You feel more sure of yourself when you’ve been right when everyone else said you were wrong. Dave Oancea, who is better known as “Vegas Dave” in the betting world, carries his confidence around with him like a wallet. It’s always there.
A businessman from Taiwan flew into Las Vegas on May 11, 2018, and Oancea pulled up to a Bank of America in a black Ferrari. He then went inside and gave the man a cashier’s check for $400,000. He only got one baseball card in return: a 2009 Bowman Chrome Mike Trout autographed Superfractor card graded BGS 9 with a 10 auto. One of one. There isn’t any other. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It wasn’t.
Something like this didn’t happen at a convention center or a well-known auction. It happened in the lobby of a bank between two people who had been having trouble talking to each other because they didn’t speak the same language. The seller’s brother in Maryland helped them talk to each other. Oancea made the deal official when he sent a deposit and bought the man a plane ticket. That is how bad it was. That’s also how strange the modern card market had become: deals were being made in plain sight, in normal places, for strange money.
Oancea doesn’t collect things the usual way. He’ll say it himself. He approached cards like a venture capitalist would approach a new business: with a thesis, a clear goal, and a willingness to risk a lot of money in a way that most people would think is risky. Other investors spread their money out among eight or ten players, but Oancea put all of their money into just two: Mike Trout and Derek Carr. He got Trout red refractors with numbers from 5 to 25, orange refractors with numbers from 25 to 35, and finally the Superfractor itself. At one point, he had eight or nine of the oranges, which he had bought for about $90,000 each when they were worth about $30,000. He says the sellers thought things were going well.
Take a moment to think about that. According to Oancea, he wasn’t just buying cards; he was running the market. You can change how much people think a series of cards is worth if you own most of the meaningful supply of those cards. A lot of people were surprised by this move, which is more common in goods than in collectibles. It was hard for him to buy the Superfractor, he says. It was mean of him to catch so many trout in general. After a while, he got in trouble for putting $500,000 into Derek Carr cards.
He paid $180,000 for the Trout red refractor, which was later sold at Goldin Auctions for $922,500 plus buyer’s premium. A new high for an auctioned baseball card. The doubts became much less intense after that.
The method, not the money, is what makes Oancea’s story interesting. He got his start in sports betting by making parlay bets that most professionals wouldn’t even think about. He bet $100,000 in 2015 that the Kansas City Royals would win the World Series, even though the odds were 30 to 1. They got it. He got more than $2.4 million. In almost the same way, he talks about the philosophy he brought from betting to cards: do what you believe in, ignore the noise, and go all in. That sounds careless, but it’s actually been done in a way that shows discipline.
A good question still remains about what takes place when the music stops. Oancea has put about $500,000 into Carr’s cards, but their value has gone down since he bought them. He doesn’t seem too bothered. He thinks that the Trout profits will more than make up for any losses there. Whenever the card money comes in, it is used to buy property on the ocean in Mexico and build a 20,000-square-foot villa in Cabo San Lucas. He sees how everything is linked. Cards pay for things. Compounds of property. Nothing just sits there.
At least $1 million was bid on the Superfractor at an auction in late July 2020. It went from nothing to $1.45 million in just two weeks, with ten days left. It’s still unclear if it will ever be worth more than the all-time record for a baseball card, which was the T206 Honus Wagner, which sold for $3.12 million in 2016. Oancea thinks it could go up to $4 to $5 million, or even more. People laughed a year ago when you said it was worth $3 million. That number doesn’t sound crazy anymore.
There’s a version of this story that says Vegas Dave was just lucky and got the right card at the right time. The truth is different from that version, though. He started flipping cards when he was 12 years old and renting out dealer tables when he was 13. He knew how a limited-supply market worked before most people his age even thought about money. The urge was always there. He just found a new place to do it.
