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!

An Inside Look At One Of My Models

 The one thing I've never really talked about with regards to my sports betting journey is the nuts and bolts of my models, for pretty obvious reasons. I've always treated them like state secrets and it seems like just about every other sports bettor I know who models is the same way. I've been in a couple different big betting groups in one way or another, and that is one topic that is just off limits. I remember one time during a night out at Foxwoods I asked someone in my group a very basic question about what kind of data they use and it was like the most serious I've ever seen the guy in over a decade. He said something like "I can't tell you a single thing about it, ever" and that was the last time it was ever brought up. And it's understandable, of course. A good model that beats major markets can be worth millions of dollars, if not more. So obviously you'd want to keep it a secret as much as possible.

But I've been thinking, as my career in sports betting is mostly behind me (the modeling aspect at least), I don't really have anything to lose by sharing it. And it isn't super advanced whatsoever and everything in it can be found online. Oh, and by the way, the model I'll be sharing hasn't even won in like a full years worth of sample. I still refuse to believe that it's unprofitable. Just with the amount of time and work I've put into it and how soft these lines generally are, I simply refuse to believe it's a loser. But the numbers don't lie and I don't trust it enough to use it anymore. So I don't think anyone can just take this and start making money. However, there is always something to learn when you read about other people modeling. I've learned that everyone approaches modeling quite differently. They might use the same general stats and end up at the same place, but there are countless ways to model sports. 

I've always been more of the granular sort. I like cutting edge stats, I want the most recent data and I try to stay up to date on any and all lineup/injury changes (TRY being the operative word there). I'm looking for increases or decreases in velocity in a pithcers last start. A hockey player running bad with getting his shots blocked or a reciever suddenly getting a higher percentages of throws. Others take a more 'thousand feet up' approach. I remember reading "Trading Bases" by Joe Peta which was a super interesting book and a great look into his model. He was a stock guy who got hit by a car and had to spend a year or something in bed. And so he took up trying to beat baseball. He made this model that graded every team in terms of expected winning percentage just based on their runs scored and runs given up, and would place bets all season accordingly. He just updated the model as games ended. (At least this is what I remember of it. There may have been more to it but the general idea is right). He didn't know who was the starting pitcher, who was out that day, etc. And he crushed it. I just finished reading Billy Walters new book (which is great by the way and I'll talk about it more later) and he somewhat goes into his models. I'll probably make a seperate post about it and a couple other books I've read recently, but he makes power ratings for every team and bets when he has an edge over the posted line. He actually has a power rating for every PLAYER. His edge seems to come from superior info. He said something like "everyone knows who's injured, but not everyone knows HOW injured they are".

I started modeling props after reading "Attacking Las Vegas" by Justin7. He gives some really simple and easy examples for modeling NFL player props and I just took the logic from them and applied it to different things. He also taught me about the Poisson distribution in that book which is like a literal cheat code for pricing props. I first started with pen and paper and all I did really was normalize their number for the opponent. So for example, if a QB averaged 200 yards per game, I would just take 200, divide by the league average yards given up by defenses, then multiply that by what the opponent gives up. And I basically made a living doing that for a few years. Obviously it was more due to the lines being super soft, but that really is all it took for a while. Like I said before, once DFS came onto the scene, the prop party dried up, for me at least. It coincided with me getting married and more into my real job so it all worked out. 

Once I learned excel, that was like a whole different ballgame. It really is amazing the stuff you can do in excel. I made models for props in all four major sports and have multiple models for a few different sports. The one I'll be talking about today is the one I made for MLB starting pitcher strikeouts.

When I first started betting this prop, it really was as easy as taking the pitchers average K's per start, normalizing for the opponent and betting when it was way off (you can use poisson for this, kind of, but I usually wouldn't bet anything that wasn't obviously off). But as thing progressed and I moved everything into excel, I began thinking about it differently and slowly developed what I think was a pretty neat little model that won me plenty of money for years until it basically became obsolete a couple years ago.

Whenever I start with a model, I always try to think of it like an alien would. Like someone who's never seen or heard of the sport before. What is it that I'm trying to do here; come up with an expected number of strikeouts for a starting pitcher. Ok, what is a strikeout, exactly. What are the events that lead up to that. What stats do I know I need. Number one, the pitchers expected K rate. Aka, the percentage chance that each at bat ends in a strikeout. I need to know for how long the pitcher is going to stay in the game. Do I use balls thrown? Innings pitched? I need to know the K rate of the opponent and the K rate of the average team. 

