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!

How An Episode Of The Phantom Gourmet Helped Me Understand An Important Economic Lesson

Three new posts in less than two weeks! You never know what you're going to get around here. "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen" -Lenin. Pretty sick quote.

A couple quick updates before we jump in. First off, follow @poogsBLOG on X/Twitter for updates.  Also, one thing I forgot to mention in my last couple posts was the ending to the BlockFi saga. If you don't know, I got caught up in the Blockfi debacle that happened a couple years ago now. Basically, they got in bed with FTX and ended up with their pants down and froze withdrawals. I had about half of my stack on there at the time (big time No0b move. I have since moved everything onto a cold storage wallet and I highly recommend you do the same) split between a regular "wallet" and an "earn account." After months and months of litigation and back and forth, I ended up getting 100% of my wallet funds back and about 20% of my earn account. The wallet funds came in crypto which was ideal but the earn funds came in cash, valued at the time of the Blockfi blowup, which just so happened to be at the very bottom of the market. All in all it cost me about a couple grand but like I said before, I am honestly happy that it happened. I probably wouldn't have moved my funds to a real cold wallet if this didn't happen, and something like this was for sure going to occur at some point. So it's good that it happened when it did as opposed to years from now when my stack was much larger. I consider the money that I lost the cost of a much needed education. Everything that went down is now baked into my numbers.

For a quick update: my average BTC price is $27k. ETH: $1720, LINK: $6.6, LTC: free rolling but own small amount, MATIC: $.8. Not bad, considering we're bumping up against an all time high for BTC right now at about $72k.

Now, onto the meat of what we're going to talk about today.

The Phantom Gourmet is a pretty legendary TV show that is on in the New England area every weekend for two hours starting at 10 AM. When it started in 1993, it gained a cult following immediately and was given a "Best of Boston" award by Boston Magazine in 1994. The basis of the show was that a secret shopper, or 'The Phantom' would go to restaurants/bars/chains all around the New England area and give them number grades on different aspects of their business, culminating in one overall grade. They would be very honest too, often times giving places bad reviews. They earned quite a reputation around here and I would bet that something like 90% plus of all people in the NE area are aware of the Phantom Gourmet. They would give the store owners stickers that they could put on their front window saying the "phantom was here" which generally meant that they had received a good review from the Phantom. (Their stickers and the whole look of it all was cool, too. The "phantom" was made to look like the phantom of the opera guy and when they showed him on the show, it would just be his purple arm. They took his anonymity seriously and still to this day, no one ever found out who it was. They made sure to always pay for their own meals, too. So the restaurants didn't even know they were serving a food critic).

And it had real tangible results. Getting a good review from the Phantom would increase a restaurants profile immediately. It was fairly common for people to see a new place favorably reviewed on there and check it out that weekend. I know I personally have been to at least a dozen places I wouldn't have otherwise gone to, just because they were featured on the PG. If you were out walking about, you might choose to check out a place based on nothing but the PG sticker on the front window. And on the other hand, getting a bad score from them could be a death sentence to a restaurant, especially a new one. 

In other words, people trusted and respected The Phantom Gourmet and their judgement. The fact that they gave out plenty of bad reviews made people realize that a good review meant something. It was scarce. A good review from The Phantom Gourmet had real, tangible, intrinsic value.

However, The Phantom Gourmet of today is a shell of itself. They stopped doing the letter grades completely and now the show is basically a two hour commercial. They do full features for a place and have the owner come in and talk all about the food, location, etc. They basically never say a single negative thing about anyone anymore. Ever. I was watching an episode this past weekend and actually got pretty sad at how cheesy and downright bad it was. I don't know if the restaurants actually pay to get on but I wouldn't be surprised. The show is, for all intents and purposed, a two hour long advertisement and pictures of cheesy food. 

So you might be wondering, that's a great little story Poogs, but what does it have to do with economics? Well, my friend, it perfectly encapsulates an economic 'theory' that I've been abstractly thinking about for a few years now. The best way to describe it in one sentence would be this: "anything that has value will have that value extracted from it at some point". Let me explain.

As I stated, the Phantom Gourmet built itself a well earned reputation over the years for being a trusted and honest eatery critic. They did everything right, filled a hole in the marketplace and were rewarded for it. Their reviews had value. And now they're cashing in on that value. No more report card, no more brutal honesty, just gushing, glowing reviews of everyone. They're trading on their old reputation but are not doing the necessary things to keep that reputation. And the results are obvious. It had such a strong reputation for so long that a sticker/endorsement from the PG still means something, I suppose, but not nearly as much as it used to. And a year from now, it will mean even less. Two years from now, even less still. They are extracting value from the PG's reputation and unless they go back to the old format, which they won't, eventually that value will run out.

