modern sports.
Just seven years have passed since PASPA’s repeal, and sports gambling is now legal to varying degrees in 38 states and the District of Columbia. The potential customer base has exploded. A joint study by the Siena College Research Institute and St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication recently revealed that 48 percent of American men ages 18 to 49 have an account with an online sports-betting service. According to the American Gaming Association, the total amount of money bet on sports in 2024 was $149.9 billion, an increase of 23.8 percent from 2023.
Ninety-five percent of those bets were placed online. In much of the country, you can now bet from your smartphone on whether the very next pitch in a baseball game will be a ball or a strike, or whether a Super Bowl will end in a “scorigami” (a final score that has never occurred in the N.F.L. before). More and more sports arenas are enabling spectators to bet on the live action unfolding in front of them, because what could go wrong with people wagering lots of money while they drink lots of beer? All the major pro sports leagues and top collegiate conferences now have lucrative deals with one of the industry leaders like DraftKings or FanDuel.
In the process, sports gambling has saturated the broader culture of sports, particularly sports coverage and sports broadcasting — the language of sports itself. Good luck finding a sports-themed podcast or telecast that isn’t presented by DraftKings or FanDuel. Betting odds are now a fixture at the bottom of the screen. This highlight package has been brought to you by BetMGM. Fanatics Sportsbook Pick of the Day: Bet and get up to $100 in bonus bets each day for 10 days. Headlines in the world of sports are routinely analyzed through the prism of gambling; football injuries, for example, are reported on in terms of how they’ll move betting lines and affect odds.
Everyone sounds like a capper now, peddling their picks, acting as if they know who’s going to win, and when you consider the tens of millions of dollars that their parent companies are being paid to harvest more sports gamblers, are they cappers or are they more like touts? “Listening to sports personalities talk about betting — it sounds like listening to my parents freestyle rap,” Brennan says. “Mazi or some of these other guys — they’re just a touch more egregious.”
Brennan was a central figure in the push to repeal PASPA, but while he still believes in the legal outcome, he also has some concerns about the development and regulation of the industry; he recently stepped away from Prime Sports and started pushing for change. “I will be the first one to say I’m stunned at just how quickly sports betting turned into sports media and entertainment,” he says. “It’s like selling Happy Meals.” The sheer volume of novice gamblers flooding into the industry, and the billions of dollars flowing through it, has led to the sprouting of countless niche economies, from model-building software to brand-sponsored talk shows on X Spaces to $1,500-a-pick cappers like Mazi. Some of these businesses supply useful services; some of them can be parasitic or predatory. The entire ecosystem, though, relies on a steady supply of people who don’t know what they’re doing but who keep doing it anyway.
‘The folks I know on, let’s say, both the light and dark sides of the street — we know who’s out there,’ says one industry insider. ‘We know who’s for real and who isn’t.’
The difference between a sincere handicapper and a shady tout is mostly in the eye of the beholder, but at the core of it is transparency — fessing up when you lose. Hamersley often posts Instagram stories about his crushing defeats, and he shared proprietary business documents with me without hesitation. Amanda Vance, 29, a Pittsburgh Steelers-obsessed capper who is based in Boca Raton, Fla., and has swiftly amassed more than half a million followers on Instagram, says: “My view is there’s scummy cappers who post with a bunch of nice watches on and flex their money, and those are the people that I think kind of deserve the hate. But then I think there are people like myself, who are good at it, love what they do, don’t brag, own their losses.”
Vance is something of a unicorn: a female capper operating in the troll-infested swamp of the online manosphere that has sprung up around sports betting. She started out in sports broadcasting but transitioned to handicapping during the pandemic when she noticed that her social media followers kept asking her for picks. A vast majority of her clients are men, and she recognizes that the bond between them and Vance, like so many online relationships today, has a strong parasocial component. She’s attractive, crushes beers, talks smack and knows more about the Cover 2 defense than you do — a dream girl for many, whose presence only costs $24.99 per day, or $99.99 per week. “No matter what,” she says, “I have to try extra hard because of my looks to prove I’m not just a pretty face and I do know what I’m talking about.”
