Anatomy Of An Arb

 One thing I have always talked about on here is Arbing. But I've never really gone into depth with exactly what they are and how to do them. So let's do a little bit of that today, plus some other stuff. First post in a while.

I have always felt that, in general, people are terrible at explaining things. They tend to assume you know more than you do. The person having something explained to them also seems to have a very clear bias to show that they understand and not really ask questions. I think it's that deep-seated thing in us to not want to be outcast from a group. You want to nod along and not look stupid, even if the explanation is bad. You want to be part of the group that knows whatever is being explained. And I think sometimes the explainer ends up just trying to show off what they know and impress people instead of accurately and effectively communicating an idea. My Dad was always a terrible explainer so maybe this is just a me thing but it's something I've become a lot more aware of as I get older. All of this is to say that I'm going to take a thousand foot up approach here (and with most things) and assume you have never even heard the word "arb" before. To any professional or semi-pro bettor, this will be elementary. But it is good to go back to basics once in a while and make sure your foundation is solid. 

So let's really look into Arbing, scalping, hedging and middling. All slightly different variations on the same theme.

"Arb" is short for arbitrage. Arbing refers to the practice of betting on both sides of an event and locking up profit, no matter what happens. You can do this in all different kinds of industries and in many different ways, but for today we'll keep it mostly confined to sports betting. Here's an example of a glaring arb. You're looking at various books' odds for an MLB game, Red Sox vs Yankees. One of your books has Red Sox -120, NYY +110. Another book has Red Sox -145, NYY +130. You can lock up money no matter what happens by betting on the Red Sox at the first book at -120 and the Yankees on the second book at +130. All you're looking for is for the plus number to be bigger than the minus number. That's it. Very simple.

However, it starts to get interesting when we start talking about exactly how much to bet on each side. Let's say each book has a $1000 limit. Let's say you bet 1200 to win 1000 on the Red Sox and 1000 to win 1300 on the Yankees. If the Sox win, you're even. If the Yankees win, you win $100. But what if you want to lock up the same amount of money, no matter who wins? You'd simply bet a little less on the Yankees. Something like 957 to win 1244. Now you win about $43, no matter who wins. (Notice in the first example there was $100 possible to win and the second one there is $86. Something to keep in mind). So far so good. This is easy stuff.

To me, arbing is when you take on no or very little risk. I would call both examples I just gave Arbs. You don't really care who wins. You have a clear position in the first example but you aren't risking anything in either.

Scalping, as I understand it anyway, is similar but you typically take on some risk. You semi-arb, or scalp, to get yourself better odds than just straight betting.

Let's use the same example above. Let's say you have an arb of BOS -120 and NYY +130. For any arb involving a game line, especially a major sport like MLB, one line is usually going to be off-market and the "+EV" line to bet. In this instance, let's say the +130 line is off market. If your roll justifies it and you don't mind the risk, the best play to make would be to max out the bad +130 line, suck up all the EV and move on. However, that isn't the case for everyone, all the time. If you don't really trust the market line, or if there isn't one, or it's far away from the game starting, or maybe you just need a win even. There's plenty of reasons to not simply just max out the bad line and do nothing else, even if your roll justifies it. However, if your roll does NOT justify a naked max bet, your choice is sort of made for you. Let's work through that real quick.

Let's say that with your bankroll, your max bet is $500. Let's use the same example above, a +130, -120 arb with a $1k limit on both sides. One option would be to simply bet $500 on the bad line and move on. So you'd have the Yankees risking $500 to win $650. This is what most people do. However, with just a little bit of creativity you can do even better. IF you only want to risk $500, the optimal thing to do here is max bet the bad +130 line. So you'd have $1000 to win $1300. You then 'scalp' out the amount you don't want to have at risk, in this case $500. So you bet $600 to win $500 on the Sox at -120. Now, if the Yankees win, you win 1300 and lose 600, for a net of 700. If the Sox win, you win 500 and lose 1000 for a net of 500. So your effective bet is NYY 500 to win 700, which is +140 odds. Isn't that a neat trick? So you're getting +140 (instead of +130) on something that should be +110. The more you scalp out, the better your effective odds are. However, the more you scalp out, the more EV you're leaving on the table, too. But this line of thinking sort of assumes that you can make enough bets like these to iron out the variance. And if you're a pro or even semi pro bettor with multiple years of sample, this will be true. But it isn't true for everyone. So don't be afraid to scalp. Remember, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Sometimes it's fine to just take the free money, reduce your risk, and sleep easy.

A little digression here; I WISH I would have done that for the past decades worth of Super Bowls. The Super Bowl is a great example of an event where you'll find all kinds of arbs, often even on the game lines. And sure, over the long run of like 20 years, you'll definitely show a better profit if you just ride naked on all the bad lines. But man, I cannot tell you how many times I've spent the full two weeks setting up absolutely incredible middles instead of taking the free arb money that just never hit. I would have been better off if I had just clean arbed every +3.5, -1 middle I set up.

Speaking of middles, middles are exactly what they sound like. You can technically middle anything by buying/selling points or betting a favorite on the money line and the dog on the spread. When I or anyone talks about setting up a middle, they mean a 'profitable middle'. You can get really creative with middles with money lines, spreads, teasers, parlays, etc. But every single -EV bet you make costs you money, even in a middle. Great thing to remember when thinking about setting up a middle: No combination of bad bets can ever equal a good bet. Something to always keep in mind. 

To find a good middle, you almost always have to find an off market line. If not, then you need two slightly off market lines. I used to find juicy middles with team totals, full game and first half, all the time. Not so much anymore though. It seems to me that books finally caught on to the team total EV they were leaving lying around this year, by the way. But something like an NFL 21.5, -110 on the under and 20.5 -120 on the over is probably profitable. It's hard to know for sure to be honest. (Actually with a good database it wouldn't be that hard to figure out). But I always use pinnacles lines as a rough guess which is fine. Something I've done every Saturday for the probably the past two decades is pull up two books' college football lines, 1H and full game, and run down the team total lines for the entire day. You'll find plenty of middles on the 10 for the first half and 20-24 on the full game. And I usually do just clean middle them because how efficient is a first half team total market on some random college football game? It's hard to know which line is 'correct' because there probably isn't a 'correct' line. So you set up a middle or an arb and move on. That's something that absolutely every beginner bettor can and should do every week. 

Arbing and middling have become my main thing now the past few years or so. Every week I hunt for something mispriced and max it out. If the max is more than I want to have at risk, which it usually is, I then hunt the other side and look for the best possible number(s) to scalp. One of my books has a massive limit so if the off market bet is on there, I'll have multiple thousands of dollars worth of bets to scalp out of it. I usually do some combination of an arb and a middle. I used to always go for the big middle but like I've said on here before, I have run cartoonishly bad on them that now I cleanly arb out of most of it, and will set up a small middle. 

Here's an actual, real world example for TWO middles I actually hit last week (am I due this year!?) Last Sunday, looking over lines at the two PPH books I have right now, I noticed one of them put up -2.5 -110 for the Seahawks, who were playing the Patriots. The market line everywhere was an even -3 -110 (Pinnacle was -105 most of the day). So this is clearly a bet, and a really good at one that. So first thing I always do is refresh everything, make sure I'm not making a mistake. Sometimes, in some markets you have to be lightning fast to pick off arbs with things moving all over the place, quickly. This wasn't one of those times. This account does this sometimes. He'll move random games sometimes a full point or even more. This being the Pats home opener and me living in MA probably had something to do with it, but he moves random stuff all the time. Anyway, once I confirmed everyone was at -3, I maxed out Sea -2.5 -110. Now, believe it or not, but this account actually takes big bets. (I have never really quite figured this account out actually, to be honest. This is one of the very first accounts I ever got. It's from a dirty agent that I've worked with since the beginning on all different stuff. I slowly lost access to everything on this account except strictly straight bets. Props, team totals, futures, stock market bets, horse racing, video game bets, even live betting. I lost access to them each one by one over the years. But they let me bet straights and teasers, take big bets, and at least once a week, he'll move a number way into arb-able territory. I asked my agent why he did that and apparently it's because he wanted the lop-sided action because he had 'inside info' on these games. I was licking my chops when I heard that, however, I swear to God, after like three years of getting killed on these, I kind of think he actually does. I ran naked on these moves for so long and just got destroyed. Sometimes, by like, a lot. I know it doesn't make sense, how could this PPH guy possibly have inside information on an NBA or NFL game? But the numbers don't lie and this guy is really high up in the PPH ecosystem. After a good 2 or 3 years of getting killed on these moves, week after week, I mostly just arb or middle them out and take the free money. I know it sounds preposterous that this guy could be better than the market, but man, I don't know anymore. I cannot tell you how many times I've lied awake at night after a big loss on an absurd number I 'got in good' at, knowing I could have locked up money with an arb. Anyways, back to the example).

So I've got Sea -2.5 -110 for, let's say 10 units. And I really only want to be exposed for 2 units, 3 max. So I need to buy back about 7 units on the Patriots. It's important here to really line shop, you really need to get the best possible number on the scalp for this all to work. Access to Pinnacles lines is a must but I try to do even better than that. First, assess all your options, and understand you don't have to arb it out all at once place. If you want the clean arb, you can bet the Patriots at +2.5 at something like +123 at Pinnacle. You can lock up money on both sides or give yourself something like +140 odds using the example I gave above. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want a little action, a little spice, you can go for the middle or the semi-middle. You can bet the Patriots at +3 at the best price you can find, in my case it was -105, and hope Seattle wins by exactly 3. Your other option is a little counter intuitive but absolutely worth knowing. You can do a 'Polish middle' or 'heart-attack middle' where you would bet on something like the Patriots money-line at +140 as your hedge. Now you win both sides UNLESS Seattle wins by exactly 1 or 2. Then you lose both, hence the 'heart attack' moniker. It really all just depends on what you can get. If I found a good, off market number on the Pats money-line, that's what I would have done. Maybe not for all of it but certainly for some. Also, don't forget to look at alt spreads, especially at games that have moved a lot. You could hedge with something like Patriots -2.5 +160, even. What I call the 'holy grail' of middling or arbing is when you find +EV bets on both sides. That's the sweet spot.