The biggest part of this model, the most 'artsy' I would say, is coming up with the expected K%. My first instinct would be to simply use the pitchers career or current season K% (or some combo), and that's probably ok. But I did a ton of reading about baseball analytics back then and I found out that the best predictor of strikeouts wasn't actually past strikeouts, but swinging strike percentage, which is the percent of pitches that end in the batter swinging and missing. The general logic is that getting a swing and miss is the best possible outcome for a single pitch, and the best 'message' that the hitter is overmatched. More swinging strikes=more strikeouts. 

Another good predictor of strikeouts is raw Contact %. I also found the best fit for Contact% to K% and would use a mix of those two to come up with K%. If I had the time, I'd also look at his last few starts and at pitch usage and velocity. Velocity is huge and also a really good predictor of an injury.

At a certain point, raw K% is better to use than SWS% and Contact%, but early in the season and with new pitchers, SWS% can be deadly. You'll see all kind of pitchers who are either running good or running bad with it early and it's a great stat to use. (Interesting aside: there are a few pitchers who seemed to be able to outperform their SWS% for their entire career. Aaron Nola was one of them. I always used to try to see him pitch to see what it was exactly that he was doing different but I never really could find it. It was somewhat surprising how useless called strikes were for predicting strikeouts.)

Anyway, I would get the pitchers SWS% and Contact%, but then you have to turn that into K%. I read a bunch of fangraphs articles back then, and one of them gave the average number for SWS% into K%. I'm not going to give it here but you can find it pretty easily if you wanted to. I also kept a list in excel, every time I priced a pitcher I would put in his SWS% and K% for his past 4 years and keep the list going all the time so I had my own updated number. It was always very close to the fangraphs number anyway. I did the same for Contact% (which isn't as important as SWS%).

This was the part of the model that I was always tinkering with. Some pitchers would be way out or underperforming their expected K% all year, and you'd start to wonder if it was luck or a skill. That relationship between SWS% and K% and to a lesser extent Contact% and K% was an elusive one and I don't think I ever really quite nailed it down.

But anyway, now that I had the pitchers expected K%, the rest was pretty easy, honestly. First, you need the expected K% for the average opponent. I had four separate numbers; AL vs R, AL vs L, NL vs R, and NL vs L. I would update these numbers every week at least. Then you take the opponent K% (side note: you can drill down into anything as far as you want. For example, for a while I was taking the days posted lineup and using their K% instead of taking a team stat. My thinking was this would be more accurate, obviously. But everything you do takes time. And I've always lived by Justin7's credo: do lots of props quickly. So I eventually stopped doing this). 

You normalize the pitchers K% with the opponent, and now you have the true expected K% for that pitcher for that day. (Again, we're obviously approximating here and I'm sure a true 'data scientist' would find some glaring errors in the way I do things. But they were good enough to win for a while, and again, you can spend more time and get more accurate on any number there is.) Now that you have the K%, you need to get a number for how long he's going to be in the game. Or, more accurately, how many batters he's going to face. (This was a slight mis-step for me at first. I kept trying to come up with a number for innings pitched and then even percentage of game pitched for a reason I can't explain now. Batters faced is very clearly the number you're looking for). For this, I just took the median number that he had faced that season with a mix of total batters faced per start. This had a little bit of a fudge factor to it as I would consider the opponent and his last few starts and then just adjust it manually which probably isn't great. 

So now you have the SP expected K% and the total batters he's expected to face. You multiply those and you have expected strikeouts. I did an ump adjustment as well later on.

Now you just compare your number with the books number. I'm actually not sure if you can use poisson for this. The conditions for poisson are that the event has to be very rare and not have the rate change over time, which isn't really true for this. But I usually didn't need to use poisson. I'd get something like 5.323 and see 6.5 even on the under. You don't need poisson to know that's a bet.

