He Helps the Smart Degenerates Win
A gambler walks into a bar. He’s wearing a nautical button-down jacket, which he thrifted, and a pink headband that sweeps his dreadlocks off his forehead. He grabs a seat, flashes a grin, and orders a mezcal old-fashioned. Nothing Vegas about the guy.
Except, of course, the gambling. And the stage name. He introduces himself as Jon Elliot, but he’s Jon Elliot Godbody on the internet. He’s a DJ and a former Equinox trainer so the nom de hustle makes some sense. And, also, yes, it is a nice body. Broad shoulders. Big for a numbers guy.
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Since 2018, when U.S. states began legalizing online sports betting, Elliott has made a living telling other people how to win. Together with his business partner, an Ivy League-educated coder who wanted his name nowhere near this story, Elliott shares daily predictions with his clients on a private Discord. The focus is on individual stats. Points. Rebounds. Assists. He’s like a financial advisor, but more helpful and more aligned. He takes the same action as his people, who find him through friends and friends of friends.
It’s a word-of-mouth thing, a tip passed between upwardly mobile guys: More than two-thirds of Elliott’s clients are young finance and tech guys, he says, plus a combination of lawyers, former athletes, and medical school students.
These are men who want to gamble, but also men who are accustomed to winning — and to having an inside track. Elliott’s product is simple: an advantage. He’s proud of that offering, but also — and this comes across as clearly as his good nature — a bit ambivalent.
“I’ve always wanted to talk about sports [betting] at length,” he tells me early in our conversation. “I think it’s important to have a 360-degree view of something that is continuously taking over young men’s lives in America. It’s already a multi-billion dollar industry and it’s going to continue to grow.”
He pauses for thought, peering over his dark sunglasses. The frames are lined with pearls.
“There’s going to be a lot of weird consequences.”
Elliott did not mean to become a gambler, but there was a woman. Around eight years ago, his then-girlfriend wanted a pair of Nike Yeezy sneakers. She told him about a DraftKings Daily Fantasy basketball contest in which her coveted pair was the prize on offer. She said, “‘You know everything there is to know about basketball — you could probably win.’” He smiles a bit remembering this.
She had a point: Elliott had already put in his 10,000 hours analyzing the game. Growing up in The Bronx, he wanted to be a great basketball player like his father, but just didn’t have it. Martial arts came naturally, not ball. So, to impress his obsessed father, he made up for what he lacked in natural ability by becoming an amateur analyst. “I had to learn everything there is to know about the game,” he says. “I realized my memory was pretty exceptional when it came to those types of things.”
Meanwhile, in school, Elliott aced tests and skipped class. He didn’t think about what it meant to have a natural talent. Then, his math teacher at Monroe-Woodbury High School stepped in.
“My teacher made me stay afterward for like two weeks before graduation to pass me,” he says. “He is the one who drilled into my head that I have a gift — that I should pursue math. [My teacher said], ‘You don’t show up to class at all. When you do, it’s amazing. You know the answer to everything. You’re just so sharp.’”
He was. And so Elliott beat 13,998 people in that fantasy competition, coming in second and bagging $300 (no dice on the sneakers). He took the $300 and reinvested. In three weeks, he’d turned that number into $20,000 just playing Daily Fantasy. He was 23 years old and he’d accidentally gotten himself a job.
“It was so much money for me at the time,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I really have something here. Then I made it my mission to go even harder — to learn more and start using all my math to build models.”
He kept winning and he kept working on it. After about two and a half years, FanDuel, which is now the second-largest online sportsbook in the U.S., invited him to a fantasy tournament in Miami to compete for $100,000. The company sent a black car to fetch him, gave him a first-class plane ticket, and put him up in the Ritz-Carlton. But when he arrived, he received a less-than-warm reception from his competitors.
“I tried to talk to other older guys, and they just weren’t receptive,” he says. “They didn’t know what to do with me because I’m just this very flamboyant young Black man. They were conservative older white dudes…they had bigger bankrolls to fall back on. They come from rich families. I’m making this all happen myself.”
Elliott didn’t win the big money that weekend but left the tournament with about $22,000 and one friend, the man who would become his business partner. “He was also from New York, and also younger,” Elliott says. “We got along immediately. They had a top-shelf open bar, and we just got drunk on the beach together — just talking about all these different random ideas and nerding out.”
Elliott had a Fantasy Friend.
After Miami, the road was rocky for a little while. Elliott struggled to manage the windfall of money he was bringing in. “I was living very recklessly — going out, I was spending like $5,000 or $6,000. Partying, bottles, clubs. Now that I’m 31, I understand how to rein that in. But at that time, I definitely didn’t.”
That was the beginning of the end of the relationship with his ex-girlfriend. After the breakup, Elliott moved back in with his parents, to regroup. He thought about what he wanted to do next and how to best apply himself. He reached out to his Fantasy Friend.