What I did was bet the Patriots +3 -105 and accepted the middle and lo and behold, it actually hit. Seattle won with a walk-off field goal and my big Sea -2.5 won and my Pats +3 all pushed.

The other middle that I hit was Cin +7.5. Early in the week the line was moving around 6.5, 7, and pinnacle was at something like Cin +6.5 -105. The other book I had put up +7 even! I bought half a point for 10 cents (which is an exploit I heavily use at this book, the 10 cent half point buys off the 7) and got myself Cin +7.5 -110. I waited a couple days and hedged with Houston -6 -103 and Hou ended up winning by 6. It wasn't nearly as big as the Pats middle but two in one week! Maybe I am due for some positive variance. 

Another thing to consider with middling/scalping is WHEN to bet. Sometimes I'll find something off market early in the week and will wait days to scalp it out. That's risky as the market can move against you, and sometimes you can arb out a little bit and then wait a couple days to arb out the rest of how much you want. The more you do it, the more you will start to develop a little bit of a 'feel' for the market and how it moves. Look at books who cater to different bettors and see where they differ. I always look to see what Bovada is at versus Pinnacle. That's a good indicator of square/sharp sentiment and where the market might drift towards.

Another thing I like to do with scalping/middling is with Wong Teasers. Sometimes I'll find a game that I really want to "Wong Middle" into. Something like a game where the spread at Pinnacle is +1, my book has +1.5, and the total is in the 30's (there's actually a couple of those games this coming week). I'll put that team into as many teasers as possible with teams playing later or earlier in the day. Then you bet on their opponent, either the money line for the big middle, or an alt spread of -6.5 or something. Or, let's say a Sunday night game is -9 everywhere. I'll be looking all week for one of my books to drop to -8.5 and put it in as many teasers as possible. Depending on how the day goes, you'll end up with a big position of that team at -2.5. You can then hedge with the opponent at +9, or maybe you find a 9.5 and buy up to 10.5 (buying through the 10 at 10 cents each half point is usually worth it). Or you can go for the Polish middle and bet the opponent at big plus odds on the money line if you find a good number. Or you do some combination of all of them.

An important thing to remember here though is that every -EV bet costs you money. Sometimes you can get a big middle going and you end up giving away a ton of your EV buying it all back. You have to be making +EV bets in the first place for any of this to work.

The key thing here though is pretty much the same thing we always come back to, which is getting soft PPH accounts. That really is the whole name of the game and everything pretty much flows from that.

I listened to a really good interview the other day on the "Circles Off" podcast. Here is the youtube link. It's with a guy who bets on futures for a living. Definitely worth a listen if you're into this kind of stuff. That podcast in general is decent if you don't know about it.

That's it for today I suppose. Check back soon, I should have some BTC stuff up.

BTC price: $62.5

BTC marketcap: $1.235 T

BTC dominance: 56.8%

A Look At Political Odds Part 2

 My last post was a bit of a mess. This past week was extremely volatile in the markets, especially leading up to the 'big boy' NATO press conference last night. So let's check in now, the day after, and see where things have settled.

The main one, 'Who will win the election' on Predicit, Trump is still in the lead at about 60%, Kamala actually in second at 24%, and Biden third at 23%. It appears that, somehow, the press conference last night actually helped Biden a tiny bit. Right at the start of it there was a huge spike in volume that saw Biden go from 17 to 20% and Kamala go from 28 to 23%. I watched every second of that press conference and I guess it could have been worse but it was far, far from comforting if you're a Democrat. Biden is so clearly done for. It's just a matter of time at this point.

As for the the market 'Who will be the Democratic nominee", Kamala is in the lead now, by a decent margin too. She's at 46% and Biden is at 41%. 

Like I said before, I'm not going to get too into the election on here this year. Last time was completely different because I was able to bet on it, of course. And I know no one is here for my political takes solely. I like to have some kind of betting/investing angle to everything in here. I might make a few posts here and there when/if there are big moves in the markets but not much more than that.

One random nugget. I watched an incredible interview on youtube a couple weeks ago. It was with David Packouz who was the real guy behind the Miles Teller character in the movie War Dogs. He was a logistics guy who paired up with a real brutal scumbag kind of guy (the Jonah Hill character who they made WAY too nice in the movie) to get into government contracting work. They did all kinds of stuff but the main thing was arms. He told a super interesting story about how they middle manned an agreement between the US military and Kosovo/Albania. The short of it is that as the Bush administration was going out and Obama was coming in, the Bush people thought that the Democrats would pull out of Afghanistan immediately. So they wanted to arm the Afghans to the teeth before they left the White House (another example of short sighted and dumb forgien policy by the US). A few years earlier, this little weirdo eastern European country convinced itself that a full scale American invasion was coming any day. They were arming literally every single man, woman and child with whatever they could find. Well the invasion never came and they were left millions of tons of guns and ammo which they not only didn't need, but were required to get rid of due to something with NATO. So these two guys simply middle manned a deal between this Albania country and America. They bought all kinds of guns and ammo for super cheap and had it delivered to the US military. Pretty interesting way to make money. I suggest you watch the whole interview. One quick little thing I learned is that one grenade is equal to 10 high capacity bullets.

That's really it for now. Sorry for the lackluster couple of posts and the dearth of posts in general lately. Bit of a summer lull all around I suppose.

BTC price: $58k

BTC market cap: $1.15 Trillion 

BTC dominance: 53.4%

Total cryptos listed on coin market cap: 2.5 million. (When I first started this, I remember there was less than 10,000)

A Look At Political Betting Markets Plus Some Other Things *updated for July 11th*

I started this blog in 2020 basically to discuss the bets I had for the 2020 Presidential Election. You can go back and look if you want but I had an outstanding 'election cycle couple months', scooping up something like 40ish units if I remember correctly. I simply used Predictit as my Pinnacle, or the true line, and was betting on anything that was off-market with my PPH accounts. It was super fun, crazy profitable, and also really got me more into the news cycle. I was more on top of that election cycle than ever before, by a wide margin. And you might have noticed this year I haven't talked about it at all. The reason is simple, really, and is indicative of the biggest downside of PPH betting, which is that I ran out of places to play. Every account I had in 2020 that I used for politics is long gone, and the only one that I still have took down their political section entirely (along with props, team totals, stock market bets, horse racing, video game bets, etc. I can only play straights there). So even though I don't have any action personally, let's take a good look at the political landscape in general and see how the betting markets are looking, especially after the past couple weeks.

For starters, Predicit.org is still the go-to place for political betting. They have literally hundreds of millions of shares/dollars being traded on their site, 24/7. Super liquid, super efficient. Like I said, think of them like Pinnacle for politics, if not even better. So anytime I refer to the market or the true line, I'm usually talking about Predictit's prices. However, since 2020, a new competitor has emerged on the prediction market called Polymarket. From their site: "Polymarket is a decentralized information markets platform that lets people trade real-money markets on the outcomes of the most-highly debated current events, and follow the odds to garner accurate insights about the future. Users buy or sell Outcome Shares, which can be redeemed for $1 if the outcome is resolved as correct, and become worthless if it’s incorrect. Owners of outcome shares are never locked in and can sell their position at any time." Polymarket is essentially the same thing as Predictit with one important distinction. Polymarket uses crypto whereas Predictit uses dollars. This has a subtle but, I think, important point. Polymarket probably skews younger and definitely more tech-savy. Something to keep in mind. 

Polymarket is also bigger in general. For example, for the 2024 presidential election winner, $233.8 million has been wagered on Polymarket, whereas 20.4 million shares have been traded on Predictit. So Poly might be the more liquid market but Predictit is probably the more well-known. It'll be interesting to see where the two disagree.

Anyway, let's take a look at where things stand on both sites for some of the bigger markets and see how they changed over the past couple weeks with the debate and Bidens ABC interview in the rear view mirror.

As of today (July 8th), the odds on Predicit for the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election are: Trump in the lead at 58%, Biden and Kamala tied for second at 23%, and Newsom in fourth at 6%. On polymarket, Trump is even further ahead at 63%. Biden is second at 16% and Kamala is third at 12%. (Michelle Obama is fourth at 4%). On June 26th on Predictit, one day before the debate, Trump was 55%, Biden was 45%, and Kamala was 4%. The total volume bet was a tiny $51k. On June 27th, the day of the debate, Trump went up to 58%, Biden fell to 33% and Kamala got a bump up to 7%. The total volume bet was $542k, over ten times the day before. Now, here is where things get interesting. On June 29th, two days after the debate, Trump remained at 58% but Biden dropped even more, to 29%, whereas Kamala went all the way up to 14%. It seems to me that the prediction markets largely priced in that Joe Biden is essentially a walking corpse and the debate performance wasn't really news. However, what the markets didn't price in was the fact that the Democratic voter base didn't know that. Which I find shocking. Half the country seemed to have been aware that the president literally has dementia and the other half thought it was nothing more than a 'conspiracy theory' (or my new favorite phrase that everyone is pretending is a real thing: the videos were "cheap fakes." The phrase they're trying to use is 'deep fake', but since we're in complete clown world, KJP said 'cheap fake' and now everyone is just going with that?)

 July 3rd was another big day on Predictit which saw $507k in volume in this market. Trump remained at 58% but Biden dropped again down to 25% and Kamala got bet up to 21%. Since then, Kamala has risen a little bit to about 23%, and Biden has dropped to 22, 23%. 

