From the pallet line.

It's somewhere north of 30 degrees inside a tin shed in Australia. I'm at a workbench repairing pallets and throwing them onto a line, same as every other day. Except on my phone, Dillon Brooks is collecting me thirty grand.

Two hundred dollars at $152. Rebounds and assists. And he wasn't even the whole day — by the close of play the day's collects came to $42,500, with Brooks responsible for $30,400 of it. I'm death-riding every board, every dime, sweating through my shirt for two reasons now instead of one. My mate Matt Ellis is at the bench across from me and he sees my face and goes:

That day was more than half a year's salary. Free and clear. In one afternoon. I've still got the slips.

I worked the full shift. Built different, I guess.

But on the way home it hit me properly, and it wouldn't let go. I had worked myself into the ground for years to move my family forward financially — two jobs, overtime, 80-hour weeks in the heat. And here was a thing where, if I was right, I win, tax free, and everything is Gucci. My money, my mouth, my noise. If I'm wrong — bad consequences, and they're mine too.

Not long after, I packed in the manual labour.

To explain how a bloke repairing pallets ends up making that call — and why it wasn't as reckless as it sounds — I need to take you back to a $10 ticket in 2007.

The $10 ticket

I'd been to the Trentham races with my uncle when I was younger, but I was never really a bettor. Betting was just around, the way it is.

Then in 2007, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett joined the Boston Celtics, and something in my head said that's wrong about the $10 they were paying to win the championship. I put on ten or twenty bucks and held the ticket the whole season. I couldn't have told you why. I just had this innate sense that it was a good price — that the number and the reality didn't match.

They won the title. The ticket collected. And it took me about ten more years to take up any regular betting — and twelve before the Bubble showed me that the feeling I had that day has a name, and that some people build entire livelihoods on it.

The grind years

Fast forward. I'm a 30-year-old man in Australia hustling two jobs, overtime whenever it existed, 80-hour weeks, covering ground in 30-degree heat. A wife and three kids to support. Ground out a hundred racks for a house deposit the hard way — hour by hour, shift by shift.

Betting-wise, I still wasn't really a bettor. I made a little coin on the local basketball leagues — lunch money, honestly. But two things were quietly true that would matter enormously later: I knew basketball deeply, and after years of grinding, I finally had a small amount of money that could disappear without changing anything about my family's life.

Hold onto that second one. It's the whole foundation.

Breakthrough one: the promo that taught me what an edge was

Things got real when a corporate bookie ran a "double your winnings in bonus cash" promo. It incentivised me to bet, so I bet. I won.

They removed the promo. I kept winning.

And that's when the penny dropped, even if I couldn't have articulated it at the time: I could make money after they took the incentive away. Their assessment of the prices in the markets I was betting wasn't as good as mine. Maybe I was better than the market, maybe the market was just soft — either way, the promo hadn't been the edge. The promo was just the thing that got me to look. The edge was mine, and it was still there when the free money left.

I know exactly what that was now. Back then I just knew the balance kept going the right way.

Breakthrough two: the Bubble

The 2020 NBA Bubble is where the bankroll truly came from. I went in betting my edges from a small base — call it a couple of grand from the local ball days, plus a few thousand in profit on top.

Then the significant ones started landing.

The 76ers one — my read was simple: a nothing game for both teams given the standings, and D'Antoni was on record saying he'd rest guys. The market hadn't priced what that actually meant. $301 for something that live. It got up.

The Jazz–Nuggets one I remember vividly — Mike Conley misses a game-winner at the death. I was at work, we were literally walking into toolbox talk, and I'm there full-on cheering.

There were wins and there were losses along the way — plenty of both. But most of the business went through my personal sportsbook account, and by the time they finally turned it off, I'd taken close to $100K in profit from them. For a fair while I think they genuinely believed I'd lose it back. I just kept betting up and kept winning.

(Being restricted — what to do about outs, getting set when the books don't want you — is a whole subject of its own. I can't get too deep into it here, but luckily I'd won enough in front of the lads that I had options. That story is for another day.)

The shed, again

Which brings us back to Dillon Brooks, the pallet line, and Matt telling me to go home.

That day was the point of no return. I finished the shift, went home, and made the decision. I left the manual labour behind and put my focus into betting, tipping, and building this thing. I also took a job in the industry — partly for the money, mostly because I have genuine passion and some skill in this area and I wanted to be closer to it.

Since then it's been the wins, the losses — and there have been plenty of both — and above all the lessons. Discipline. Persistence. What variance actually feels like when it's your money and your name on the results.

The honest ledger

Here's the part most people leave out of these stories, and it's the part I care about most.

What the winnings did: Car, paid cash. Solar on the roof, paid cash. Family holidays — Hawaii, LA, Vegas, Disneyland, NBA games live, and New Zealand a few times (Wanaka — beautiful spot, genuinely recommend it). New gear for the kids, plenty of food on the table, and the thing money is actually for — time. Time with my kids that 80-hour weeks were never going to give me. None of that happens on my old salary. Not a chance.

What I got wrong: I wish I'd managed the money better, plain and simple. I bought shares in horses — two were so slow it was offensive, one died, and the fourth actually won races and showed real promise, was out of I Am Invincible with good residual value... and then it died too. Crypto — gone. Easy come, easy go, as they say. (The harness horse, Franco Macho, is the exception — sturdy, trustworthy, a great investment. Shout out Franco.) I should have put more into bricks and mortar, boring as that sounds. That's not false modesty; that's the actual ledger, and if you're going to trust my numbers on the good stuff, you get the dumb stuff too.

Why any of this matters to you

Looking back, my leap only worked because two conditions were true before I ever jumped:

1. I was only ever risking money I could genuinely afford to lose. The grind years bought that. The bets never threatened the house, the kids, or the mortgage.

2. I had a proven edge before I scaled — not a hot streak, an edge. The promo era proved it, the Bubble compounded it, and seven seasons of published results have documented it since. Including the losing one. Especially the losing one.

That's why every result since July 2020 is published, audited, and reconciled — the winning seasons and the season we lost. It's why the bankroll guide tells you the truth ("nobody can tell you what your bankroll should be — but here's exactly what each level of risk looks like") instead of selling you a dream.

I got my start on a $10 ticket, a soft promo, and a Bubble that will never happen again. You don't get my start. What you get is the record, the maths, and the honest version of the story — dead horses and all.

That's worth more.

And me? These days I'm set. There's plenty to bet with, the bankroll stopped being a concern a long time ago, and I back my reads with real money every day of the season. At heart I'm still a hustler — that never leaves you. The difference is I don't have that relentless dark cloud of not-much-money hanging over my head anymore. That, more than any single collect, is what all of this was for.

— T