Mazi, though, seems to hold a different allure for his clientele. They don’t care about his take on the Boston Celtics’ defense or the Los Angeles Dodgers’ rotation or whether a point spread of 6.5 is too large for a road favorite. In fact, Mazi barely talks about sports at all. He doesn’t have to. All they see is the money.
Have you ever held $100,000 in cash in your hand? It’s lighter and floppier than I anticipated, and thrilling in an almost illicit way. My instinct was to hide it. Mazi had walked into the bustling lobby of the Trump International wearing his $180,000 Eliantte chain and nobody blinked, but for some reason I felt indiscreet publicly flashing far less than that in someone else’s cash. I’d asked Mazi to show me how much he had in the fancy satchel he placed on the bar next to him, and while the bartender hunted for the clicker to put the Purdue game on one of the six TVs in our line of sight, Mazi fished out two stacks of casino-banded cash, each containing more money than I’ve ever held in my life.
From the moment I started following Mazi, I’d been trying to wrap my head around the thought process of someone who would spend $20, let alone $200 or $1,500, to buy picks from a handicapper. It’s hard enough to make money gambling on sports without starting in a $1,500 hole. “If you’re paying someone $1,500 for a play — and this is assuming the play gives you a 10 percent edge, which is very, very generous — then you need to bet $15,000 just to break even,” Noel says.
“People come into the space, they’re uneducated, they have no clue how it works, and they probably start betting themselves — and they lose, lose, lose,” one sportsbook operator told me. “And then they see somebody pop up on social media who says they’re 12-1 in their last 13 games, and they’re flying private, and they’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars in front of them. And they want that lifestyle, so they buy into what this person is selling. And more often than not, it will lead them down a deeper hole.” Some gamblers may internalize all that losing, blaming themselves and not the worthless picks they bought, which could be one reason people stick with bad cappers. Another is selective bias: our tendency to overrate our wins and rationalize our losses, distorting our actual performance.
So maybe Mazi embellishes his record a bit. Isn’t that what salespeople do? Isn’t that what Americans do?
Mazi isn’t shy about defending his reputation in public — if anything, he’s a bit too easy to provoke — but he also has a tendency to undermine his own credibility. I had to pester him three times to connect me with clients who could vouch for his performance. Finally, he gave me two phone numbers. The first client, a man named Kendrick Muldrew, who told me he started his own private security business with the winnings from his bets with Mazi, turned out to be Mazi’s former bodyguard. The second client, a locally successful Memphis-based rap producer, Lody Lucci, told me he hooked up with Mazi through X last year and hung out with him in Las Vegas, where he watched with admiration as Mazi laid down big bets on his own picks. That sold him. Lucci told me he spends $10,000 to $20,000 per week buying picks from Mazi and $30,000 more on wagers, and he claims the relationship has made him “a lot of money, a lot of money.” A couple of months later, though, Lucci revealed that he’s not a client of Mazi’s, never has been and only pretended to be at Mazi’s behest.
It’s also worth noting that every sharp and every oddsmaker I spoke with for this article pointed out that if Mazi really wins at the rate he claims, most of the sportsbooks he bets at would never take his action. “You kind of tell on yourself when you show big tickets constantly,” Gadoon Kyrollos, a much-admired pro gambler, known as Spanky, who co-founded the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame two years ago, told me. “You’re trying to say, ‘Look — I’m a big winner.’ But for anybody that has a clue, we know the reality is that you’re fundamentally a loser.” Casinos also keep close tabs on the betting patterns of their regular customers, especially the winners. “The folks I know on, let’s say, both the light and dark sides of the street — we know who’s out there,” Brennan told me. “We know who’s for real and who isn’t, and I can tell you for a fact, Mazi isn’t anywhere near that list, isn’t in consideration, an honorable mention, any of that.”
OK, so maybe Mazi embellishes his record a bit. Isn’t that what salespeople do? Isn’t that what Americans do? Here we are, in Sin City, at the restaurant and bar of the Trump International — “the best dining in Las Vegas,” according to the hotel website, where the seasonal breakfast fruit plate costs $21 — and we’re getting all high and mighty about truth in marketing? Noel calls Mazi’s prices “absolutely absurd” but notes that “he wouldn’t be selling at that price if people weren’t buying.” He particularly respects Mazi’s willingness to bet big himself. Plenty of cappers don’t risk their own money, while Mazi claims to have won so many million-dollar bets on the Kansas City Chiefs in recent years that he got a tattoo of the quarterback Patrick Mahomes on his thigh. “Those bets — they’re definitely real,” Noel says, and win or lose, “it’s incredible marketing.”