Like I said before, this model, in all its iterations, did very well for lots of years. I guess it's similar to the rest of my models, it's certainly nothing ground breaking but I like to think it has a certain elegant simplicity. There are other things I've tinkered with on it; tried to factor in called strikes more, I tried to copy and paste an equation I got from baseball reference. Which, by the way, never works. I once tried out a 'model' that was straight from fangraphs for expected home runs. It was showing big edges but it never worked. And some guy from football outsiders tried to go tout a while ago and did terrible and was a big baby about it. For some reason, the stat guys don't always translate directly to the betting world even though everyone uses their numbers to make bets. It really is a different skill set.

Anyways, that's it for today. I have some things to talk about it so check back soon.

What Buying Picks From An Actual Winning Service Looks Like And More On NFL/Teasers

My last post was heavy on NFL teasers and my process for finding them. I think I covered it pretty extensively and I really can't stand when people post their picks and results AFTER the game has already happened. So we won't be doing that here. My results for the bets in my last post were decent but nothing special. Going into yesterday I had a ton of teasers that I started to make a post about but eventually bailed on. I just don't think it's all that interesting and there isn't a ton to learn from. The basic rules are always the same: never pay more than -110 for 6 point 2 teamers, always capture the 7 and the 3, and don't do them for college football. That is one thing I forgot. These only work for the NFL due to the fact that college kickers miss the extra point and teams do other goofy shit too often to make the 7 and 3 as valuable as they are in the NFL. Honestly, that's kind of it with teasers. They're a simple, automatic plug and play bet that have been profitable year after year. It always confused me as to why more people don't play these. I guess if you bet on the NFL and aren't at least dabbling in these, I don't know what else to say. If you are, then there isn't much more I can tell you that I haven't already. Look for rouge +1.5's and -8.5's when the market has them as a point or half point worse and, again, never pay more than -110. 

I had a very good teaser week this week and have a ton of NYG +7.5 going into tonight. So I'll hedge with some Sea -7.5 +237 as well as some Sea -1.5 -110, Sea -6.5 +175. Blah blah blah. We've been down this road. The reason for this post today is to discuss another topic I'm pretty knowledgable about on: buying picks. If I could convey just ONE overall message to my sports betting friends on here it would be this: do NOT pay for picks. Paying for picks is probably the single worst mistake you can make while betting. I truly do not understand the impulse for it either, but it is pervasive. Squares LOVE buying picks! I had a conversation once with someone online who genuinely thought that the only way to win was to buy picks and it was all about finding and riding the right guys. I cannot overstate this enough: paying for picks is the quickest possible way to lose money at sports. No one who wins sells picks and no one who sells picks wins. With ONE exception that we'll get into now.

I've talked about them before on here a few times, but there is one tout that is undeniably a winning service and has been for as long as I can remember, at least 15 years. They're called Right Angle Sports, or RAS for short. Back when I was doing this full time, I did my due diligence into them and found out that they were for sure legit. They track their plays against the closing line and only release widely available lines (a nasty little trick the 'smarter' touts try to pull. They release a play at a number that doesn't even exist. For example, say the market has Team X -7 -110 and it gets bet up to -7.5 -110 everywhere. The tout will release the play at -7 -110. Effectively going back in time. Everyone could beat sports betting with a time machine, even if it only goes back 5 minutes).

Anyway, I deduced that RAS was in fact a winning service and everything about them was very different from any other tout I've come across. The only mark against RAS was that their plays are almost impossible to get down on because the market moves so fast once they release something. There was also some rumors about them front running their clients, aka give out their plays to certain people a couple seconds before the official release. But even their harshest critics had to admit that they were legit, long-term winners.

Sometime around 2014, I bought a half season of WNBA plays from them for something like $1200. They're marketed towards professionals as you need to be betting at least $1k a play to make the price worth it. My experience dealing with them for that WNBA half season was unremarkable. I think I won enough to show a profit even after the $1200, but I really did it as more of a fact finding mission above all else. This was a long time ago when they were still figuring out the best way to release their plays so that everyone got a chance to get it before the market moved. I remember almost always getting a half point or 5 cents of juice worse than their official release, only because the market would move so fast and so much. If they can push an NFL side around, imagine what they can do to a WNBA total. One interesting little nugget I found out doing this though was that they were for sure front running at least a little bit. Back then they did something like a countdown to the official release. And I remember sitting there waiting for the release and after a while I noticed that two books moved on what was their official plays a good 10 seconds or so before the release. Always the same books, (I can't remember which books they were but it was something like bet365. Not one of the big guys but not a Bodog or SIA either) always the same exact time and they always were the RAS plays. So someone was definitely getting the plays before the official release, most likely someone working at the books if I had to guess. Once I figured that out though, it was easier to get down on their plays. 