You can find similar examples everywhere. One that springs to mind is trust in the police here in America. Decades ago, people really did trust the police. Whatever they said was thought to be true, period. They were given the benefit of the doubt. In other words, the word of a police officer had value. So how do you extract that value? You trade it for money or favors. Every time you extract, you damage the reputation, or decrease its value. A cop can lie and get away with it, ONLY because cops were known NOT to lie. However, every single time they do lie, they hurt their reputation and decrease its value. They're cashing in on, or extracting its value.

Another example is peoples trust in the dollar/trust in America in general. For a solid two hundred years, roughly, America had built itself a reputation of a fair, hard working, industry friendly country. We were the 'good guys' and we had a strong dollar, backed by actual gold, to show for it. However, ever since the 70's when we took ourselves off the gold standard, we've basically been slowly extracting value from our reputation. Or, put more precisely, had value extracted FROM us. Now it's really only a matter of time until it runs out.

It's easy to think of inflation as a sort of esoteric, intangible 'thing' that doesn't really effect you. "OK, so maybe the government does print money and just give it out to a select few. How does that effect me?" To answer that, think about exactly what is being done. Someone is printing paper, putting ink on it, and giving it to someone else (actually not even that. These days it's all electronic so all they do is change a line of code to show a 1 instead of a zero on a computer screen). The only reason anyone values that line of code or that piece of paper is because you will get up and go to work tomorrow. Think about it. If Americans weren't as productive as they are, those dollars would mean less. That is your value being extracted. It's robbery just with extra steps. It is literally no different than someone taking money right out of your pocket.

I was talking with a few people a couple weeks ago and the topic of the moon landing came up. Someone asked if I thought we really did land on the moon and I said that I think we did but if it was faked I wouldn't be shocked. But that we basically fake a moon landing every single day. The federal debt, the money printing, the 'housing crisis', the dollar bubble, real inflation being probably 10 times the "official" numbers. That's worse than pretending to land on the moon one time, in my opinion. It effects every single one of us, all the time. The reason housing is so expensive these days has very little to do with actual houses. It really isn't that housing got more expensive, it's more that the dollar/your purchasing power got weaker. Obviously there's more to it than that, including existing homeowners colluding to limit supply. But the main reason that housing, groceries, energy, basically everything is so expensive is largely due to an increase in the money supply, aka inflation. Something to keep in mind as we head into an election year.

Tha'ts about it for today. Check back soon, buy Bitcoin, store it yourself and talk soon!

A Back Of The Envelope BTC Price Prediction

There is certainly no shortage of Bitcoin price predictions to be found. There are seemingly endless data points and different things to look at. Prior price movement, macro environment risks, social risk like twitter mentions and Youtube subscribers. Moving averages, Stock to Flow Ratio, prior ROI's, RSI, MACD, Golden/Death crosses. And that's not even getting into the on-chain stuff which looks at actual transaction on the blockchain, what miners and exchanges are up to. You can do technical analysis for pretty much as long as you want. So I generally don't throw my hat into that ring too much. I love Bitcoin for my own personal reasons, largely dealing with how corrupt and stupid and evil the current system of money printing and its ensuing inflation is. Which is a big, round about way of transferring wealth from people with assets and 'suction to the system' to people without it. Inflation is literally no different than someone reaching into your pocket and taking your money. But it's so embedded into our system that people are just used to it now, which apart from being incredibly evil, is exactly how regimes collapse. 

Because Bitcoin solves this problem (among others), it is incredibly valuable for preserving wealth. The fact that it also can act as a currency is just a bonus in my opinion. You don't see people pay for things in gold bars, yet we all agree gold has value. No one pays for anything with a building, but we all agree that a building has value. Anyway, the dollar value of Bitcoin has gone from $.07 in 2010 to about $70k in 2024. That is a 1,000,000% increase. A one million percent increase in price in roughly 14 years. So I usually think price predictions are largely useless. It's volatile and the swings can be big, but just zoom out and you'll see that all it does is go up. (By the way, volatility in any asset largely is a good thing. It means it's alive. People are using it, buying and selling, trading it back and forth. Don't be afraid of volatility.)

Since we have a nice little surprise snow day here in the Northeast, I have a little time to myself and decided to do some back of the envelope math and come up with my own little price prediction. The metric I'll be using is from Ben Cowens Into The Cryptoverse Premium: BTC Logarithmic Regression Bands. It won't let me share a picture of the chart, but here's a link to a video of him explaining it 2 years ago with the chart up on the screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI1tFhop8Do&ab_channel=BenjaminCowen

So click on that and have it up in a second window as you read this. The green bar on the bottom is fit to thousands of data points and is "non bubble data". The red bar on the top is only fit to a few data points and is fit to "bubble data". The price on the left up and down axis is on a log scale, so it goes from .$01 to $1,000,000, but $1k is the middle. (If you don't already, you should read up and understand log vs linear scales if you want to understand charts like this a better. I know that helped me a bunch). The chart I have is similar to the one in the video except it's up to date and instead of solid green and red bars, there are three green lines and two red lines.  If you look at that chart, you can see that since its inception, Bitcoin spends a good chunk of its life in those green 'accumulation' phases where it still goes up, just slower, and then blasts off until it hits a blow off top somewhere in that upper red band region, or right up against it. You can super zoom in on any portion of it of my chart, so I thought it would be good to know exactly how many days we've spent in the green portions in each cycle.