On Polymarket, Trump was 60% going into the debate and has bounced around from 60 to 67% since. Biden was 34% going into the debate, dropped to 22% right after it, dropped all the way to 8% on July 3rd, and has since rebounded a little bit, climbing to 16, 17% currently as of July 8th. Kamala was 1% going into the debate, rose to 5% right after it, rose to 17% on July 3rd, got as high as 20%, and is currently about 12% as of July 8th.

One thing that stands out right away is the relatively big discrepancy in price between the sites. With hundreds of millions dollars in play, you'd think the prices would be essentially identical but we can clearly see that's not the case. I think it goes to show, among other things, how difficult it is to predict something like this. I think it also shows that younger crypto friendly guys support Trump over Biden which isn't surprising. The amount of discrepancy is somewhat surprising to me though. Predictit has Kamala at almost double the price as Polymarket (12% vs 23%). That's a pretty big difference. There's obviously some arbitrage opportunities between the two sites but I'll leave that up to you to decide if it's something you want to do. 

Now, about that "debate." I honestly thought it was one of the single most embarrassing moments in recent American history. With so much going on right now on the world stage. Russia vs Ukraine, World War 3 bubbling, Israel vs Hamas, China threatening Taiwan, inflation rampaging still, Sudan, Yemen, Houthi pirates, the collapse of respect and trust in all American institutions...I mean the list goes on. And to see our commander in chief is literally a guy you wouldn't trust to run a cash register at an ice cream shop is unnerving, to say the least. Would you let Joe Biden watch your kids around for an hour? Would you trust him to drive a car? Do you think he could do 9 times 7 in real time? Seriously. I'm not going to go on and on with my political takes. There's more than enough of that to go around and it's pretty clear where I stand. I just think it is such a bad look for our country and I think Jill Biden might be one of the most power hungry, evil people alive right now. It really is hard to comprehend everything going on right now at the top of the Dem ticket.

*UPDATE*

I started writing this post on July 8th. I usually crank these out in one shot but sometimes I let em marinate for a few days. Well now, today, July 11th, there have been some big, interesting moves. They're actually happening literally right now, about 2:00 PM EST. Kamala Harris is really getting bet up to be the nomination, as is "Will there be a woman president elected in 2024" and other related markets. So let's dive in real quick.

For the main market of "Who will win the 2024 US presidential election" on Predictit, Trump is still way in the lead at 59%. He's been fairly static there for the past month, rising slightly from 51% on June 11th to a high of 62% yesterday and down to 59% currently.

Biden has been steadily falling since the debate on June 27th. He was 45% on June 26th, and is now all the way down to 18%. He was JUST flipped by Kamala literally an hour ago. She is now 26% and rising and Biden is 18% and dropping. With high volume, too. 

For the market: "Who will win the Democratic nomination", Kamala is really steaming up right now, all the way to 47%. Biden has fallen all the way to 36%.

Polymarket has roughly the same movement going on. They have Kamala at 19% to win the election and Biden only at 10%! They also have Kamala at 43% to win the nomination and Biden at 37%.

Like I said up top, I don't have any action going this cycle which stinks. Biden is supposed to do a press conference tonight and I'm thinking that's when they'll announce it. We'll see. I'll probably have some kind of update soon, maybe even tomorrow. I wanted to write more about crypto and stocks and some books but I'm gonna get this out there now before even more stuff moves. Check back soon!

Another Inside Look At One Of Models

Last time I did this it was pretty fun. I know you guys liked it too because it's always in the top 10 of most viewed posts on here. And I really don't mind 'spilling any secrets' now because like I said in the last post, these models almost certainly aren't profitable as-is anymore. At this point a lot of the stuff in there is almost 10 years old. You're lucky if you get two or three full seasons out of any model without serious, constant tweaking. And finally, even if they are profitable, it would be for a tiny amount of EV, and quite frankly, I really don't give a shit either way. Try em out for yourself or don't. I'm very clearly not even remotely guaranteeing anything. All I can say is that any model I'll share on here absolutely worked for me for at least a few full seasons and I did make some real, actual money with them. And I used to LOVE reading about other people's models. Everyone seems to approach it in a completely unique way and I always learned something reading about anyones even attempt at modeling.

So here goes. Today I'll be going into my NHL expected shots on goal/goals/points model. The model I made last in my sports betting career and the one I'm probably most proud of. I have somewhat of a bizarre, almost intimate love-hate relationship with all my models, this one in particular. It's big, it takes a lot of work and time to use and I always felt like it was running bad. Like I should have been winning way more with it even though it was quite profitable for a while.

 I can still remember the early days of building it and the little light bulb moments along the way. When you're building a model, it's in your head quite literally 24/7. You make 2 steps forward and 1 step back. I was like a sponge, trying to absorb any and all information I possibly could about hockey analytics and modeling in general. I even paid someone I respected from a message board for a small piece of the model that I'll explain.

So let's get into it. This one will be a little different in that it will have more of a narrative structure to it. To explain this model I will have to explain the first NHL model I made that eventually became this one.

One of the first models I made was for NHL player vs player matchups, aka who would record the most points in a game. This is where the basic genesis for my later model came from. Basically, I used a players corsi instead of shots and then turned that number back into shots. (Corsi is simply all shots AT the net instead of ON the net, named after Jim Corsi, a goalie coach for the Buffalo Sabres who first started tracking it for his goalies.) Corsi, especially in smaller samples, is better than Shots because there's way more data points. People used to always say 'Corsi measures possession' without really knowing what that meant. It's true, it does a better job of measuring possession than shots, but only because it counts more events. I used to always think of this example: say a player gains possession of the puck in his own zone. He goes the length of the ice, dekes out all 5 guys, dekes the goalie out and wrings a shot off the post or misses a wide open net by half an inch. NONE of that gets recorded into the game log! Hitting the post doesn't count as a shot on goal. Does that seem accurate to you? Now with advanced analytics we could call it a good zone exit, a good zone entry and a Grade A shot attempt from a super high percentage spot on the ice. But when I was making this model, just counting up the shots AT the net was considered fairly ground breaking. And the reason, in my opinion, was not so much that it was super important to count up every shot attempt, but by counting shot attempts, you were really measuring where the puck was on the ice. The real skill, the real work being done on the hockey rink is getting the puck and the play into the opponents zone and keeping it out of yours. Whether or not the puck happens to bounce off someone and go in or not, or be on net or not, has a ton of noise and luck in it. The good teams play more in the offensive zone and convert that time into shots AT the net. Corsi did a good job of capturing that. You can't put a shot at the net if you're always in your own zone. (In the long term, shooting percentage and corsi percentage is pretty fluky and noisy and for the most part, any team giving up more shot attempts than taking them usually lost. Although I will say, some teams did seem better at suppressing shot quality. John Tortarella coached teams come to mind. His whole thing was everyone collapsing down in front of their own net and EVERYONE had to sell out to block shots. Another team that comes to mind is the Boston Bruins, especially when Chara was on the team. Great defenders not only suppress shot quantity, but suppress shot quality. However, by and large, any team giving up more shots than they took would eventually lose.)

My models always treated all shot attempts as equal which I know wasn't an accurate assessment. I should have made adjustments later on at least for High Danger, Mid Danger and Low Danger shots. One of those things that was always on my to-do list.

Anyway, getting back on track. I know I talked about this a little bit on here before, but in my first model I assumed that a players corsi per game for the current season was his true skill level. I would take either the last 3 years worth or his full careers worth of what I called 'corsi percentage' or the rate at which he turned 'Corsi's' into 'Goals'. It's the same exact thing as 'shooting percentage' but I just used Corsi instead of Shots. (I know it sounds funny saying 'corsi's' and most people nowadays call them Shots AT the net while just 'shots' is considered Shots ON the net. That's dumb and confusing though and I will never, EVER not call them Corsi.) So I would take a players Corsi per game, multiply it by his expected Corsi into Goals percentage, and now I have his raw expected Goals. Now you have to adjust for opponent. When I first started, I just divided his raw number by the average goals allowed per game and then multiplied that times the opponent goals given up per game, which is maybe a little bit clunky but really not that bad. Now I have his Expected goals. The next step is to get his expected assists. At first I did the same thing as goals; I took the players assists per game, divided by the average assist per game given up then multiplied by the opponent assists per game given up. So now I would have players expected goals and assists, add them up and you have their expected points. Do the same thing for whoever he's up against and you'll end up with something like Player A .875 and Player B .62. Which is great and all, but you still need to then turn those numbers into percentages, and then turn THAT into betting terms. For all that, all you need is a poisson calculator which are online for free. I'm not going to walk you through how to use Poisson but if you want to bet on props, you absolutely 100% need to learn it. It isn't that hard, I did it all by myself. So you end up with something like Player A will outscore Player B 65% of the time (I'm making that number up) and then you convert that into a betting line using an odds converter. 65% equals -186. So if the bet was, say, -170 or better, it would be a bet on Player A. If the line was, say +200 or better, it would be a bet on Player B.

This is a really simple model but believe it or not, it worked great for like 3 years straight. I think the linesmakers would simply take each players raw points per game and just use that as their line. Most of my bets would be unders on guys playing against top 5 defending teams, or overs on really bad defensive teams. You'd also sometimes catch guys running good or bad on getting their shot attempts through or not. 