I never re-upped with them as I found it too much of a headache to be worth it. I also wasn't really betting big enough to justify the high cost of the service and max betting the WNBA will get you noticed and kicked out pretty quick. However, I still always get their emails and stay on top of what they're up to from a distance. Two weeks ago I got an email saying they were giving out a free NFL play (something they do a few times a year to get more customers) and I decided to check it out. This is how it went for, again, a FREE play.

They send out an alert about an hour beforehand, saying they will be giving out a free NFL play at 11:00 AM EST. Once 11:00 comes, you click on a youtube click and it's a live video of a guy in front of his computer. They give out what they call 'a set up' which is an unofficial play. You are supposed to get the play all ready to go on your end so that all you need to do is hit confirm to put the bet in. Then they wait 30 seconds or so and then say either GO or STOP. Oftentimes, they'll give out fake plays (or a couple of fake plays in a row) for the 'set up' and then say STOP and you don't bet it. This is to stop people from betting too early and moving the market. For my example, the play the released was under 19.5 in a first half NFL game which was very much widely available. They had it as a set up for probably 30 seconds and finally said GO on the video and BAM. The market moved INSTANTLY and closed way under 19.5 (and won by a good margin, too. It was a Green Bay game either week 1 or 2. I could find out if anyone is interested).

Now remember, this was a FREE play on an NFL game, no less. The sport with the biggest, most efficient market there is. I say all this to show you how valuable a winning services' plays are, how hard they are to get down on and how much effort goes into just simply the release. A huge chunk of RAS's whole thing is the method of releasing plays, something they've tinkered with for at least a decade. If the service you use won, it would be respected by the market and their releases would look something like this. All the touts I've ever seen besides RAS do absolutely nothing like this with their releases. I've seen touts release plays with no odds!! And people who have been betting for decades following it! It SHOULD be hard to get down on the number that a winning service gets out. If it's not, that means the market doesn't respect them. And if the market doesn't respect them, they're not a winner. It really is that simple.

Anyways, that's about it for this topic. I've harped on it multiple times. Looking forward, there are a few good looking teasers for this up coming week. NYG tonight is decent but I see some action coming in on SEA, pushing it from -1.5 to -2.5 (I wonder if sharps hedging their NYG teasers had any effect on the line move?) Right now Pinnacle has the Ten/Ind game lined at Ind -1 -117 which looks like a classic 'teaser defense line'. Look to see if your book has Ind +1.5 and maybe get in light on them with a teaser. Same thing with Hou/Atl, which is currently Atl -1 -110. Again, look for Hou +1.5 to tease. New Orleans is a flat +1.5 everywhere, same with the Jets. Pinnacle is putting up two MORE 'teaser defense' lines too with Car/Det and GB/LV. Pinny has Det at -10 +107 right now which is exactly what I was talking about with looking ahead for rouge teaserable lines. If you can find Det at -8.5, that's a great leg to start building up a position. Same with LV. Right now Pinnacle is at GB -1 -123 instead of putting up a flat 2.5. Lots of books have LV at +2 or +2.5 right now and that's a great one to include. Its the Monday night game too so you can put that in a lot of different small teasers and hedge with GB come Monday night if they're still alive.

Check back soon, I'll have a crypto and stocks post coming and I'll try to do more frequent, smaller posts like this during the NFL season. Bye for now!

NFL Betting Primer, A Look At My Process And Bets For Week 2 And Crypto Update

Well hello again. Another long time in between posts. The main reason being I actually had my first child a month ago. So I'm officially a Dad which is pretty sweet. The other reason being that I have an idea for a post that would be fairly shocking. It has absolutely nothing to do with sports or investing and would be pretty out there. I'm not sure if I want to post it or not, honestly. A few too many 'in real life' people know about this blog but we'll see.