By the time the bartender and three other co-workers managed to find the Purdue game, the Boilermakers had a healthy lead and Mazi’s big parlay was nearly two-thirds of the way home. As we left, the bartender put our coffee orders on the house to atone for the debacle with the TVs, and then a valet brought around Mazi’s two-toned white-and-black Maybach, which is a high-end brand of Mercedes-Benz for people who think only poor people drive Mercedes-Benzes. Lots of sports fans consider today — Day 1 of Round 1 of March Madness — to be their favorite day of the year, but Mazi seemed uninterested. Instead, he drove us to a luxury shopping mall and made a beeline for the Louis Vuitton store, where a clerk recognized him and greeted him warmly. While I watched basketball on my phone, Mazi bought a $2,200 pair of black pants and a $3,800 black jacket.
The next day, Kentucky beat unheralded Troy University, successfully completing his three-leg parlay without any stress. As soon as the buzzer sounded, he posted his winning tickets on Instagram. He was $1.35 million richer. The Sports Betting King had done it again.
Two months or so after our breakfast, on Friday, May 16, Mazi was coming off another blowout week of nothing but big winners. “WEEKEND PACKAGE IS AVAILABLE NOW !!!!!” he wrote to his subscribers. “LOCK IN EARLY.”
Then he vanished. All of his social media channels fell silent. He stopped responding to my texts. Mazi VS was gone.
Weeks later, Noel shared with me a rumor circulating through sports-gambling circles on X that Mazi was still in Las Vegas — specifically, in the Clark County Detention Center. He was in jail.
The same day that Mazi’s entire operation went dark without explanation, the State of Nevada arrested a man named Darnell Smith; he would be charged with 14 felony counts of forgery and counterfeiting documents for the purpose of creating a false identity. The Las Vegas district attorney’s office declined to provide any additional information about the case beyond what was available in the public court documents, and Smith’s listed lawyer, Robert Draskovich, did not respond to written questions or a request for comment. But according to Mazi’s former bodyguard Kendrick Muldrew and another knowledgeable source in the industry, Mazi VS and Darnell Smith are the same person.
The court documents indicate that Smith stands accused of possessing 14 different IDs. One was a Utah identification card with the name Carson Marimon; 11 were from Arizona; one was a Romanian passport with the name Stanescu Ana-Maria. And the final ID? A Nevada driver’s license with the name Goated Mazi.
Smith entered a plea of not guilty on all 14 counts, but according to an investigator in the district attorney’s office, he was not granted bail because he was still on probation from an earlier gun-possession charge. His criminal trial is scheduled for Aug. 25, and if convicted, he faces years in prison.
In mid-June, Mazi finally responded to one of my texts, writing that he was on “business out of town.” When I texted him to ask if his real name was Darnell Smith — and included a screenshot of the inmate report on Smith from the Clark County Detention Center — he didn’t confirm it, but he also didn’t deny it. He accused me of being “weird” and asking “too many personal questions.”
“Enjoy your day, bro,” he wrote. “You can delete my number.”
Additional reporting by Kimberley McGee.
Read by Eric Jason Martin
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Brian St. Pierre
Source photographs for illustrations above: Mazi VS Instagram; Mario Hommes/DeFodi Images, via Getty Images; Andrey Denisyuk/Getty Images; Stacy Revere/Getty Images; Matthew Stockman/Getty Images; Jamie Squire/Getty Images; Mikhail Starodubov/Adobe Stock; Maksim Denisenko/Adobe Stock; Bruno Coelho/Adobe Stock; The Picture House/Adobe Stock; Retouch man/Adobe Stock; Luca Piccini Basile/Adobe Stock; Somchaij/Adobe Stock; Kdrkara/Adobe Stock; Nata777_7/Adobe stock; Jan/Adobe Stock.
The post He Claims He’s the ‘Sports Betting King.’ What Are the Odds? appeared first on New York Times.