Adjustments:

I made many adjustments along the way with this model. First, I changed the way I calculated assists. Assists in NHL game logs are counted two ways, primary and secondary assists. Primary assists are when you pass the puck to the goal scorer, secondary assists are when you pass the puck to someone who passes to the goal scorer. Primary assists are more stable, or more likely to result in more assists. So all I did was break my assist column into two columns, primary and secondary. For primary assists I would multiply by something like 1.2 and for secondary I would multiply by something like .8. (This will probably horrify certain people, but I just completely made those numbers up. I would monitor them closely and would change them slightly every now and then, but that was the basic idea. The big thing, in my eyes anyway, was to make sure I was taking away from secondary assists the same amount I was adding to primary assists). 

The other big change was that I changed the way I adjusted for opponent. It occurred to me that I should try to use the market game line and total in some way. I knew there was a way to extrapolate each teams expected goals using the game line and total, but I didn't know how exactly. First, I tried to reverse engineer through poisson each teams expected goals using their team totals, which wasn't a bad idea but didn't quite work since team total markets aren't exactly efficient. This is where I paid for a piece of this model. I reached out to TomG from the message boards, who was/is a true OG, one of the best old school DFS guys out there and I know is reading this right now (shoutout Tom, leave a comment!) For 50 bucks, he sold me his little Pythagorus theorem way of inputing the game line and total and it spits out each teams expected goals. This was huge. So now I had each teams expected goals for each individual matchup. I would simply use this number against their season long GF/60 number. For instance, say Team A is expected to score 3.25 goals tonight but for the season they average 2.9 goals per 60 minutes. So you know the team is expected to score more than average. (If their raw expected goals per game is .3, you divide that by their Teams GF/60 and then multiply that times their expected team total. So using the example above, you'd get .336). More goals equals more assists, too. For assists, I did some work and found that for the most part, teams get assists at a fairly constant rate with regards to how many goals they score. Something like 1.7 assists for each goal. So I changed my expected assists to match their expected goals. (At certain points I did this a little different too. I would add up each teams goals and assists and then divide them to get each teams "assists per goal ratio" and use that number. Good teams did actually get more assists per goals than bad teams. It depended where we were in the season).

Model Limitations and Problems:

Whenever you're making a model, you have to make a bunch of assumptions, some of which you know aren't great. And you have to constantly be attacking your own model, looking for flaws. For one, my model treated every single shot attempt as being equal. I had a really good idea that I never implemented which was to count corsi (all shot attempts), fenwick (all unblocked shot attempts), shots (all shots on net) and goals (shots that go in) as slightly different, weigh them all accordingly and then use that as my corsi number (any attempt at all is a corsi).

The second one, and probably the biggest issue with this model, was that I completely ignored special teams. I tried for a long time to incorporate power plays and penalty kills, but for this model I never did (I did eventually which I'll get into later). My reasoning was that if I just use "all situations", I was taking into account power play time/points anyway. The glaring issue here though is that you can't take into effect the fact that a team is playing an opponent that takes or draws a lot of penalties (or vice versa). And getting even more granular, certain individual players could draw penalties more than average. Sometimes a lot more than average. Incorporating that, as well as injuries, was another thing always on my to-do list.

Even with these problems, this model crushed. Eventually I completely ran out of books to take my action on this prop so I had to adjust. My main book at the time actually just took this entire bet off the board, but there was still places to bet on Shots on goal and individual player points over/under. 

Shots on goal seemed like a really easy prop to attack. I used the same logic as above but just used Shots where I had used Goals. That was easy and worked fine, but I wasn't beating 'will player A score a goal, yes or no'. I realized that my model was great for matchups but the numbers it was spitting out weren't all that accurate. They were accurate against each other, but not on their own. So this is where I basically started over and created my end boss NHL model.

The first thing I knew I needed to do was incorporate special teams. So for each matchup, I had 'over all PP time', 'PP TOI per game', 'penalties drawn and penalties taken'. Then you need the league wide average penalty time per penalty (which is slightly below 2 minutes because sometimes you get a penalty while on the power play. This was another place you could find slight edges. Some teams would run good or bad at turning their penalities drawn into actual PP time. For example, getting a penalty while on the PP or vice versa). So I would run their penalties drawn against the opponent penalties taken vs the average team and I would get each teams expected power play minutes. You then take each players power play share (the percent of the teams overall power play time that that player is on the ice for) and you have the expected time on ice on the power play for each player. (I also regressed this number to the mean a little bit).

Then I had three sections for each player: All situations, Power plays, and All situations minus Power Play time (which is a proxy for 5v5 plus penalty kill time). I would do each players Corsi into shots and then shots into goals per minute for all situations and PP. The difference would be all situations minus PP. You add up the outputs for PP plus all situations minus PP and I would get the players expected shots which you then can get expected goals.

 I was constantly changing and tweaking this model and there's plenty of stuff I didn't get into because it's pretty technical (and it was so long ago it's hard to remember exactly what I did and when). The end result though was that I would get each players expected corsi and shot on net per minute for PP time and All situations minus PP time. Multiply that by his average time on ice and you get their expected output for the game.

This model worked great for Shots but for some reason, never really did great on yes/no expected goals. I'm not really sure why. Goals are very fluky and since I wasn't super confident in it, I only tried it sparingly so it's entirely possible I just ran bad. But I'm not quite sure about that.

Anyway, that's about it. As you can see, it was a lot of work. For each game, I would have to put in all the team info and then go bet by bet, player vs player. TOI, corsi, shots, plus the last 4 years of corsi into goals or shots to get their corsi into goals/shots percentage. And that's just half the battle. Once you get the outputs and turn them into betting terms, now you have to actually place the bet which is a whole 'nother thing.

If anyone out there would like this model sent to them and have me walk them through how to use it, reach out to me and we can probably work something out. I'd probably charge less than a grand for a complete walk-through. Honestly though there's enough info here to at least get you on your way. But there are a few things I did leave out.

I know this was a little bit clunky. Looking back, it's crazy to me how long ago this was and how much time and effort went into it. I don't regret anything but man, it did take up a lot of my time. 

Check back soon, I have some crypto and politics stuff I want to get into. 

BTC price: $71k

BTC market cap: $1.4T

BTC dominance: 53%

A Look At Sportsbooks' Hold Percentages

It occurred to me recently that state run sports books have to disclose their hold percentages and this could be an interesting thing to look at. So in this post I will take a look around at a few different markets and sports books and check out their hold percentages and what that might be able to tell us, if anything, about the different sports books, their clientele and the entire betting market as a whole.

First, some explanations and some simple math. What is 'hold percentage', exactly? A sports books hold percentage is exactly what it sounds like. It's the percentage of money wagered by bettors which the sports book keeps. So if a book takes in, say, 10k in bets and pays out 9k in winngs, their hold percentage would be 10% (they keep 1k of the 10k wagered). Pretty simple. 

However, one thing to keep in mind here, and this is wildly misunderstood by just about everyone: a sports books hold percentage 'should' be 4.56%, NOT 10%. Everyone thinks that since they're betting at -110, the sports books edge is 10%. But that is incorrect. It's only 10% when you lose. And since you should win half your bets (betting straight markets at -110), the overall house edge on all bets should be 4.56%. In simple terms, if you bet straight bets at -110 in a perfectly efficient market close to game time, you will lose 4.6 dollars per every $100 you wager. (While we're at it, here's one more thing everyone gets wrong about sports betting lingo/math: a typical line with -110 both sides is a 20 cent market, NOT a 10 cent market. -110 both sides has 20 cents of juice in it because you have to go from -110 to 0, which is 10 cents, then 0 to the other -110. So 20 cents of juice total. A line of -120/even is the same amount of juice, 20 cents, just shifted 10 cents to one team. A true, balanced, 10 cent market would be -105 both sides).

Again, just to be perfectly clear; in the NFL regular season with both teams at -110 on the spread, if you threw 10 darts at a board every Sunday at 12:45 and picked teams that way, aka perfectly randomly, at the end of the year you should be down about 4.56% of the total amount you bet all year. That really should be, in theory, as BAD as you can do. With line shopping, bonuses and handicapping, you should be able to get that number down. Again, in theory. 

Let's look at hold percentages in Las Vegas brick and mortar sports books first. Now, when looking for this data, I have learned that it's a little noisy. Each sports book/state does their accounting a little differently and we're relying on them to self-report. That said, I did find a couple good articles that show that the hold percentages for old school Nevada sports books has historically been about 5%. Here's a quote I found from William Hill in Kansas from 2018, for example:

"While sports betting will help generate revenue for the state of Kansas, the reality is that sports betting is a low margin business. In Nevada, the average hold – the amount retained by the operator after paying winning customers – in recent years has been around 5%. That margin has been trending downward due to the increase in mobile wagering and InPlay wagering, which is wagering on an event after the event begins. Both mobile and InPlay are lower margin products."

Since sports betting has become legal in most states, however, hold percentages have increased. Here is the national trend: 

2019: 7.0%

2020: 7.2%

2021: 7.5%

2022: 8.1%

Using data from https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting/revenue/   we can look at each state for the past 6 years. You can check it out yourself, but the overall total is this: 

Total money wagered: $352,392,456,869

Revenue (money the sports book kept): $29,478,521,378

Total handle: 8.4%

Using a different site, it breaks it down month by month, state by state and the overall handle is a bit higher, into the 9s. This is WITH bonuses factored in too, which were pretty substantial in the early days of Draftkings and Fanduel.

So what does this tell us? Well, nothing really earth shattering at first glance I suppose, except if you really think about it. The average sports bettor is losing about 100% more than he would if he just picked straight bets completely randomly. So your typical NFL sports bettor who watches all the games, watches pre and post game shows, follows the league closely, can name most of the rosters of each team, might even be paying someone for picks, is getting beaten by a random number generator. And not by a little bit either. By 100%! TWICE as bad. Guys! That's abysmal! And I know what you're thinking right now. "Well sure the average sports bettor loses like that, but I'm not the average sports bettor!" Well let me tell you, unless you keep accurate records of your bets, you ARE the average sports bettor. Someone reading this blog is probably a tiny bit more sharp than average, and I know I hammer this point all the time, but if you aren't keeping track you really have no idea what's going on.

