Debt-Ridden Gambler Wins $1 Million After Friends Bet Him He Couldn’t Cut His Body Fat To 10 Percent In Six Months

Instagram/Walter Scoobs


We do a fair amount of body transformation posts here at BroBible, all containing varying degrees of inspiring qualities. But this one right here is by far the wildest, most intense, highest stake metamorphosis I’ve ever come across.

The man’s name is Walter Fisher, a 36-year-old professional poker player, who from February to June 2016, was living the high life. The dude could not lose, turning two grand into $97,000 on the blackjack table, just one of his many scores during his five month heater.

But, eventually the law of averages won out and Walter claims he got overwhelmed by “playing over his head.” And one month later, just like that, he had lost it all. To add insult to injury, he piled 40 to 50 pounds onto his $100,000 debt by ordering double veal parms and eating large pizzas for himself at the poker table.

The 6’1” Fisher ballooned to 245 pounds and had settled into a dark, dangerous place–I was broke, big and isolated. People dream of what I had accomplished, and I lost control,” he told The New York Post.

His lifestyle of binge eating and self-pity would be challenged in December 2016 when a gambling friend offered to bet Fisher $100,000 that he could not cut his body fat to less than 10 percent in six months. Although the probability of reducing his body fat to the percentage of an elite athlete was extremely slim, Fisher was desperate, and took the bet. He looped in poker playboy Dan Bilzerian and Bill Perkins, a wealthy hedge fund manager and fellow poker player, for backing.

The entire $1 million had been put in an escrow account within a month. Winning would erase his debt and cushion his bank account. He needed to win, against all odds. It didn’t help that he had his poker buddies chirping in his ears, one saying “You’ll probably look better at the end of all this, but there is no way in hell you’ll win the money.”

Fisher started exercising intensely but realized that working out without direction was simply not going to cut it. So, he brought in personal trainer Chris DiVecchio, owner of Premier Mind & Body in Los Angeles, who agreed to sign on for an upfront fee and a cut of the back end. Upon initially body fat percentage, Chris knew he had his work cut out for him–his client had no athletic ability or training and his body fat was 33 percent.

The two went to work. Hard.

“We started with 30 minutes of high-intensity interval training and an hour of weights, seven days per week,” says Fisher. “Then we went to 45-minutes of cardio and two hours of high-intensity interval training, plus weights. I ate oatmeal and egg whites for breakfast. I soon put in 10 hours a day, with five hours of cardio. I drank amino acids and glutamine to keep my muscles from breaking down.”

“I had him swinging with a weighted hammer; that pushed his heart rate up while working his core. There was boxing, workouts with a medicine ball, cycling, rowing, weights.”

At the three month mark, Fisher’s fat percentage dropped impressively to 13.5 percent, but still a ways from magic number. So, his backers (Bilzerian and Perkins) sweetened the pot with a second wager: They got 4-1 odds on a $50,000 bet that he would drop below 10 percent body fat in just four months. Fisher fell short.

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After losing the tangential bet, Fisher began freaking out and doubting himself. That’s when his trainer brought in sports medicine guru Phil Goglia, who has worked with Carmelo Anthony, Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey, The New York Post reports.

Goglia concluded that Fisher was eating too little to cut down his body fat percentage, ironically.

“Walter was taking in just 1,100 calories — not enough to burn caloric heat,” says Goglia. “He was burning muscle when he should have been burning fat.”

Goglia also made Fisher consume a spoonful of iron-rich blackstrap molasses after his last training session of the day.

“It shuttles oxygen to red blood cells,” Goglia says. “You wake up with more endurance capacity.” Then there was the water: “Drink one ounce for every pound you weigh. Water is a thermostat. If your body gets low on water, it starts hoarding fat for insulation.”

Once Fisher got his eating right, DiVecchio ramped up the training by working his client out on a machine called a VO2 Max, which is a treadmill on steroids that measures the utilization of oxygen, essential in deciphering Fisher’s optimal heart rate for burning fat.

We kept him at 145 beats per minute for an hour at a time,” says DiVecchio. “He would do five one-hour cardio sessions, plus 75-minutes of weight lifting, then take a 50- to 60-minute break. His legs burned out and we sent him to cryotherapy sessions to speed up recovery.”

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Judgement day came on June 22.

Fisher laid on an X-ray bed at BodySpec, a medical diagnostic center in Los Angeles, and a bone-density scanner measured his body fat. After a few short moments, a number popped up on the screen.

8.8.

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Fisher, who had lost 70 pounds and now was a ripped 175 pounds, leapt from the X-ray table into his trainer’s arms. He had netted $490,000, or $7,000 for every pound lost.

He celebrated by eating four slices of pizza.

Going forward, Fisher hopes to weigh between 195 and 205 pounds, with body fat at around 13 percent. The metamorphosis has done far more than pad his bank account.

“To have gone from an absolute low to where I am now is an achievement and a transformation,” he says. “A lot of people talk big games — and 99 percent of them would not be able to do what I did, even with the money as an incentive — but I backed it up. I backed it up and it makes me feel like there is absolutely nothing I can’t do.”

Congratulations, bro. Now don’t fucking blow it.

[h/t The New York Post]

Matt Keohan Avatar
Matt’s love of writing was born during a sixth grade assembly when it was announced that his essay titled “Why Drugs Are Bad” had taken first prize in D.A.R.E.’s grade-wide contest. The anti-drug people gave him a $50 savings bond for his brave contribution to crime-fighting, and upon the bond’s maturity 10 years later, he used it to buy his very first bag of marijuana.