Before I get into what I want to talk about today, I have some other good news. BlockFi released client Wallet funds! If you've been following along with me, you know that I got caught up in the BlockFi debacle and had pretty close to half my entire crypto holdings on there. Finally, after over a year, they let people withdraw funds from their Wallet accounts. They say it'll take a while, up to 3 months, and I haven't actually received the funds into my own wallet yet so we are not 100% in the clear here yet. But assuming it all goes through, this is of course terrific news for me, everyone who had a BlockFi account and for the crypto industry in general. I'll have a complete crypto update soon, but it puts my average BTC price from $48k all the way down to $22k, which is awesome. ETH goes from $5k to $1600 and LINK goes from $10 to $8. I still have some tied up in my Interest Account on there but luckily not too much. It looks like we'll be getting some of that back too. I'm hearing 50%. Again, I'll have a complete update on all my positions soon, but this is a very nice development. (By the way, if the BlockFi thing didn't happen, my average BTC price would be about $18k. I started buying in 2021 when the price was close to $40k. So that is pretty damn good and it shows I definitely have skill in this as a trader. That's almost 3 full years of sample size, too.) But like I said, check back soon and I'll have a much more complete update on everything crypto.

Let us get into the reason for the season though. NFL has begun! A happy time in all sports bettors lives. I'm going to show my bets for this upcoming week so far as well as my thought process. If you're here for crypto stuff, this probably won't bet your favorite post and you might want to check out the next one. However, if you're here for that sweet sports betting content, buddy, buckle in, because we are going for a ride.

For the past few years, my prop action has pretty much shriveled up. I've gone into why but basically I finally ran out of super soft places to bet at, plus I don't have the time or will that it takes to dedicate to it if you want to beat props full time. But what I have been doing for NFL is playing Wong teasers and picking off off-market lines (plus team totals but I don't usually do those until right before game time so I doubt I'll show them here).

The general rule of thumb with Wong teasers is that you want to be betting into an efficient market, so the standard advice is to put them in as close to game time as possible. However, I like to start putting them in early in the week but being VERY selective and using a little bit of handicapping. Plus, having access to a multitude of accounts is huge too. So here's a look at what I have going on this week, why I bet the ones I did and what to look for when you're doing these.

Real quick refresher on Wong teasers: Wong teasers are teasers where you 'capture' enough winning probability that you make them profitable. The big thing here is to move through key numbers, aka the 3 and 7. You want to tease favorites of -7.5 to -8.5 down to -1.5 and -2.5. You go through, or 'capture' the 7 and 3. You can do the same thing with underdogs of +1.5 to +2.5, teasing them up to 7.5, 8 or 8.5. There's endless information out there about these and I did a pretty in depth look at them in a post a while ago. They're a simple, plug and play bet you can make that has been profitable every year since they came around and it always shocks me that more people don't play these. I know people that have been betting on the NFL for more than two decades that have never heard of them. In the digital age, I honestly don't even know how that's even possible, but a lot of things about a lot of sports bettors shock me.

So what I like to do is only play Wongs when they're absolutely perfect. I look at early lines and try to find a rouge line that falls into Wong range. For instance, a game that the market has as a PK or -1, I'll look for someone that has -1.5 and pounce hard on the underdog. Same for favorites. You'll often see games that are lined at 9 or even 9.5 and I'll look for rouge lines or quick line movements that will have the favorite dip to -8.5. When that happens you can snipe the favorite and tease it down to -2.5 so that you capture the 3. Getting that whole 3 is important. You can't tease a -9 favorite to -3. Since so many games are won by exactly 3 points, you have to capture the whole 3.

That's exactly what I did this week. There are actually quite a few of these examples this week so this is a perfect time to delve into them. The first game I attacked was Ind/Hou. This game opened as roughly a PK (pick em which means no spread, aka the teams are evenly matched). I love games like this because if you play them well enough, sometimes you can actually get both sides. I saw everywhere had either a heavy PK or Ind -1 with -115ish juice (a lot of sharper books will do this. They make a game something like -1 -130 instead of an even 2 or 2.5 for this exact reason. Think of it as 'teaser defense'). One of my accounts had Ind -1.5 so I fired a bunch of Hou teasers from +1.5 to +7.5. As the week went on, money came in on Hou so the line drifted through the 0 went all the way to Hou -1.5, -2 in some places. This is what I like to call the Holy Grail of Wongs. I bet more than I wanted to have at risk on the Hou teasers, knowing I would middle/arb it out later. But now with Ind being Wongable, I was able to put in a bunch of Ind +7.5 teasers. So now I have a great position of having both teams getting 7.5 points. If the game is decided by less than a touchdown, I win both legs. I can't possibly lose both and have a really good chance of winning both. So this matchup worked out great, no matter what ends up happening.