I measured the days in each cycle starting from where the price entered the green zone and ending when it left the green zone and had a blow off top to the red zone. July 2019 was the only time it left the green zone and came back into it without having that red, blow off top until it left the green zone again in November 2020 and hit the red zone a few months later.

Going back to the very start of Bitcoin puts us at July 7th, 2010 when it came onto the scene squarely in the green zone. It bounced out of it briefly, came back down to the very top of it, then took off to its blow off top of $25 right under the red zone. It was in the green zone from July 7th 2010 to April 12th, 2011. 264 days. 

It came back down into the green zone on November 15th 2011, and then took off towards the middle of the red zone on February 13th, 2013 for a local top of about $800. 455 days in the green.

It stayed hot until March 16th, 2015 when it came back into the green accumulation zone and stayed in it until May 11th, 2017 when it broke out. 786 days.

This time is went all the way to the top of the red zone with a local top of about $17k, then came back into the green zone on November 20th, 2018. It stayed in the green until July 2019 where it poked its head out for about 3 months, then came back into the green. The next time it broke out, November 16 2020, it went to the very bottom of the red range, bouncing off it almost perfectly with a local top of about 55k. The time from when it first entered the green and had its real bounce out to the red 55k was 726 days.

We re-entered the green zone on May 9th, 2022, and we've been in or under it ever since. Right now, April 4th 2024, we are just under the very top of the green zone. So we've been in the green for 696 days so far.

So here are 'our days in the green to a breakout to the red' since Bitcoins inception: 264, 455, 786, 726, 696 plus. Going from 264 to 455 is a 72% move. Going from 455 to 786 is also a 73% move, almost exactly. But then you go from 786 to 726. It goes backwards. Now we're at 696 and counting.

There's a few different ways to look at that. First off, it's only 5 data points so it might not mean anything predictive at all. But if assume for a minute that it is meaningful, the way I see it that we sort of 'leveled off' our time in the green. It had a short period at first and then grew incrementally all the way up to 786 days. Now we might be coming down the other way a bit. I'll be very interested in what this next number comes in at, which we won't know for a while since the price needs to hit or come close to the red area for confirmation. If it ends up being 786, that would be exactly 90 days from today. To me, that feels like the max it could be. I can't imagine we spend more time in the green this cycle than ever before but of course I could be wrong. If we take an average of the four numbers, it would be 558, which was 138 days ago.

Either way, it looks incredibly bullish to me. Like I said in my last post, even though it might feel like we're a little heated right now, we're still very much in the green accumulation zone. And sure there could easily be another pullback, but I think there is no chance we don't get a push to at least close to the red zone this cycle, if not further. 

And now we get to the meat of the matter. What price is the red zone? Right now, the very bottom of the red zone is 190k. If we move it out 90 days, the bottom of the red zone is 200k. So I think we might actually touch 200k this cycle. We've spent just enough time in the green zone, we're almost poking out of it, and except for a couple small instances, every time we leave the green zone we don't stop going up until we hit the red zone (or come extremely close). Even if I'm half right, that puts us at 100k pretty easily. 

So my official low confidence prediction: BTC hits 100k this year and tops out somewhere around 200k in late 2024, early 2025. We'll check back on this post in 6 months and see how I did.

That's it for today. Buy Bitcoin, store it yourself and have a good day!

Active Investing, BTC ETF And Everything Else

 Hello again everyone. Sorry again for the long time in between posts. Quite a bit to get to so let's jump right in. I'm going to take a look at the crypto market a whole with the big ETF news among other things. Some stocks and macro market updates and some other stuff.

Quickly before we get into it though, remember I have a twitter account that you can follow for updates @poogsBLOG. You can also send me a message on there if you want to get in touch with me. 

The NFL season has come and gone and it was just about break even for my own action. Actually down slightly, including props. I know we've been through this before and I've gone back and forth a little bit on throwing in the towel or not. I actually updated my NFL prop models for the playoffs and Superbowl and did OK so I might still put some action in next year. But my big betting days are largely behind me (he said for the 7th time). I am still somewhat involved with a group though so my offer on account sharing still stands if it's really good.

Let's jump into what we're all really here for though and that is a discussion about Bitcoin, crypto in general, where I stand personally, what the market looks like and where I think it's going. First, an update on all my positions: (Today March 29th 2024 current prices are: BTC: $70k, ETH: $3480, LINK: $19, LTC: $105, Matic: $1).

