LAS VEGAS — In the wee hours on June 22, Greg Matson sat at the long Westgate SuperBook bar, mega screens from left to right showing highlights of Friday’s action.
However, he honed in on his smartphone, horizontally propped on a video-poker machine, tuned to baseball in South Korea. To clients, he had trumpeted over 11 in NC Dinos-SSG Landers, and Landers led 9-3 in the fourth inning.
The KBO, as usual, kept his rapt attention.
An occasional barkeep or fellow patron inquired about the small screen. “What,” they say, “are you watching on your phone?!”
Similar scenes occur at the Golden Nugget or Harrah’s, Matson’s spots in Lake Tahoe. And at Beer Thirty, in Santa Cruz, California, where nearly everyone in the bottle shop and pour house knows him.
Matson, 40, eases into his love for baseball that sprouted at his grandpa’s beach house in Capitola, Tommy John surgery that threw his pitching career a curve and his start in KBO handicapping in 2019.
I’d been seeking to scribe an Ode to the KBO since the coronavirus pandemic nearly shuttered the planet’s sports in 2020. South Korean baseball, thankfully, eked onto ESPN during those hazy months.
Matson had been scouting it with aplomb, producing profit for his California Wager handicapping clients. When it was the only game on TV, he knew all about the KBO. Via a mutual friend, I met Matson later that Saturday.
“I’m just going with it,” he says. “The past three years, I’ve been grinding 16 to 18 hours a day, getting content out there, figuring new angles. When it all shut down, there was still something to talk about.
“There was so much success early on, so much juice. Trends would just stare at you. It was so beatable, and that’s why certain sportsbooks didn’t carry KBO odds.”
Selective shopping
Matson has expanded his operations to include college baseball, since he has fared well in spots in the past.
Penn State visited Stanford’s Klein Field at Sunken Diamond, an easy walk from Matson’s home, in late February. He knew the Cardinal was down, that the Nittany Lions were solid.
He has 10 betting outlets, and Matson wagered on Penn State +330 to win Game 1. It did, 15-4. He got +320 on Game 2, which Penn State won 13-2. For Game 3, it was Nits +290, and they lost 9-5.
California Wager was up 5.5 units on that series alone and would forge a stunning profit margin of 110 units on the campaign that just concluded with Tennessee winning the College World Series.
Florida State won a chunk of that by cashing a 25-to-1 futures ticket just to reach Omaha, Nebraska, site of the CWS. Overall, California Wager went 208-86-3 in college baseball in 2024.
When I met Matson, his selections had swept five of the previous six days. Since 2019, he has recorded a ridiculous 356 profit units in the KBO. Monthly subscriptions start at $50.
This season, his KBO action is ahead 5.7 units, at 49-44-2, middling success he partly attributes to juice that shops have sliced from +150 to +125, -120 to -140.
College hoops and football, NASCAR and golf also land in his crosshairs.
His VIP Card for last weekend’s Rocket Mortgage Classic returned 20 units of profit, wagers heavy on top-five through top-30 finishes for Akshay Bhatia and Min Woo Lee, both of whom finished in a four-way tie for second.
In five years of spot-betting golf, that’s his best return on investment. Many top players passed on Detroit.
“Without a lot of the big boys,” he says, “I thought more comfortably about attacking some of these younger guys. I’ve been very selective with doing anything VIP-wise until I have a good system and really trust what I’m seeing.”
Touch the grass
Matson was a tyke at his grandfather’s beach house in Capitola, just east of Santa Cruz, when he fell for baseball. With a Wiffle ball and bat in one hand, a cocktail in the other, Richard Lynn smacked liners to him.
“Missiles,” Matson says. “I was his only grandson, and he took it upon himself to turn me into a baseball player.”
Lynn died at 95 in 2011. At the family dwelling in Monterey not so long ago, Dave Matson rose before 5 a.m. to begin his usual workday in finance and found Greg at a table.
Charts, notes and an open computer, KBO baseball on the flat-screen TV, Matson was prepping for the day. He also has two children from a marriage that soured.
The brave new world of sports betting might be foreign to many parents, but it has given Matson stability and success.
“My dad has always been a hard worker, still is,” Matson says. “He’s my hero. He has definitely had a big effect on me, keeping me motivated and driven all the time.”
Logan asks his pop, “Have we had a good day? Are we up?” Matson responds, “Dude, you’re 7! Stop.
“More motivation,” Matson laughs, “and it shows [Logan] consistency.”
Matson has a saying: Touch the grass. On Tuesday, he took Logan, who prefers to play barefoot, to a golf course.
“A motto I use, from my clients all the way down to my kids,” Matson says. “It’s important to get outside, have some perspective and understand that there is more to life than just the grind.”