The other matchup that was similar was GB/Atl. This opened mostly with GB -1 and one of my accounts had GB -1.5. So I did the same, fired a bunch of Atl +7.5 teasers, knowing I could arb out with GB bets later on. Well as luck would have it, the line moved towards Atl and I was able to get in on GB +1.5 teased to +7.5. Just like the Ind/Hou matchup, I have both Atl and GB getting 7.5 points. Can't possibly lose both bets and have a good chance of winning both.

I did the same thing with the LV/Buf matchup. That's been at 9 for most of the week but I was able to find Buf at -8.5 at a couple places. So I teased Buf down to -2.5. (This has mostly settled at -8, which is fine. As long as it doesn't cross the 7 I'm in good shape).

But if you're following along here you might have a question. What do you tease them with? Well good question. I've refined my approach to this a little bit over the years. Now I very rarely tease two teams that are playing at the same time. The reason being is that it's hard to hedge teasers like this. So I like to tease 1:00 games with 4:00 or later games. That way I know before the 4:00 games start which legs are still alive which ones aren't. It just so happened that there is a perfect game in the afternoon slate that was great to pair these up with. NYJ/Dal has been at an even 9 and even 9.5 all week. I was able to find Dal -8.5 at a couple of my books and that was perfect to tease down to -2.5. So my plan is that going into the 4:00 slate, if my 1:00 teasers are still live, I can hedge the Dallas bets and either go for the big middle and bet NYJ +9/9.5 (maybe even buy through the 10 and get +10.5), or lock up some money and go with the heart-attack arb by betting Jets ML (if Dallas wins by 1 or 2 I lose everything which has happened to me before. I usually do a little of both).

The other Wongable legs that I have involved are SF teased from -8 to -2 (this one actually went a little bit away from me, as SF went from -8.5 to -7ish). I have some on the Pats too, teasing from +2.5 to +8.5. This one went away from me a little bit too, as it is now mostly Pats +3. I have some on Pit too, going from +2.5 to +8.5.

The only other teasers I sometimes do that aren't true Wongs are sometimes I'll tease teams from -3 to +3.5. I look for games that are lined at +-3.5 and look for a book that puts up a heavy 3 instead of 3.5. Sometimes books will put up something like -3 -130 instead of -3.5 -105. I'm already getting a free half point right there, and I do a 6 point teaser and then buy half a point. So I get what should be a 3.5 favorite and get them at +3.5. Honestly I'm not even sure these are profitable as you're buying a lot of useless points (two 2's, the zero and two 1's. But you do get both 3's so it's at least close.) I do them rarely, only if it's perfect. For example, this week I teased Cinci from -3 to +3.5 and KC from -3 to +3.5. Neither for big money at all and usually I only do these if I have a really good leg already that I need to pair with and there aren't any other Wongable games. Also sometimes books have limits on how much can be teased on one team, regardless of bet size. That's one way to kind of get around that.

It's very important to get creative when hedging/middling these. Look at all options, including alt spreads. A little hack I've found that I don't mind burying in here for you if you've read this far: look at alternate spreads on games that have had a lot of movement on the main spread. Sometimes books forget to adjust these lines after they move the main line. (First half alt spreads are juicy too sometimes).

One thing to mention here I've said before but is very important; you have to be getting these two team, 6 point teasers at -110 or better. Anything worse than that is a non-starter. 3 teamers at +180 or better is actually better than two teamers at -110, but those are hard to find these days.