The only crypto's I'm invested in are the aforementioned: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, Litecoin and Matic. Those are in order by my amount owned and how much I like them. My overall average BTC price is $25,500 which, not to flatter myself here, is fairly impressive. I've done a good job selling tops and scooping dips. My average buy price is $28750 and average sell price is $29050 with way too may buys and sells. I'm working on building up to a full coin and have been doing a lot less selling lately. My overall ROI on BTC is 177%.

For Ethereum, my overall average buy price is $1688. My average buy and average sell is almost exactly the same which is bad. I started out doing amazing with trading ETH but I made one big essential error. During the bear market, I thought ETH was for sure going at least sub $1k so I sold off a huge chunk at $1200 and missed the boat on getting back in under $1200. I did of course make a bunch of buys on the way up and having a $1688 average price is nothing to complain about right now, but I essentially sold at the bottom of the market, which, by the way, is not what you want to do. Overall ROI on ETH: 115%.

Next up we have Chainlink. LINK is my little alt-coin side piece. It's the only alt-coin that I truly believe in (as much as you can believe in an alt-coin) and I have done a really good job of holding steady with it and accumulating during the bear market. Thinking back, getting LINK at under $6 all the way up to September 2023 was a literal steal. You can read all about it elsewhere, but Chainlink provides a way to connect real world assets to the blockchain. Think smart contracts with real estate and buying/selling cars as well as live odds and scores. If you've ever bought or sold a piece of property, you know how BRUTAL the process is. So many forms, so many different people and entities involved all with their hand out. It's a big, slow, inefficient, dumb process that was put into place decades ago and seems oh-so ripe to be completely overhauled. Quite similar to taxi's and Ubers IMO. And blockchain technology is perfectly tailored for it. I'm about as close to a Bitcoin maxi as you can be without actually being one, but if there is one alt-coin I can get behind, (excluding ETH) it's Chainlink. Anyway, my overall average price for LINK is $6.55 and my LINK ROI is right about 200% with owning a decent amount.

Rounding out the list we have Litecoin and Matic. I own a tiny amount of LTC with an overall buy price of $44 and 110% ROI. For Matic, my overall buy price is $.812 and 30% ROI. I'm actually looking to mostly get out of my Matic position as I don't really care for the coin. However, I do like Litecoin and have always felt it was a little bit undervalued. Like I said before, LTC is basically a faster Bitcoin. It doesn't have the name value and might just be the single most unsexy alt-coin of all time, but it's a solid, reliable coin and I think it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of exposure to. Although, on the other hand, and I almost made a complete post about this, but when you put it up against BTC it trends mostly down. That's a very, very important piece of the crypto/alt-coin puzzle. Does it bleed against bitcoin? Almost all of them do. On Tradingview you can change the right hand up and down axis to anything. Its default is USD but if you change it to bitcoin, you can look at how anything has done against bitcoin. Tesla and Apple stock, gold, any alt-coin, put them up against bitcoin for pretty much any amount of time. I haven't found anything that beats it. So sometimes I wonder if it would be better to invest in literally nothing but bitcoin. Over the past 10ish years that would have been about as good as you can do. I like being a little bit spread out and I actually, very simply, enjoy the process of investing and trading and having different positions. But it's always in the back of my mind and I think it should be in every investors mind. If it bleeds against bitcoin, and your sole objective is to maximize wealth, what are you doing exactly?

The other thing I like to do with my five crypto's is trade them against each other. If you aren't into trading you can skip this paragraph as we're going to get into the weeds a tiny bit, but if you are then this might interest you. My average price for BUYING Bitcoin and SELLING Ethereum is .0737. My average price for buying ETH and selling BTC is .0662. Right now the current BTC:ETH price is about .0505. So what that means is it would cost you .0505 bitcoin to buy one ETH. Or, put another way, you can buy .0505 bitcoin with one ETH token. Whenever that number trends high, you want to be buying bitcoin and selling ETH. When it's low, you want to be doing the opposite. With my numbers being .0737 and .0662, that means that anytime the current price is between that, I make free money. And if I do it evenly, that is, buy and sell the same amount of BTC and ETH, I'm completely freerolling. I break even when the current number is anywhere outside of that range and I make money when it's in between them. So the goal there is to get as big of a spread as possible. This actually took me a little bit to really understand and I promise it isn't as complicated as it seems. You really need to have a good system of tracking everything to do this right. But if you're an active trader like me it's a no brainer strategy. Right now, at .0505, ETH is pretty "cheap" compared to Bitcoin. So I have been trading tiny amounts of bitcoin for ETH. I actually think it'll continue to drop as bitcoin dominance increases, but I like taking nibbles like this. When/if it bounces back the other way, which it typically does during the second halves of bull markets, I'll sell some ETH back to BTC. I do the same for BTC:LINK and ETH:LINK but it isn't really worth it to post my exact numbers. The system is the same though. Whenever the number is high you want to be buying the bigger asset and when it's low you want to be selling the bigger asset. Again, the goal is to get your spread as wide as possible.

