Sometimes poker player Amit Patel steals $22 million from Jacksonville Jaguars, mainly to shoot off on DFS

[Dan Druff]

Here's the article on him: https://archive.ph/mUntA

Amit Patel is a degenerate gambler who stole $22,000,000 from his employer, the Jacksonville Jaguars, mostly loaded onto DFS sites for high stakes contests. From 2008-2014, he seemed to play poker on and off, but did cash in 2019 after nothing for five years, so it looks like he still played occasionally.

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He was known as "parlaypicker" on DraftKings and FanDuel, and was thought to be notoriously bad. One of the things he did was "run trains", which in DFS means submitting a lot of entries with the exact same picks, hoping to win all of the top spots. This is considered a very -EV strategy.

He also sometimes would register for high stakes contests and forget to set lineups!

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His titles during with the Jaguars were coordinator, financial planning and analysis, and then manager, financial planning and analysis, and he worked there for 5 years between 2018 and early 2023.

Nobody else was found to be involved in these thefts, and he did not have access to confidential team strategy or player data -- just financial stuff.

[The Boz]

This is the what the sports gambling industry has become. The vast majority of new players are betting Lottery Ticket Parlays with over player props and favorites looking to change their lives with one hit on 6-10 leg parlays. And social media promotes the 1 in 10,000 one that actually hits at 6732-1 like it’s an everyday occurrence that can happen to you too.

Just look at what happens when a player gets hurt, they cry within minutes for “refunds” because they all bet the over. Here is another example from last night. Books inflate the prop totals because they know this mob won’t be an under.



Draft kings and Fanduel are making tens of millions, $10 to $20 at a time. And the leagues have bought into it with their pregame shows pushing prop parlays. Anyone making “smart” straight wagers with these books and winning will be cutoff or limited quickly. They don’t want that business.

I truly believe the damages being done will become a big story in some circles in the next few years. While the NFL will claim they “warned” fans with disclaimers.

[AhoosierA]

I saw this story and immediately went to my FB friends list and looked for a former classmate from my high school.

I went to school with an Amit Patel, who I know had went to jail for scamming shortly after high school, and once he got out of jail he started coaching football.

I probably haven't thought of him or saw him in 15+ years so I went to find his face book to see if this was him.

It wasn't

[Mission146]

Ha! I had to see if it was the brother of a guy I used to work with.

[Dan Druff]

The Jaguars want the $20 million BACK from FanDuel, who is refusing to give it back: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/...tolen-millions

The popular opinion on Twitter is that the Jaguars are being unreasonable.

After all, if a guy robs a 7-11, then goes to a nice steak dinner with the proceeds, the steakhouse doesn't have to give the money back to the 7-11, right?

But this is a bit different. All casinos sportsbooks are required by law to do extensive KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti money laundering) checks on high rollers. That is, if someone is firing off huge money in the sportsbook, the book is required to verify his source of funds and make sure that it makes sense that he has such money to gamble.

The guy here clearly did not make this kind of money at his Jaguars job, and would not have had a logical explanation as to where he got all that money to lose. Apparently FanDuel did not ask any questions, and just let the guy fire off $20 million.

But wait... there's a problem. Almost all of the money was lost on fantasy sports, which is NOT a regulated industry. There's currently debate whether the KYC/AML requirements apply to daily fantasy sports. So this one is going to be a tough legal battle, with no clear cut answer.