If I have any goal with this blog, besides the enjoyment I get from writing it, it would be to help the average sports bettor lose a little bit less. You gotta know what you're up against and where you stand and if you aren't keeping track, it's like trying to be a race car driver and not timing your laps. You just have no idea. So start there. If keeping track of your bets seems like too much work or too daunting of a task, I would ask that you really consider what you're getting out of sports betting and if it's really worth it to you. Maybe it is. But I think you owe it to yourself to find out exactly how much you're paying for that little dopamine hit a few times a week when you win a bet. Winning money long term from betting on sports is a lot of work. Like, a shitload of work. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's easy, just follow my advice and give me money and I'll make you a winner, which is what a lot of people do. I'm just here to tell you that there is no free lunch and you're probably losing more money betting than you realize. I mean, that number up above from 6 years of betting just on legal books is 30 billion dollars in the sports books pockets. $30 billion! 

Above is an overall trend line for the national average hold percentage. As you can clearly see, it's increasing, and not all that slowly either. Remember, a move from 4% to 8% is a 100% move, not a 4% move.

That's really it for today. Bit of a downer post, I know, but these numbers popped out to me. If there's anything actionable here, by the way, except for maybe taking a good hard look at your own betting habits, it would be to consider buying stock in the sports betting industry. I have stock in Draftkings at an average price of $18 per share which is pretty good with it being $45 per share currently. I can't say whether it's a good buy or not right now, but if brick and mortar sports books can operate profitably with 5% hold percentages, I would think an online sports book with hold percentages approaching double that figure (and rising) would be a good business to invest in. Of course, all this information is public and baked into the stock price, in theory anyway.

Lastly, a new little thing I'm going to do every post from now on is post the BTC price, market cap and market dominance. I think it'll be an interesting thing to look back on in the coming years. I plan on having this blog going basically forever so it'll be cool to look back at where we were at at various different times in the future.

BTC price: $65k

BTC market cap: $1.28 trillion

BTC dominance: 54.5%

Buy Bitcoin, store it yourself and have a good day! Bye for now!

Detailing My Time In Las Vegas As A Professional Gambler

In the fall of 2010, my friend and I embarked on a road trip to Las Vegas where we lived for a little while, with sports betting and playing poker as my only means of income. I've talked about it here and there on this blog a few times but I never really went into too much detail. As it gets further and further behind me, I think it would be a good idea to revisit that time in my life and have some sort of chronicle for it. So here goes. Certain names are changed and the exact dates are a little fuzzy, but everything in here is true.

Sometime in the fall of 2010, my friend "Mike" and I embarked on a journey from Massachusetts to Las Vegas, Nevada. Mike was my roommate at the time and could work remotely so while he wasn't involved in gambling, he came with me for the experience. We rented a U-Haul, filled it with as much of our stuff as possible and headed West. We took a Northern route and stopped in Detroit for a few nights. Our other friend was going to graduate school at the University of Michigan so we stayed with him. That was the year the Patriots played the Lions on Thanksgiving so we actually went to the game. (First digression here: for the rest of my life, I will never forget being in the stadium for that game. I have never seen a more defeated, depressed, beaten down fanbase in my entire life. The Lions are actually decent now, but for a looong time they were the absolute laughing stocks of the NFL. Terrible, year after year. And of course 2010 was smack dab in the middle of the New England Patriots Tom Brady dynasty, so it really was like a pro team facing a college team. The Patriots won 45-24 and it was one of those games that are over before halftime. The fans there were totally defeated, like nothing I've ever seen before. They weren't even really rooting for the Lions anymore. It was more like an exercise in sadism. I have a memory seared in my mind of multiple people respectfully shaking my hand as we left the stadium, congratulating ME on the Patriots winning, lol. They were in awe of not just an organization like the Patriots, but in some bizarre way, in awe of me and their fans just for being from New England! I'm telling you, it was borderline disturbing just how beaten down they were. Add in the fact that Ford Field is an oppressive feeling, indoor grey dome and Detroit was basically a third world country in 2010 and you get the idea. The only other worse stadium I've ever been to was Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay Florida for a Red Sox vs Devil Rays game. But the fans in Detroit were nothing like I had ever seen.) The game itself was a snoozer, I remember actually falling asleep in my seat once. 

My friend lived in the suburbs of Detroit and one night while we were there we took a ride into the city to go to the Motor City Casino (I think that was the one. It was the main casino in Detroit). I remember seeing multiple burned out and abandoned cars on the side of the road on the highway and tons of dilapidated, empty houses. This was a couple years removed from the 2008 crisis and Detroit was hit especially hard. It was surreal seeing an entire city, completely beaten down and kind of accepting it, up close and personal. (Another Detroit fun fact; there is a big concentration of Muslim people in Michigan for some reason. And they used to do the weirdest thing when walking around the city. They'd be walking normally and without warning, break out into a sprint for like 2 or 3 seconds and then go back to walking normally again. I swear I saw that at least 5 times.) My experience at the casino wasn't noteworthy, I think I played $2/5 NL for a few hours. 

We left Michigan after a few nights and headed South West towards our ending point. That drive from Michigan to Nevada was one of the coolest things I've ever done. Driving through the Rockies is truly awe-inspiring. The complete marvels of engineering, the tunnels that go right through gigantic mountains like open mouths in a massive mountain face, the long, windy, SUPER hilly roads. Bizarre billboards in the middle of nowhere. Images I'll never forget. We actually took advantage of it pretty good and managed to ski the Rockies one day. We are both decent skiers and rented everything for a day on the slopes. Let me tell you, West Coast skiing is A LOT different than East Coast. For one, the runs are LONG. You get halfway down and it feels like you did three runs. Also, the thin air is absolutely real and makes it so much harder to catch your breath. Plus with the powder instead of the typical east Coast corduroy/icy conditions, you have to work much harder. We were both gassed out early. It also didn't help that we did a very mogul-y double black diamond run early on by mistake trying to get a good picture. I think we only did something like 5 runs that day total. It was a great experience and a great story, but it was not a great day of skiing.

Anyway, we arrived at our apartment in Henderson a week or so after we left MA and settled in. Now, it's important to note here where I was in my sports betting and poker career at this point. I was incredibly naive and was not nearly as good at poker or sports betting as I thought I was. I wasn't even keeping track of my results at this point! One of my regrets with the whole thing was that I made that move way too early. I was obsessed with being a pro gambler back then and moving to Las Vegas just seemed like the thing to do. Plus I was single, winter was coming and our lease was up so the timing seemed perfect. I didn't really have a goal in mind or a set plan. It was just get there, play poker, bet on sports and see what happens. 

So once we settled in, I checked out the strip and various poker rooms and games until I found the first of a couple different games that I would play regularly. My first room that I played in regularly was the Venetian $8/16 limit game. That was a good game and place to get my feet wet. It was a super soft and fun game where I met some interesting characters. One was "The Ice-Man," Teddy Monroe. He was a huge black guy who was featured on the World Series of Poker a couple times and was semi-famous in the poker world. He had these ridiculous bedazzled headphones that said "Ice-Man" on them and a little "I'm gonna freeze 'em" catch phrase and was just wicked recognizable. He was a good guy too and fun to play with. (Side note: from what I remember he was pretty bad. I kind of couldn't believe he was a pro and I doubt he was actually making a living playing poker. At one point he tried to get into pick-selling (of course) and I remember him talking to some guy at the table about it. His whole entire shpiel was that they were only going to release one play a day. "If you only bet one game a day you will win. People only lose because they bet too much" I remember him saying). These are the people who sells picks. Don't buy picks.

Another guy I met in that game was a super outgoing kid a little older than me who went by the nickname "Tuna". He befriended me and we ended up being close friends for my entire time out there. He did the same thing as me, moved from New England to Las Vegas a few years earlier to play poker. It was great meeting a local guy like him who was super connected in the scene as he showed me around all over the place and introduced me to all kinds of people. We haven't spoken in a long time but I'll always be grateful to Tuna. 

We both did good at the $8/16 game and eventually moved to the Bellagio where we set up shop at their $15/30 and $30/60 games. I was actually there when the Bellagio famously went from the 15/30 and 30/60 games they were running for decades to 10/20 and 20/40. The Bellagio became my 'home casino' and I was there at least 4 or 5 days a week. I absolutely loved the Bellagio and their poker room. They famously had "Doyles room" in the middle of the poker room where all the big time poker pros that you might know from the heyday of TV poker played nosebleed stakes. It was one table enclosed in glass that was usually empty, but when they would play you would have people all over the place trying to take pictures. I saw Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Antonio, Phil Laak, Tom Dwan, plus many others all playing poker with probably millions of dollars on the table, just feet away from me. Pretty cool for a 20 something year old aspiring poker pro.

Tuna was well connected and knew how to schmooze and what buttons to press to get things done in Las Vegas. I remember one night we took a break from playing and got comps for the buffet (he played a level higher than me so he always got amazing comps). If you don't know, buffets in Las Vegas are not what you might picture when you picture a buffet. They're more like a fever dream of fancy and awesome food that people happily wait for hours in line for. The line for it literally looked like a roller coaster line, circling back on itself. And here we come, two 20 something year olds in sweatpants, cutting to the front of the line and being let in on comps only. Pretty sick. I remember getting lots of curious looks. We also developed a nice little system of getting some of the best food I can ever remember eating delivered to us at the poker tables and eating like kings while we played. One underrated aspect of Las Vegas is the food. You might be surprised since it's landlocked and kind of in the middle of the desert, but I had some of the best sushi in my life out there.