Anyway, my overall ROI so far on all crypto right now is 146% which is obviously quite good. It's very volatile, and lots of people have a lot to say about it, but if you just stick around you are almost guaranteed to be rewarded. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself for not having weak hands and accumulating through the bear market. Maybe not as much as I should have but I at least never panic sold anything. Quite a few people bailed out completely during the bear market which is really the opposite of what you should be doing. Speaking of the bear market... so... that was it, huh? Clearly the bottom is in. And now that I've been solidly in this space for 3 plus full years, I feel like I have a bit of perspective. I came in right at the start of the last bull market, rode it all the way up to the top and right through the bottom. Now it looks like a real, full bull market is headed our way. But let's look back a little bit, shall we?

One thing that sticks out to me when I think about it is this: absolutely no one, and I mean NO ONE, called the bottom. If I'm wrong please show me, but I don't know of one single crypto or investing guy that called $15k as the bottom for BTC. Everyone and their mothers was calling for it to go lower. I think that is a terrific lesson to take away from the past couple years. NO ONE called $69k as the top last cycle, and even less than no one called $15k for the bottom. Even I fell for it a bit with my big ETH sell. And I think it's interesting, if you look back on my blog, you'll see the one and only time I showed even a hint of capitulation was when it was at that $15k bottom. And man, I gotta tell you, I will forever regret not absolutely backing up the truck and accumulating a bunch more at $15k in Nov/Dec 2022. It's all so much easier in hindsight but when you think about it, that really was the big opportunity, maybe the biggest one we'll see in our entire lives. That was only a little more than a year ago and it has essentially 5 x'd from there and feels like it's only going to continue. I didn't panic sell like a lot of people I know, but honestly for the rest of my life I think I will regret not getting to a full coin when it was well within reach and, even more crushing, was kind of all going to plan. 

I think the big lesson to takeaway from what we saw in the crypto markets this past cycle was that, again, NO ONE called the bounce. The closest I can remember anyone coming was my favorite youtube guy, Ben Cowen. He didn't call $15k as the bottom, but he did say that in prior bear markets everyone called for it to go lower, it will bounce back and we'll all look back and wish we had bought more. And he was the most right of anyone I follow. So I think it's important to remember that 'momentum bias' is absolutely a real thing. People always think that whatever the current trend is will continue far longer than it does. I think it's important to have a strategy and stick to it. So many people online and in my little circle completely capitulated and threw in the towel when BTC went under $20k. I didn't really fully grasp this until about a year ago, but apparently the bias in the general noob-investor population is that people tend to pile into an asset when it's on the way up and then panic sell when it starts to fall. Which is the exact opposite of what you want to be doing. I think my sports betting background helped me avoid this, but it is a little perplexing when I see just how fickle people can be. I remember being at a wedding couple years and over hearing someone talking about their experience getting into Dogecoin. Now mind you, this was a complete capital N N00b, but literally all he did was FOMO buy high and panic sell low. Like, over and over, just locking in loss after loss. It was astounding hearing him. Sometimes it's good to remember that these people are in the market with you. Not every single trade is against an algo-hedge-fund and the market isn't anywhere near perfectly efficient.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the big BTC news and definitely the biggest catalyst for the latest bull run: the spot BTC ETF approval. It's been discussed to death at this point and I meant to make a post when it happened, but essentially what this means is that now people (and more likely institutions) can purchase Bitcoin through a broker without having to actually buy and store Bitcoin. It's a way to get exposure to BTC without having to deal with actually buying it. This is obviously HUGE for Bitcoin and the crypto market in general. It finally gives Bitcoin the seal of approval for big time investors and institutions and makes it way more feasible for them to purchase it. It puts on big time buy-side pressure and I think that lightning fast move from $40k to $70k was pretty clearly due to the ETF approval. 

I think it's quite amazing how fast the narrative has changed on Bitcoin. It wasn't that long ago that BTC was considered a joke and some random, silly 'internet money' that people only used to buy drugs and hire hitmen with. Now you have literal countries buying up billions of dollars worth at a time. CNBC has BTC, ETH and Solana price updates on their screen right next to the S&P and the Dow Jones like it's been there the whole time. (By the way, I find it quite interesting how much of a weird institution-y backing Solana seems to have. I always see those three: BTC, ETH and Solana. Feels a bit fishy, honestly. None of what I say is financial advice, but I'd stay away from Solana. Something about it feels very weird and future-rug-pully to me).