One other fun little teaser nugget. There was a pretty famous/infamous sports book back in the day called 5dimes. I think they're still around actually but for a while they were pretty notorious. They had a WHACKY owner, this guy called '5 dimes Tony'. He was famous for actually getting into the chats himself and losing it on sharps lol. I actually had a conversation with him before when they kicked me out that I remember him just being unhinged. Like, typing in all caps and swearing a bunch. They were known as a square book that tried to act like a sharp book and even had dual line sets, one for sharps and one for squares, which is super illegal at places where betting is legal. But they were messy. They used to misgrade prop bets all the time. They had really soft props though and would let you buy and sell tons of points and all kinds of unique offerings that you could take advantage of if you knew what you were doing. They were quick to ban though and that's sort of how this guy Tony got a reputation. Fun fact and I swear I'm not making this up; 5dimes Tony was fucking decapitated. And I don't mean in some sort of 'he lost a lot of money' way. I mean, they found this guys HEADLESS body in the trunk of a car in Costa Rica. Yea. You can read about it here. Pretty insane stuff. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that 5dimes used to do this pretty clever thing where they would put up lines that would actually trick people INTO playing wongs. What they would do is take an NFL game that has a market line of say -6 -110, +6 -110. 5Dimes would instead make it something like +7.5 -170, -7.5 +150. To a noob, this LOOKS like a Wongable teaser. After all, it's a favorite of 7.5 which falls into Wong territory. However, all you're really doing is paying for points that don't exist. You're paying to cross the 7 on a team that is really a 6 point favorite. I used to think that was pretty clever and kind of funny, actually. Very on brand for them. That and the fact that Pinnacle will often line games at -1 -130 instead of -2, or -9 +110 instead of -7.5 in an effort to thwart Wong teasers shows that these bets are profitable. When the biggest guys on the block are reacting to them, you know there's something there.

Anyway, that's what I have going on this week. I'll put in some team totals on Sunday and refine my positions so that I can't get hurt too badly no matter what. I used to always go for big middles instead of taking the free money but I've changed my stance on that. I have set up so many juicy middles that just did not hit, week after week, year after year, that now I mostly just take the free arb money and move on. So say I'm heavy on Team X +7.5 in the last leg of a teaser. I used to always bet the opponent at -1.5 and try to hit the middle but I had so many gut wrenching games that didn't hit that usually now I'll just bet the opponent at -7.5 at something like +220 odds and lock up money on either side. Having access to Pinnacle's lines is a must for doing this.

That's it for now, just a quick little NFL post. I will have more to come soon, probably Sunday if I add more and/or Monday where I'll wrap up how these went. Thanks for reading and don't forget about my twitter account to follow for new posts. @poogsBLOG

Bye for now!

Twitter account for updates

Hello. Just a quick update to say that I have an official Twitter account that will serve as a way to update you guys on new posts and maybe some more stuff as we grow. I'm working on a new post now which should be out in the next couple of days.

So if you're interested, please follow me here:  @poogsBLOG 

My name there is SBwithPOOGS but I'll probably change that. I'm doing a little bit of a "re-brand" here as the sports betting stuff will probably be a little less and it will be more crypto and stocks/investing. But of course sports betting will always have a piece of my heart so I'll never fully abandon it. Actually the post I'm working on now has some sports stuff in it.

So give that twitter account a follow if you will. Even if you don't have twitter, you can still just go to twitter.com and check it out. Anytime I have a new post I will send out a tweet. This is in lieu of the email list.

Thank you and check back soon!

@poogsblog

Reflections Part II, Plus Crypto and Stocks

For some reason I always find myself feeling a little rushed when I write these. I have no idea why, I think it starts to feel like I'm droning on and on and no one wants to read something super long, but when I go back and read it a couple days later they really don't seem that long at all. If anything, probably too short. I thought of a few things I wanted to add to my last post but more importantly I wanted to do a long overdue crypto and stonks look around, plus some more random stuff.

To finish up a few things I was talking about last time, I don't think I really got across how much poker and more so sports betting really changed and sharpened who I am as I person. People tend to think of poker players and gamblers as shady, shifty, con-men liars who you could never trust. And if your only sample is 20-something year old "pro" live poker players, you might be right. (Honestly, SOME live poker pros do tend to be pretty scummy). But real, actual professional gamblers are some of the most trustworthy and dependable people I've ever come across. You have to not only talk the talk, which is easy, but you have to walk the walk too. It's really easy to call yourself a principled person and say you'd never do anything shady or steal from someone if you never have the chance to. It's like that famous quote, "men are as faithful as their options." Fat slobs in their 50's will say that they're loyal to their wives and would never cheat on them but that's easy when no women on the planet are looking for you. It's easy to THINK you're principled but how often are you tested? What does it even mean to be principled? These are the kinds of things that I don't think I really would have thought that much about if I didn't get seriously into advantage gambling. I certainly wouldn't have as early as I did, which was in my low 20's. The idea that you will simply do what you said you'll do, 100%, no matter what, is powerful. I think the default setting for most people is simply looking to avoid conflict at all times, and I think that's a big reason why our country is in the middle of falling apart. Somewhere around 2000 I feel like it almost became cool to be aloof and a little bit flaky? "Like yea bro, whatever, I know I said I'd do that, but now I like don't really feel like it. Take a chill pill bro." Hard, uncompromising principles aren't in fashion anymore and that probably contrbuted to the absolute silliness of the past 5 years or so. And by the way, having and standing by your principles only matters when you're tested. It only matters when it matters and you are only your actions. That's a really good lesson I got from the sports betting landscape that I try to live by with everything I do. If you're trustworthy ONLY when it's easy, then you aren't trustworthy. 