We had an awesome little smoking spot for breaks during our sessions at the top of the Bellagio parking garage. It was really hidden and you could see the entire city from there. The views at night were as unforgettable as our little smoking sessions, talking about poker hands and life with thousands of dollars in chips waiting for us back at our tables. Tuna and I also went to the Spearmint Rhino one night which is like one of the most famous strip clubs in the country. I guess if you're a strip club guy it was pretty cool. Massive place with multiple floors. I remember I couldn't wait to leave though. I'm not a strip club guy and it just felt awkward to me. I can't get over paying money for a woman's attention and I usually end up in long serious talks with the strippers, lol. That was one of my "this is all kind of fake bullshit" moments too, leaving that club. Everyone was talking about awesome it was and I couldn't help but think they were faking it for their own sake. I guess I kind of felt like an outsider among outsiders.

Overall, my experience playing poker in Las Vegas was OK. Nothing crazy, to be honest. I realized after a couple months that I really wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was and even though I was still beating the games, I could tell that the guys who were REALLY doing it were at a different level than me. I surmised that I could probably beat games up to about $20/40 limit and $2/5 NL, but the next level up was beyond my reach at that point. I took some shots at $40/80 and $5/10 NL but I always felt very out of place and overmatched. To be honest, my dream of becoming a pro poker player was snuffed out fairly early in my journey. I didn't start really reading and becoming a better poker player until I left Las Vegas and played in the $20/40 game at Foxwoods regularly. I remember back then I was still cold-calling a lot of hands pre-flop, which if you know anything about limit poker, you know that that is basically the surest sign that someone is a fish. When I think about it, it's actually pretty incredible that I even thought I could beat mid stakes games back then. Like I've said before, the worst things to not know are the things you don't know that you don't know. 

One quick poker story. I took the single worst bad beat in my life out there (at a non bad beat bonus table of course). I forget the action exactly but it was $2/5 NL and I had pocket 6's and saw a flop of q66 in a heads up pot. So I flopped quads. There was some betting and we a turn 9. More betting and river 9. And the guy gets all excited and jams all in and I swear on my life, I actually thought about it. I knew in my guts that he had quad nines but there was no way I could fold four of a kind. So I called and he rolls over 99 for runner runner quads to beat my quads. People were running over taking pictures. It was early in the session and I remember just picking up and leaving. There was no coming back from that.

Another funny quick little poker story. Same room, the Venetian, playing $2/5 NL. There was a younger kid in the game who had been talking a lot and trying to be the table bully. He really wasn't crossing the line but was coming close to it. He gets into a hand with the table fish, a guy very clearly on vacation and new to poker. On the turn in a big pot, the young kid bets into the tourist and the tourist is thinking. The young kid starts talking, running his mouth a little bit. The tourist is just sitting there kind of blankly looking at him and the young kid says something like "If you raise I fold. I swear to god I fold". An older guy at the table who had been semi going at it with the young kid all session very quietly calls the floor over. The action between the young kid and the tourist was getting all the attention as they were still going back and forth talking and I think I was the only one who noticed this other guy call the floor over. The floor comes over and the older guy asks him, still very quiet "is saying 'I will fold if you raise' binding?" And the floor guys says "yes." Now everyone hears him, even the tourist. The tourist guy finally min raises and the floor declares the young kids hand dead! He had turned the nut straight and the tourist was drawing dead. Now the young kid goes apoplectic. He berates the floor guy and especially the older guy for not being involved in the hand and calling the floor over, so much that he gets ejected. As he's getting ejected, he tears into the older guy who called the floor. Keeps saying "You were a loser in high school! You had no friends, I can tell!" among tons of other stuff. Really laced into this guy. He FINALLY leaves and once everything settles down, the older guy says to the table "by the way, I was on the basketball team in high school. So I had PLENTY of friends" lol. Such a cheese dick thing to say.

I was a poker player first and sports bettor second in those days, but I think a few months into my time in Las Vegas was when that switch sort of got flipped for me officially. I think I intuitively figured out that my ceiling was fairly low for playing poker as a career so I moved onto sports betting more heavily. The first thing I tried to do was to beat props which I had been doing for a couple years back in MA at this point. And man, I just could not figure out a way to make it work. My process normally is that I'll have whatever model I'm using up at the same time as the multitude of accounts I have. I go bet by bet, guy by guy, making bets as I use the model. So if I'm pricing, say, Brad Marchands shots on goal for the night, I'll use my model and come up with a total expected shots for Marchard. Then I look at the lines and see if my model is suggesting a bet. If it is, I will usually find the best possible number and bet it. However, often times it's close and I might look over his stats and the matchup more closely, and something like his ice time over the past 5 games or the opponents recent few games. Maybe they're on a back to back? It isn't always as easy as betting when the model says to. There are plenty of times when the model shows a big edge, sometimes too big, and I'll have to dig in and usually find something that explains the difference (opposing player or linemate is out or something like that). Once that's done, I erase all the inputs for Marchard and do the next guy, leaving all the game stats up on my model until I move on to the next game. But now in Las Vegas, I had to do my prop work first without even knowing which bets will be offered. So I'd make a little piece of paper with my projections on it and then head down to the strip. I'd go from book to book asking for their prop sheets and half the time they wouldn't even know what I was talking about. Other times I'd get handed a sheet with something like 10 props on it, all super standard game props that was old and usually had the wrong odds listed and usually had like 60 cents of juice. So the vast majority of the time I would do hours of work and not get a single bet out of it. 

I tried out casino after casino. No one really regularly put up prop markets that I could find, and even those that did would be copied from The Greek or some other offshore book with extra juice. The only exception was big Sunday night and Monday night NFL games and I did manage to get in pretty good on some props in those games. The Super Bowl was an absolute feeding frenzy and I eventually found a casino way off strip called "The M" that would offer props every week, but I found out pretty quickly that I was not going to be making any serious money betting props in Las Vegas. I tried to adapt to just finding off-market straight bets and one thing I did moderately successfully was find these rinky-dink off strip casinos called "Stations Casinos." They were almost like the PPH's of Las Vegas. They were not on the strip and didn't have the glitz and glam of a regular casino. I think they were kind of marketed towards Las Vegas locals which is kind of a weird thought when you think about it. But even that was difficult. I found an online odds checker site that would list the odds from different sports books in Las Vegas and I would find these Stations Casinos would have a lot of college basketball stuff that would be a couple points off market. So I'd write down the Pinnacle lines and head out to one of these places. By the time I got there usually the lines would change against me or the odds checker was wrong so I'd have like 3 or 4 bets total. And even THEN, they would try to cheat me. I think I told this story on here before, but one time I went in and there was like 10 or so good looking college basketball bets. So I'm at the counter with my little sheet putting my bets in with a guy and I see another boss looking guy off to the side clearly listening to us. The process was I would ask him for his line on a certain game and then tell him what I wanted to bet. After I got a couple in, suddenly the ones I would ask for would magically change away from me, that instant. The guy who was eavesdropping had walked over to a computer and I'm 99% sure was listening to me ask for a game and then updating the odds before I could bet. So after a few months of this it dawned on me; what was the point of this, exactly? I had access to more and better sports books online. I wasn't good enough to make a real living playing poker and even if I was, there was plenty of poker to be found back home. So what was I doing out here, really?

I knew fairly early on that I wasn't going to make LV my new home. Even besides the sports and poker stuff, socially it kind of sucked too. Thank GOD I met Tuna and his friends, I can't imagine how awful it would have been if I hadn't. We had some fun nights out bar hopping and played a few rounds of golf at some unreal courses. But even with his group of friends, I would slowly realize eventually that they barely knew each other. See, no one, and I really do mean no one, is actually from Las Vegas. They were all transplants like me. So there were no roots at all. No childhood friends, no connecting stories, it was more like a collection of random people who, in my eyes anyway, sure acted like they were better friends than they really were. I think that may be a bit of a west coast thing; aloofness, little bit fake? One time a new kid Tuna and I had met playing poker started hanging out with us away from the tables for a month or two. He was more Tunas friend. One day he was just gone. Come to find out, he "bought" a really nice set of golf clubs from Tuna a couple days before but hadn't paid him yet. So of course no one hears from him ever again and he makes out with new clubs. And Tuna wasn't even THAT shocked or pissed off. That's just an example of how transient and weird things were. Flimsy, almost like you could put your hand right through the whole state.

One really cool thing I did out there was road trip to Hollywood. An old friend of mine who was an aspiring actor was out in LA/Hollywood for a few days doing something and I decided to make the drive from Las Vegas to LA to hang out with him. That was another drive I'll never forget. Up, over, around and through mountains, desert and even snow going by the windows. 80 MPH speed limits. I'm glad I got to see LA and especially Venice Beach before it turned into the open air drug marketplace and homeless encampment that it is today. We had dinner at this cool, really tall building in LA that had a big lazy-susan at the top with 360 degree windows for walls, and it slowly rotated. So you could see literally all of LA from your seat while you ate.

Another fun thing we did was I had two of my friends from college come visit us for a few nights. We rented guns and a shitload of ammo and took em out to the desert and had a blast shooting cans and cactuses (cacti?). By the way, you know that weird "PACH-UUUUuuuu" high pitch sound that guns sometimes make in movies? They really do sound like that when you shoot outside. We'd throw cans in the air and try to shoot them on the way down. Super fun.

Another fun trip I took while in Las Vegas was to New Orleans during Mardi Gras with the same friend who we visited in Detroit. Mardi Gras was exactly what you'd expect. Dirty, hazy, booze filled and tons and tons of boobs. Not all of them were ones you wanted to see, either. It was interesting how beads literally became currency during Mardi Gras. Women really wanted them and it was sort of a badge of pride for a woman to have a shitload of beads around her neck walking around. I think every young single man should do Mardi Gras once in their life, but exactly once. I would never go back there. It's a pretty gross city to be honest. Mind you, this was not that far removed from Hurricane Katrina and one day it rained pretty heavily for a couple hours. And basically the whole city flooded and shut down. They had no drainage. I also got an alligator sub which took over an hour to get and was absolutely terrible. 