“We both remembered the connection,” he says. “We just got each other. It’s a strange thing.”
His Fantasy Friend was making the move to online sports betting, which, at the time, had recently been legalized in New Jersey. He invited Elliott to his apartment in Manhattan. He had an idea, an algorithm, and a model.
Elliott’s Fantasy Friend had been scraping pro sports stats and had purchased access to Sportradar’s Synergy Sports platform, which combines statistics and video to provide ultra-detailed, compartmentalized play-type data. “You have to be like a member of the media or pay a shit ton of money to have access to some of that stuff,” he says. But, he thought, it wasn’t quite enough.
To place smart bets on individual statistics rather than game outcomes — neither man wanted to contend with lines being set by data-rich sportsbooks — the Fantasy Friend needed to know about recent performance. What players were streaking. What players were not. Elliott dove in. Using his own pattern recognition and the new data sets, he built some models and made some early bets.
“I built up a very big bankroll, which was really nice,” he says.
He started posting his successful bets on Reddit. “I was wondering where I could post my winnings in a place where people would appreciate them,” he says. “Guys started hitting me up asking, ‘Can I tail you?’”
Elliott didn’t want to give free advice. But then a man offered to pay him. Boom.
Elliott’s willingness to share his tips begs a question: Why didn’t he parlay his skillset into a full-time job at a financial services firm? Surely, there are funds that do that, and would be happy to have an Elliott on staff pulling a chunky salary.
But, in the world of gambling, drawing a salary draws suspicion. Salaries are for people who can’t stomach risk or doubt their own alpha. Elliott probably could work a financial services job, but that’s not him. He’s the guy that you get introduced to if you know the right people.
And, as it turns out, investing is a form of gambling, but gambling isn’t generally recognized as a viable form of investing. Roughly a decade ago, as a lot of dumb money (which is to say, one-off gambles) pooled in England, the idea of a sports betting hedge fund became briefly popular. The smart money would gang up, hire analysts, and trounce the dumb money. That made sense on paper, but in reality, sports betting hedge funds have tended to go bankrupt. The analysis was probably sound, but unexpected events are, in fact, inevitable. The way to collectively win at gambling is to place different bets. Thus the Discord model.
Elliott charges his clients shockingly little. All they need is a word-of-mouth invite. The cost after is a flat monthly fee: $50 per month for access to the Discord chat and five or six bets a day, or $100 a month for access to Elliott himself, who likes to chat.
“A lot of times, you have to see the pattern before it truly emerges,” he says. “Vegas is so good at adjusting their lines [of betting]. If something happens three times in a row, they’ve already caught up to it. If you get it on the second time? That’s where you make a lot of money.”
When we spoke, Elliott told me he and his Fantasy Friend have 80 clients in the high-tier sector and 100 in the lower-tier sector, though it fluctuates from month to month.
Crucially, Elliott also bets for himself. Usually, he makes the bets he recommends for his clients — which instills trust, he says — but every so often, he’ll bet against his recommendations for emotional reasons. “I do things that are potentially way more risky; I make bets I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving out to the clients. There have been times where I’ve bet against what I’ve told a client, just because I love the player,” he says. “I just want to root for their success.”
Risk is always top of mind. Elliott worries about gambling addiction. Ads for sports betting are everywhere — and more effective than original cigarette campaigns, according to studies out of Northwestern University. Gambling is linked to suicide. Elliott knows it.
“Unfortunately, I would probably say 60% of [my clients] are problem gamblers,” he says.
“They’re addicted to gambling?” I ask.
“Yes, absolutely,” he says, suddenly serious. “Even jokingly, we all say it about ourselves. Sometimes, a friend of mine will say that he bet on something, and I’ll say, ‘You’re definitely a degenerate because that [bet] doesn’t even fucking make sense — you just wanted to have some action.’ That’s a big thing.”
It’s also why Elliott doesn’t like promoting his work; his social media accounts make no mention of it.
“The last thing I would ever want is a kid who’s just starting his life to fuck himself, financially and mentally. Without knowing the downside, it’s so easy to fall into it. Your dopamine, your serotonin — you’re very influenced. I already experienced it myself.”
A while ago, he was approached by representatives of FanDuel, who floated the idea of him becoming a social media influencer for the brand. Elliott declined. He wasn’t comfortable with that kind of work. He doesn’t want to promote gambling. He just wants to win.
But the thing he knows from looking at all those stats is that variations are unpredictable and inevitable. He’s winning now, but he won’t be winning forever.
“I wish I could say that there’s a gold pot at the end of the rainbow,” he says. “But you have to be either fully dedicated and disciplined, or that’s it. Eventually, you will lose sight.”
He stands and straightens his jacket. Its nautical pattern features blue life preservers.
“It’s just a waiting game.”
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