Speaking of CNBC, I watch their morning show sometimes in the background when I'm getting ready and they had Gary Gensler on not that long ago talking about BTC and the ETF approval. Gensler is the head of the SEC and has always been anti-crypto (although he won't really come out and admit that). They were talking about Bitcoin and one of the hosts mentioned how it's a ledger that can be used for smart contracts and about the blockchain more broadly, and he said something to effect of "does anyone really want to invest in something just because of the way they set up their books?" Think about that for a second. It's a pretty revealing statement. He CLEARLY does not even remotely understand it, at all. And even more damming, like I say all the time, he doesn't even know that he doesn't understand it. It reminds me of a great little nugget I remember reading a few years ago. There was some kind of investing forum and Paul Krugman was talking. Paul Krugman is an establishment acadmic economist, the kind of guy that will smugly tell you that 'actually you can just print as much money as you want!' He's actually most known for this Nostradamus-esque quote: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." He is, of course, an anti-bitcoin guy and at this forum when someone asked him about it, he said something like "well we already have internet money" and held up his credit card "so I don't know what bitcoin solves exactly". Like, can you imagine someone pretending to be some sort of expert saying that? I think it shows that we're still early. These dinosaurs are all over the financial space, fighting their hardest against crypto. Once they get out and some younger, more BTC friendly guys take their places, we might see even faster and faster adoption. 

Oh and one last thing about the ETF approval. The actual way it was rolled out was hilarious and perfectly on brand for the SEC. Everyone knew it was coming and was just waiting for the official word. A couple days before the actual announcement, the official SEC twitter account tweeted out a statement that the ETF was approved. The BTC price immediately spiked up from $44k to $48k. Then, the SEC posted that they had been hacked and the ETF was NOT approved. THEN, a few days later, they posted that now, in fact, the ETF WAS approved. After they made a fuss about being "hacked" and wanting to go after who ever did it, Elon Musk commented that the SEC twitter account did not even have two factor authentication set up and it wasn't so much of a "hack" as someone in the SEC jumping the gun, most likely. So a complete clown show. Perfectly on brand for the SEC. A member of the SEC penned a really good op-ed that I can't seem to find now about how terrible of a job they did with rolling this out. She said that by dragging the process out and delaying and denying approval over and over, they ended up doing exactly what they tried not to do, which was draw undo focus onto it and make it a circus. The SEC shouldn't be in the business of telling Americans what they can and cannot do with their money. They're supposed to be referees, not commissioners. I thought it was a great showcase at how inept the traditional financial landscape is, how capricious and downright petty it all is.

By the way, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to buy BTC than through an ETF. It quite literally defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. I'm not opposed to the existence of the ETF per se and the brokers are of course actually buying and storing bitcoin "for you", but the whole point of bitcoin is that it is peer to peer, no bank or institution needed. And that's to say nothing about the premium you're going to pay in order to have someone else purchase, store and manage your bitcoin when you could pretty easily do it yourself. But I suppose I'd rather own ETF bitcoin as opposed to no bitcoin at all. But if you're sharp enough to be here, you're certainly sharp enough to buy a cold storage wallet and buy and store it yourself. Also quite interesting: when the official ETF news hit the price actually went down first for a few days. Seemed like a buy the rumor sell the news event until people saw the inflows and the amount of BTC actually being scooped up. And then the price went from 45k to 70k rather quickly. 

I know I'm a little bit all over the place here but let's shift focus a tiny bit and look at the macro environment and where I think the price of BTC is headed. Jay Powell at the Fed recently had a press conference where they announced that they were staying put on the federal funds rate at about 5.25%, which was what everyone pretty much expected. As insidious as the Federal Reserve is, I have to say, Jay Powell has done a decent job. He's been pretty clear about what they're doing and has resisted pressure to cut rates. That means they still have rate cuts in their pocket which is a good thing for markets in general, but especially for more 'risk-on' assets like BTC. I recently starting paying for some premium access tools from Ben Cowen called "Into The Cryptoverse Premium" and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. Namely, right now we're barely above 'fair valuation' for the overall crypto market cap which correlates almost perfectly with bitcoin. In other words, we aren't even remotely overheated right now. In other other words, it looks to me like there is still plenty of room to run for this bull market. Personally, it feels like 100k will be the next big number to claim and I could see this current 60-70k level being the next floor. The next halving is coming up in about 20 days. If you pull up a bitcoin chart and look at the price action for the couple years after a halving it's always basically straight up. And the reason for that is simple and makes perfect sense. The halving refers to the event that happens roughly every four years (or more accurately every 210k blocks mined). The amount of bitcoin that miners receive for mining gets cut in two. So the rate of new supply coming into the market gets halved which makes bitcoin more scarce which drives up the price. Add in a rate cut or two on top of it and it all looks very, very bullish to me. 

