About

Larry Trusley knows a winner when he sees it. He is one of the premiere sports prognosticators in the country.

While Larry has a passion for athletics and a unique talent for picking winners, he has always approached sports betting as a way to make watching football, basketball, baseball and horse racing as entertaining as possible. And even though he has never promised his clients instant wealth, he has consistently made them a lot happier when the final buzzer has sounded and the photo finish has been shot.

Larry formally started making sports picks in 1988, and now distributes his predictions via e-mail and on the Internet. Four TVs and VCRs are humming constantly in his Newport Beach, California headquarters, delivering sporting events. Like a college student cramming for finals, Larry studies sky-high stacks of statistics (as well as the numbers on a few dozen floppy disks) to formulate his next round of betting selections. His analyses keep him busy from early in the morning until late at night.

How did Larry Trusley, a humble guy from the Midwest, end up as a prominent figure in the world of sports gaming?

He grew up in Akron, Ohio, with a love of sports but with a vision disorder that limited his success on the Little League diamond and the playground basketball courts. As he explains, “I’m still remembered as the only kid in Akron who could play slow-pitch softball all afternoon long and not hit the ball even once!” But as Larry reached adolescence, he found himself surrounded by everyone from buddies to the neighborhood barber who “bet on everything that moved.” So while he was drawn to sports primarily by love of the competition, he found the challenge of picking winners absolutely irresistible. He began accumulating sports statistics, carrying a shoebox filled with stats under one arm and his schoolbooks under the other. In college at Ohio State University and the University of Akron (he has a bachelor’s degree in business), he started sharing his predictions with friends. After moving to California, his prowess for predictions followed him, and as word of mouth grew, people he barely knew were asking for his Kentucky Derby pick or his selection of the Super Bowl winner.

A typical day for Larry begins at 3 or 4 in the morning. He reads the sports pages of three daily newspapers. He checks sports stats on the Internet. When he sees a trend or pattern, he may track it for a few weeks, months or even years, and then decide where and when the bets should be placed. His picks aren’t infallible, but he’s right much more often than not. And he does it in a spirited and witty way.

Larry can point to a long list of memorable betting selections. For example, three months before the start of the 1997 NFL football season, a local newspaper published his prediction of Denver beating Green Bay in the Super Bowl the following January; in fact, not only did those two teams make it to the championship game, but as Larry had predicted, the Broncos upset the Packers (even though the Vegas oddsmakers favored Green Bay by 11½ points).

“I tell my subscribers that while they shouldn’t bet every day, they should study betting every day,” says Larry. If they did, they’d discover some of the finer points of sports betting that can keep them in the win column.

For example, in the World Series, bet on the team that plays its home games on Astroturf (these teams tend to be built around speed, which will serve them well even when playing on grass). . . .

The day after a pro basketball team has won in overtime, bet against it if it plays the very next day. . . .

The Super Bowl team with the most rushing yards during the regular season should get your attention; this team can control the line of scrimmage – and will probably control the big game.