All in all, Las Vegas and all the mini trips were a terrific experience and I wouldn't change it for the world, but I do have some regrets. Namely, that I went way too early and without a real plan. I thought that because I could beat small/mid stakes home games and was crushing super soft PPH accounts that all that would transfer over and I could win at poker and sports in Las Vegas. Like I said, I wasn't even keeping track of my results back then. So it really was incredibly naïve of me to think I could do it forever. I wish I had taken it either more seriously or less seriously. I should have either really taken it serious and done more studying and improved upon my skills, or less serious and looked at it for what it really was; an adventure. I really don't have a good reason for why I didn't buckle down and try to at least get better at poker, which I did do a couple years later back in Mass. Also, for life of me, I cannot explain why we didn't take more advantage of the incredible roads and wide open landscape in Nevada. We could have rented motorcycles or dirt bikes or cool cars and had a sick couple days exploring the sand dunes and wide open roads, and/or check out Lake Mead in some capacity. Ultimately and surprisingly, I ended up kind of getting homesick and was looking forward to leaving within a few months of getting there. I never really met any girls there too which added to the homesick/lonely vibe that was building slowly.

When our lease was up, we sold all that we could to Tuna and packed everything else up and started the journey home. We took the Southern route and went through Texas and St. Louis and then up through New Jersey/NY. We saw the Grand Canyon at one point too, which was cool.

So there you have it. I did warn you, it wasn't anything spectacular. When I got home, I focused more on my career thinking that my gambling days were largely behind me. But that was not the case actually, as the 6ish years after I got back to Mass were the absolute top of my betting career. I need lots of new (and soft) accounts to do what I do successfully and other than the adventure angle, there really wasn't a good reason for moving to Las Vegas in the first place. But if I hadn't gone I know I would have thought "what if..." for the rest of my life. I'm very glad that I went and saw for myself that even if I did manage to find a way to make it all work, it wasn't what I wanted.

I've been on fire lately with the posts, huh? Check back soon as I have an idea for a close look at the BTC ETF'S and exactly how much BTC they're buying. I might do another inside look at a different model because the last one was fun. This seems like a good place to mention, by the way, that I am not selling anything on here. I don't even have ads. I ask nothing of you, dear reader, except for your attention. Remember to follow @POOGSblog on X for updates or just bookmark me and check at least once a week. Bye for now!

A Definitive List To The Best Sports Betting Books Of All Time, Plus Some Others

OK I know I'm pushing it a little bit with that title but hey, scared money don't make money and I didn't come here to pussyfoot around. I am an avid reader and during my heyday in the sports betting world, I did try to read just about every book that was remotely well received by the sharp community. So while this title may be a little tongue in cheek, I think it's at least fairly close to a definitive list.

I know I've been threatening to do this book review post for a while now so here goes. Here is a list of, really, the best sports betting books that I'm aware of from what I'll call "my era", or the "Pre DFS era". I have been a little out of the scene for a year or two now, so if there are some newer books out there it's possible that I missed them. If you are a sharp or trying to be one, or even if you aren't but you just like to read, I highly recommend you check out any of these books. I have often said that it is pretty remarkable how much information is out there just laying around, practically in the open. A lot of that comes from the books I'll be mentioning here. I'll have some at the end that aren't sports betting exactly, but are at least investing or poker related that I would assume anyone interested in this blog would also be into.

Anyway, here we go. In rough order of the biggest impact on me.

#1. "Conquering Risk, Attacking Vegas and Wall Street" by Elihu D. Fuestel and George Howard. 2010. 

This book probably changed my life more than any other book I've ever read. This one really got it all going for me. I've talked about it before on here but this little, fairly short book has some very easy to follow and understand examples for pricing props that you can apply to tons of other things. This book has two parts, one on sports betting/Vegas and one on Wall St. The Wall St section is basically useless, honestly. But the entire Sports Betting section really is just useful nugget after nugget. It was written by Elihu Feustel who went by Justin7 on all the old school message boards. He was a very good and active poster and actually started Sports Book Review, better known as SBR with their famous message board. SBR, when it started, was a terrific idea and badly needed. Back in the old days when sports betting was decades away from being legalized and a little bit before my time, the landscape was like the wild west. (We'll call these days the "net-teller days"). Books would do all kinds of shady stuff, up to and including just complete exit scams. Good bye, the entire site, along with whatever money you had on there, is gone one day when you try to log in. It took a while for the market to sort itself out and there were lots of shady things going on and constant disputes between players and books. (And the players weren't always right, by the way). So there was a need for some sort of neutral, private, third party system who could at least give some kind of summary or warning about various different online sports books. They also acted as a de facto lawyer for players who had a dispute and nowhere else to turn to. (Now that I think about it, this situation is almost exactly like The Phantom Gourmet that I just talked about.)

SBR started off great and with the best intentions, but eventually they had to extract that value and started taking ads from sports books. That led to accusations of them getting paid for good reviews and protecting certain brands. I actually think it was more than just accusations but I'm not exactly sure. It almost doesn't even matter because the end result is that now no one really cares about or trusts SBR anymore. They're still around and Justin7 left them at some point when all this stuff was going on, but the damage was done. He kind of rubbed people the wrong way on message boards (and maybe was a little autistic-y now that I think about it?) and ended up being the face of the whole SBR debacle which I thought was unfair. He released this book right in the middle of it and I remember it got review bombed by all the people who were mad about SBR. I think that's one of the reasons I never really see or hear about this book that much. I know a lot of the more severe sharps had some issues with some of his math in the book too, if I remember correctly, but that was like circumsizing a mosquito in my opinion. The book is a low-level goldmine.

Anyway, this book quite literally has/had it all for anyone starting out. I guess it's pretty dated now as it is almost 15 years old at this point, but if you're new to this I 100% would recommend it. There's step by step how to build a WNBA and MLB model (neither of which would work today but I bet at least the WNBA one did in 2010). All kinds of push charts and really good explanations on them. The chapter on the Poisson distribution alone was honestly worth probably 50 times the cost of the book, if not (much) more. He goes into Wong Teasers, super bowl specific prop prices, oh and Correlated Parlays! That chapter alone was literally worth more than something like 4k times the cost of the book. (By the way, here's a fun little fact. After I read this book I was on one of the big message boards discussing it. I made a thread asking for a specific number that wasn't given in the book. I kind of can't believe it now that I think about it, but he gave the magic number that you need for a college football game to be an official, profitable, correlated parlay. CP's need the spread and the total to be close. How close? Well, I didn't know. But he did and he put it in that book. I wanted to know what that number would be for first half bets instead of full game bets. He immediately sent me a direct message saying "Do not talk about correlated parlays. Make your own database and figure it out but don't say anything publicly." So I wrote back something like "OK fine but you gotta tell me what the number is." And he wrote back "it's much, much higher {meaning you don't need as much correlation for half time bets as you do for full time} but figure it out yourself". That seemed fair enough to me).

He also has quite a few videos out there on Youtube where he walks you through how to price and beat props. It's insane to me how little attention this guy and his book and videos got. Some of his videos have less than a couple hundred views. And he's telling you, step by step, how to make easily 40-50k a year (back then). If you had any kind of hustle and could maintain at least a few square books year round you could easily double that figure, if not more. And I must have recommended "Conquering Risk" to at least half a dozen people in my group who were interested in what I was doing. Not one person bought it. I think the lesson there is that the vast, vast majority of sports bettors really don't actually want to win money betting at sports long term. I think deep down they feel like it's just a little bit too far-fetched for them. It's like trying to beat the lottery or a scratch ticket in their mind, maybe. I don't know. But anyway, as you can see, I recommend this book to everyone, even today. 

Whew! I did not mean for that to be a commercial for Justin7 but I always felt like he was treated unfairly by the sharp community. I don't know everything about the SBR situation as it was right before my time. I'm not sure how involved he was or even exactly what SBR did, but I know I have the broad strokes right at least. I do know he gave a lot to the community, more than most. I didn't mean to write that much but here we are! Each one won't be nearly so long, don't worry.

#2 "Weighing The Odds In Sports Betting" by King Yao. 2007.

This book was one of the few around this era that some may call the "bible books" of sports betting. These laid the foundation for much of the future sports betting material. Much like Conquering Risk, there isn't a wasted page in this book. It covers pretty much everything you need to know to start making money betting on sports.  Lots of good example on how to calculate EV and ROI, how why or when to hedge, parlay cards, prop examples. This book and Conquering Risk is where I got the idea on scalping/half scalping. There is a GREAT little nugget in here that I used for years and years. It's really simple, too. You bet NO on "Will there be a triple crown winner" in horse racing AFTER the Kentucky Derby. The logic is that almost everyone who bets that is betting YES so the NO is usually profitable already. But if you wait for the first race (The Kentucky Derby) to be over, that price will usually get way better even thought nothing really has changed. Someone had to win the Kentucky Derby. Everyone will be talking about "Can Horse X win the triple crown this year?!" and once people have a horse in mind they can root for, they'll be piling in on the YES even harder. So you wait for right before the second race and pound the NO. (Although I will say during the time I was doing this I'm pretty sure there was two triple crown winners? It hadn't happened in 100 years and then happened twice in like 3 or 4 or something. I still made money on this bet long term though, I'm fairly certain). Now that I'm looking at it, I might go back and re-read this book. 

#3 "Sharp Sports Betting" Stanford Wong. 2009.

