If you assume he “works” 200 days per year, he has devoted 20,000 hours to this “job” over the last 10 years. If he truly collected $500,000, he made $25 per hour pretax. Do you suppose he reported this income to the IRS?
When I was a child I lived near Belmont Racetrack and we would go to see the races. Of course we didn’t bet, but we would look through the tickets on the ground to see if there was anything good. It was really good if there was a dispute, the tickets were often discarded before the results was final.
Once I found a ticket that was a $50 winner. That was huge back then, to a child.