People always talk about the 'risk' of investing in Bitcoin but I like to flip that around. What's the risk of NOT investing in Bitcoin? In less than a day, you could open a Robinhood account, schedule weekly deposits and weekly purchases of Bitcoin. Every month or so, transfer to your cold wallet. You barely need to do anything. With rampant inflation, trillions in federal debt, I think it's more risky to not do that than it is to do it. I think there is a hole in the beanie bag chair that is the US dollar. We're printing more money than ever, faster than ever. The federal debt right now is $34.6 TRILLION and just going straight up. In 2008 it was $15 Trillion. So that's over 100% increase in about 15 years. Our debt is 123% of our GDP! It's almost an admission that the dollar is worthless. If there is one simple thing to remember about economics, it is that you cannot violate the basic laws of reality, no matter how many charts you make or how many acronyms you invent. You cannot get more out of something than you put in. You can't take more than you produce and that is exactly what we're doing. Printing money will work for a while but it will not work forever. ALL fiat currencies eventually end up worthless. Literally all of them. It's just a matter of time. Now, is that time horizon 10 years? 50? 100? I really don't know and I don't think anyone else does either. But it will happen someday. And I think Bitcoin is the perfect replacement. So what is the risk of NOT investing at least a small amount in it? Michael Saylor has a fantastic quote you've probably heard before but it's worth repeating. "Everyone will buy Bitcoin at the price they deserve." Worth thinking about.

Wrapping things up here, I heard a great interview the other day that I'd like to share. It was an interview with this guy Aswath Damodaran, a "Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University and is known in the finance industry as the “Dean of Valuation”". He isn't a lifelong professor though obviously and had a bunch of real world experience. He's a real trader.  Here is the link to the full interview.

They were talking about active investing/trading VS just parking your money into an index fund and barely checking. He said something like "assume you're an active trader who reads earnings reports, doing your own valuations, doing the work of active investing. And on your deathbed, someone shows you your portfolio versus someone who just bought an index fund and left it alone. If the returns were similar, how would you feel? If it would bother you, don't be an active investor. Just buy the index fund and leave it alone." I found that quite interesting. Because for me, I actually enjoy it. Investing doesn't feel like work to me and it really wouldn't bother me if someone with an index fund beat me in 50 years. Just something to think about.

I suppose I'll wrap it up here. I still have a book review I want to do as I've been reading a lot of good ones recently. Next post will for sure be sooner than this one was. Until then, stack Bitcoin, store it yourself and have a good day!

WHAT I Bet As Opposed To HOW I Bet

I have always leaned more towards discussing the how's and why's with my betting as opposed to the what's. You can learn a lot more that way and I find it to be much more interesting. However, I was thinking that it might be interesting to go over exactly what I was betting on at various stages of my betting journey. I suspect others probably followed somewhat of a similar path, for a while at least, but I also think that every single sharp bettors history is unique and it could be interesting to read. It isn't something that I can recall ever reading from other sharp bettors, either. One thing I absolutely love about advantage gambling is that there is an almost infinite amount of ways to go about it. The end result, hopefully, is you winning money from a sports book or casino. But the ways to get there are seemingly endless. 

On the low end of the totem pole, you have your bonus hustlers. This is probably the bottom of the barrel as far as advantage gambling goes, but of course the money all spends the same in the end. Bonus chasing (or whoring) was a lot more popular in the old Wild West days when moving money around online was a lot easier. The general idea, pretty obviously, is to open as many accounts at as many different sports books as humanly possible and claim all the available bonuses without losing any money betting (or not losing more than you'll make with bonuses). This is something you should be doing anyways, just kind of in the background with everything else. But for a while you could make a living just grinding break even plays and getting all the bonuses. Nothing sexy about this at all but if it works it works. Personally, this is something I was always terrible at. I've actually probably claimed less than a grand lifetime in bonuses. Playing in PPH land, my version of bonuses, you could say, was getting a percentage off on weekly losses which I did manage to do a couple times. I told that story on here before but I got a guy to give me 20 or 25% (I forget exactly) off of my weekly losses at a super soft, big PPH book which ended up being one my best accounts ever.

Above bonus whoring you've got your runners. These are guys whose only job is to place bets that they're told to place. Again, not very sexy but this involves way more than it seems and is probably a lot harder than it looks. I've never been an official runner but the arraignment I have with different people could loosely be translated into them being runners for me and vice versa.

One step above that you have your steam chasers/board cleaners/arbers. These are guys who don't know or care anything about the teams they're betting on, just focusing on the market and trying to bet numbers right before they move. What they're actually doing is indirectly following syndicates action. If a big bet from a respected guy comes in on Team A at -3 and the whole market moves to -4, they try to get -3 at a slow moving book. Some guys will then bet the other side and lock in some small free money (arbing) or a profitable middle. This is something everyone at this level or below should absolutely be doing, again sort of in the background of whatever else you're doing. This is also a lot harder than you'd think and books hate steam chasers so expect to get the boot if you do this successfully. 

One step above that, in my opinion, would be handicapping small market stuff like props and exotics. Now we're starting to get into what most people would consider 'real sports betting.' This is compiling data, making models, staying up to date on injuries and rule changes, etc. This is where we start to separate the men from the boys a little bit. I think if you have a working, profitable up to date model in excel or whatever else people are using these days, then you can be on your way to doing this for a living. The other lower things, steam chasing, bonus hunting, betting off market numbers, those are all fine but it'll be hard to make an actual living. It's certainly possible and there are some legit guys out there doing it, but I think it would be pretty tough to make more than something like 50k a year doing it. Once you start modeling though your earn potential goes way up. 