This is where "Wong Teasers" came from. I've talked about those plenty on here so I won't go into them again. It's pretty insane though that Wongs have been out in the public since 2009 and are STILL profitable to this day (at -110 which you can still find). Shows how ignorant most sports bettors are to be honest. There are lots of prop examples with step by step answers, too. 

The two books above, by King Yao and Stanford Wong, along with this one: "Fixed Odds Sports Betting" by Joseph Buchdahl were what I would consider the 'bible books' of that era. Now, I'm not actually including "Fixed Odds" in my list because I got absolutely nothing out of that book. Everyone else seemed to though as all the sharp guys always recommended it. It's super dry and math heavy and I'm sure there are good nuggets in there that I missed but I cannot personally recommend it. I highly, highly recommend "Sharp Sports Betting" by Wong though.

#4 "Basketball On Paper" by Dean Oliver. 2003.

This book is still very much considered THE bible of betting on basketball. If you handicap basketball successfully, I'd say there's a 95% chance you've read this book. This book alone helped me make my NBA prop models which crushed for years and years (largely to learning about pace and its importance before everyone else figured that out). I unfortunately bought this on my kindle instead of physically buying it so it's harder to revisit. (Massive mistake, by the way. I wish I never bought a single book on Kindle. Nothing electronic is better than reading and owning a real physical book. Don't buy shit on Kindle.) But I was reading this step by step while I made my model and that alone made it well worth it, many times over. If you handicap basketball in any sense of the word or even just really enjoy it and you haven't already, buy this book right now.

#5 "Trading Bases" by Joe Peta. 2013.

This book is a little bit different than the ones so far in that it has a narrative structure. It's about the author, Joe Peta, who was a big time Wall Street guy who gets hit by a car and is bed ridden for a couple years. He decides to put his Wall St smarts to the test in a new arena; beating baseball. He comes up with an ingenious model. Probably the most unique way of handicapping I've ever heard of. I know I talked about it before in here so I won't get into it too much but I can't recommend this book enough. If you're not super into the math of sports betting, this is a great read. This is another from my "Kindle era" so I've forgotten a lot about this book, unfortunately. But I remember absolutely loving it.

#6: "Stat Shot. The Ultimate Guide to Hockey Analytics" by Rob Vollman. 2016.

Terrific little book on hockey analytics that was a couple years ahead of its time. Like Basketball On Paper, this was another one that I had open while I made my various NHL prop models. Tons of great info on all kinds of stuff. Even if you don't bet but like hockey, I would read this book. Hockey analytics have actually come quite a way since 2016 so I'm sure this book is quite dated. If you're looking for something to help you make a model, I'd probably look elsewhere as I'm sure there are newer, better books on the subject. But this was ground breaking 8 years ago and it certainly isn't anywhere near useless. I'd read this book again if I was still betting hockey.

#7: "Gambler" Billy Walters. 2024.

The most recent book on here obviously, by far. This is mostly an autobiography but I would read anything Billy Walters has to say. The last section of the book goes into some math and opens the hood a little bit into his operation. He does the old school way of capping which is assigning power rankings to each team and actually to each player. It's their value over an average player, so basically his own version of WAR. Honestly, this book is worth it for the chapter on Phil Mickelson alone. He absolutely TORCHES him. He and Billy Walters were friends and betting partners for a long time and apparently Phil is a pretty sick degenerate gambler. He doesn't say it outright I don't think but it sounds like Walters was betting for Phil and probably using him as cover. Phil could have saved Walters from going to jail for insider trading but didn't. He tells a pretty sick story in there about Phil wanting to bet on himself in the Ryder tournament for something crazy, maybe two million dollars? Walters says he turned it down because if anyone found out it would be a huge scandal. Even though he was 'betting on himself', aka the Pete Rose defense, it doesn't really matter. You can't have professional athletes betting on their own leagues, never mind one of the most famous golfers of all time. Shows how sick Phil is. If you like this blog you should have read this book already.

#8 "Mathletics, How Gamblers, Managers and Sports Enthusiasts Use Math In Baseball, Basketball, and Football" Wayne Winston. 2009.

Another Kindle book from way back so I don't remember a ton about this one. I just know that it helped me a lot with a more thousand feet up approach. Lots of great overall nuggets and insights into how to use math for making models and such. A great primer on analytics. There is probably an updated version of this book with all the new stats we have since 2009, but there is still plenty to be learned in this book.

#9 "Interception" by Ed Miller. 2023.

The first Ed Miller entry here. Ed has been writing poker books for a long time now and has since moved on to the sports betting world. This book has the advantage of being up to date and it's perfect for the semi-pro bettor. Someone who is legitimately trying to win at sports betting but who isn't thinking about quitting their job. Ed has a company that provides live betting data for sports books so he has a unique, inside look into that world. The book is largely about how live betting works from the sports books end and how one would go about beating them. If you bet live at all this book is for sure worth a read. And if you like it I would suggest checking out his other books as he has a ton. He is a very accessible author, meaning he doesn't try to talk over people's heads or get insane with math stuff like a David Sklansky or Mason Malmuth even though Ed Miller came from the same group of those two. (Another little fun fact: I played poker with David Sklansky a few times in Las Vegas. He was just as advertised. Weird, a little bit goofy, super tight and boring and spent the vast majority of his time wandering around the room with a missing blind button in front of his stack. I know he's considered one of the godfathers of poker theory and I've read most of his books and they were all fine for that era. But I lost a lot of the admiration and respect I had for him after playing with him a couple times. He was just so unbelievably tight and unimaginative that he was easy to play against. You just folded to or floated him. I also played with Mason Malmuth a bunch at the Bellagio. Similar to Sklansky but Mason was more of a player. They were both really standoff-ish and Mason had this super annoying thing where he'd constantly be coughing into his hands at the table. He'd put both hands up over his whole face and cough loudly, constantly, every time I saw him play. Mason was a bit more normal but they both seemed like weird dudes to me. Look up the shit David Sklansky was up to with girls underwear and parrots. I'm not kidding).

#10 "The Intelligent Poker Player" by Phillip Newall.

The first outright poker book in here. I'm including it because I've read dozens, if not hundreds of poker books, and none had the impact on me that this one did. I was a limit grinder for a long time and this book was a complete step by step walk through on how to beat mid limit games and why it works. It helped me form my overall strategy that I still use. 

Honorable Mentions:

The following aren't strictly sports betting or poker but if you're here, I would bet that you would find them interesting:

"The Creature From Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin - A massive, sprawling book that goes from the very start of civilization up to today. If you're interested in money and how it came to be, definitely check this out. Among many, many other things, it talks about how the Federal Reserve started and what it really does and how evil central banking and printing money is. It's honestly a little bit scary. (Another fun fact time. A great little nugget I took from this book was how banks and interest started. When we first started with money, metallurgists were the first 'bankers.' People would go to them to get gold or whatever else they were using made, and eventually they would just leave their gold with them for good for a small storage fee. Eventually it became too cumbersome to physically go there and get and move their gold to pay for things, so they would use pieces of paper that showed their gold holdings at the 'vaults' and trade with them instead. They were in essence the first 'checks' or paper money. People eventually started to loan each other gold and loan each other these pieces of paper. The metallurgists then took it upon themselves to loan out OTHER peoples gold and pocketed the interest. When people found out about this they were obviously furious. The vault owners then cut the gold owners in on a small piece of their interest profits from loaning out the gold that wasn't theirs. This was the very start of banking as we know it today. So no one ever actually consented to banks lending out our money for themselves. They just did it and when caught, cut us in for a small piece). This book is massive and covers all sorts of things that you make you furious. If you found any of that interesting, read this book.

"The Lords of Easy Money" - I know I mentioned it on here before but this book is a more sober look at the Fed than Creature. I suggest reading those two together if you're into that kind of stuff. Written by an old school journalist (Chris Leonard) who has been covering the Fed for decades. It gives a good inside look at the people in the Federal Reserve and how it all works but without the sensational feeling of Creature. Very impressive at how accurate the detractors of money printing were in that they knew it would be impossible to stop once they started.

"Atlas Shrugged" - An absolute classic for a reason. I'm actually re-reading this for the second time right now. Absolute must read for everyone and my personal favorite book of all time. It's easy to read too, which might be surprising. I could honestly write a whole post just about this book but all I'll say is that I had super high hopes for it before reading and it still surpassed them. If you are going to buy it though, make sure you get a big copy. Like, literally a large copy of the book. It's massive and the one I got is really compact so the words are tiny. Get a nice big copy that you'll have forever.

"Crime and Punishment" - Another classic, this is quite a BIZARRE book. I know it's considered one of the classics but man is this book weird. Shockingly bleak, paints a clear picture of abject poverty in an abjectly poor country. Worth reading once in your life. Odd structure too where it's one long continuous story until the very end. Like, one chapter ends with something like "...he entered the room and sat down in a chair." Then the next chapter starts "Now in the chair, he....". Kind of jarring for some reason. I read this right after Atlas Shrugged as they seemed like polar opposites.

"XX" - A book about what would happen if we were to receive communication from aliens. One of the most enjoyable books I ever read. The author is a graphic designer and he does something super unique in this book. He used different fonts and sizes for different speakers. It works really well and made me surprised that I'd never seen that done before. Super unique book that is hard to explain. It even has a book within a book. If you like Sci-Fi or aliens at all, check this out.

Well I suppose that's it. I could go on a bit more but those are my rock solid recommendations. Looking back at this list, I do have to back off a bit of my 'best of all time' description. It's clear from looking at the dates of the books that I've been out of the sports betting book loop for a while, so I'm sure there are some newer books I don't know about. I still think a lot of these are required reading though if you are a sharp. 

Leave a comment on here or on Twitter if you have anything to add. Bye for now!