The bookie at the center of the Ohtani, Resorts World LV betting scandal is ready to talk

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most.