Now at the final step, the boss level, we have guys who handicap major markets. This is exactly what it sounds like. These guys are looking to get something like 2% return on their money and get in tons of volume. Here we have the syndicates; big actual businesses with dozens (or more) employees and split up duties. These are the guys who move the market around. Your Billy Walters, Harabaloloblbol Voulgarious (I refuse to look up his name since he's such a baby online) and others. I don't really have much to add on this since this is one level above as far as I ever got. If you really can beat major markets, congrats. You made it to the top!

Another angle is future betting. I've heard of guys who specialize in future betting and attack it almost like the stock market. It makes sense since books don't give much thought to futures since people rarely bet them. You're tying up money/credit for a long time, usually, and the chance you get stiffed goes way up, especially for PPH bettors. I almost always regretted any big futures I put in and haven't put in a futures bet in years.

Anyway, that's a very brief overview of the general kinds of ways to beat sports. It isn't complete by any means and within each group, there are hundreds of different 'sub-genres' I would say. For instance, steam chasers might find a slow moving brick and mortar book in Las Vegas and actually just physically sit there all day waiting to bet on something moving. Others want to cover the entire market online. With capping, you have some guys that super specialize in one thing and just hammer that forever. Maybe a guy who kills baseball and takes the entire winter off. Or on the other end of the spectrum, you have guys that specialize in not specializing in anything and can do a little bit of everything 24/7, 365 days a year.

When I first started, the first thing I did was pick up all the low hanging fruit around me. And there was a lot. I had guys who took action over the phone and the trick there was to get them to send you their lines as early as possible. I'd have guys send me NFL lines at the beginning of the week and not change them! I had a guy dealing NHL totals at -110 a side when they should be -220 or worse. Guys would put the Patriots line at like a full two points worse than market. That kind of stuff got me going but as you would expect, dried up quick.

That was when I entered PPH land. I would get all these different accounts from local bookies and that was the start of me sort of developing my own 'style'. My style, I would say, was that I was definitely more of the jack of all trades, master of none kind. Instead of knowing what I wanted to bet on and finding accounts that match that, which would be totally fine by the way, I would try to get as many accounts as possible and see what they have to offer. Let the market come to me, so to speak.

Once I learned about market theory and how important beating the closing line is, I was mostly on the lookout for slow moving books or books where the bookie would manually adjust his lines. So I would be mostly just betting off-market straight bets. Then I started learning about props and added that to my arsenal. A big step forward came in my career when I learned about correlated parlays (CP's). Early on I got a couple different skins that had virtually no parlay restrictions, so I was hammering away at them. So so far we've got steam chasing/betting off market straights, doing 'off-market props' and then capping my own props, and now CP's. Oh and off market team totals, too.

Every year it seemed like I would stumble into something new. I eventually learned about Wong Teasers and added those to my arsenal. One year, I remember getting a book that had shockingly off-market second half NBA spreads. I think they were actually trying to do it themselves. They would literally be like 7 points off market. I had a big roll then and it was a huge account that I was max betting and crushing. I probably ran a little good, too. That was honestly like hitting the lottery for a while. Political betting was always in the background but I kicked that into high gear around 2016 and even moreso in 2020 when I started this bad boy.

I've also been working with one guy in particular pretty much from the start. And he has access to a group of books that for whatever reason, let you buy through the NFL 7 for only 10 cents. So anytime a game is lined at -6 to -8, I usually can buy through the 7 profitably. You combine that with Wong Teasers, and you have a deadly combination. (Or so you'd think, right? I can play Wongs at -110 which I know isnt great but it's still profitable. And I can even hedge with +EV plays. Yet I'm barely up with this combo over a solid couple of years. It's confusing).

At my zenith when I was really crushing and doing this full time, I did all of the above in some capacity. I was always looking for off market straights/steam chasing and arbs. Sometimes I would arb out completely, sometimes I'd go for a clean middle and sometimes I'd leave it naked. I was always looking for off market team totals which PPH's love offering for some reason (honestly, who else besides sharps is max betting team totals? Kind of surprising they even offer them sometimes). Then once I had my prop models that was another step up and a whole different challenge. You have to stay plugged in all the time to handicap successfully. This is, again, where I think you start getting into full time, career money stuff. And I'm always, always on the lookout for CP's. When I get a new accounts it's the first thing I check for.

So that's a pretty good rundown of the stuff I actually bet on. Just a quick little post, something I was thinking about the other day. Check back soon, I have a lot of crypto stuff and some book reviews. I've been reading some really good gambling books lately. I have an idea for a 'definitive list of gambling books' post that I think will be good.

Bye for now!