Another thing that I've talked about before that I absolutely love about sports betting and poker too to lesser extent is that you really do either win or die. You either win on your own merit or you lose. There is no bullshit. There are no government handouts, no marketing teams, no one cares who your dad is or what college you went to. There's no sucking up, there's no "my uncle went to college with the boss." Your skin color, your sex, your age, your views, even your personality, none of it matters even a little bit. There's no nonsense, really. You either can do it or you can't, and if you can't then you don't. Hell, there isn't really even luck involved. You can maybe get lucky and run good for a little while, but not long term (in sports betting anyway.) That sort of harsh clarity is refreshing, especially in todays world where "merit" is becoming a four letter word. 

The only caveat to that is with people selling picks. I'll say this again because it's important and people just absolutely do not want to hear it: DO NOT PAY FOR PICKS. EVER. No one who wins sells picks and no one who sells picks wins. It's that simple. If you're paying for picks in 2023, you really do deserve to lose money, and I'll bet anyone on here that there is not a single legit winning tout out there (with one exception. I've mentioned them before but I will again here for completeness sake. There is one tout that is legit and does win long term. They're called Right Angle Sports or RAS. But their packages cost thousands of dollars and are really meant for professionals only. The second they release a play, the market moves, usually pretty hard. They have a super complicated process for releasing plays because the biggest knock on them is simply that it's almost impossible to get their released number. The reason for that is that the market respects them and reacts accordingly to their releases. When they give out a play, the market reacts instantly. And I do mean instantly. They also specialize in more niche markets like the WNBA and smaller college football and basketball leagues. They track not only their units won or lost but also how they do against the closing line, which is the single best predictor of future success. So in short, if you HAVE to pay for picks, look into RAS. Other than that, just don't. Seeing people pay for picks really does make me sad. It's so easy to bamboozle people and everyone is always looking for a shortcut.)

I'll have more about sports betting and poker in the future, maybe I'll start posting some poker hands. But let us shift focus here for a little bit to crypto. It's been a while since I updated my positions so lets start there.

As I mentioned here before, I did get caught up in the BlockFi situation and lost a big chunk of my holdings. I think I'm going to end up getting at least a portion of it back, but I'm not counting on it. For my records, I counted what I lost in all of that as simply a giant sell for which I received nothing in return. In sports betting, my "edge" was mostly from finding and staying at really soft accounts. The drawback from such a strategy is that usually the softer the site, the bigger the chance of getting stiffed when you win. So when that does happen, you have to count it in your figures. I always only counted money in my hand as money won. If I won 10k but collected only 5k, then that obviously goes in as a 5k win. I use the same logic here. It was my own fault for trusting BlockFi so I have to count the theft as a big fat sell for zero dollars.

Now, having said all that, I am going to detail what my position would have been if the BlockFi stuff didn't happen just one time, now, simply to show my possible skill as a trader and what things should have looked like. After this, the BlockFi stuff will be factored in.

So, if I hadn't been fucked by BlockFi, my average owned BTC would be $18k, with an ROI of 44% (at BTC's current price of about 27k). My average buy price is 30k, and average sell price is 34k with mid five figures volume in buys and sells. I think that is really, really good, especially considering that I started buying BTC when it was at about 35k. Now with about 2.5 years in this space, I think I can safely say that I am a good crypto trader and I have the stats to back it up. My general strategy has always been to be slowly building up a position and sell a little bit on green days and buy a little bit on red days. I never use leverage or anything like that. Just slowly and solidly building up exposure and unwinding a little bit when it goes straight up. 

With ETH, my average owned price would be $773(!) with an ROI of 30%. LINK would be average price of $7.7 with a 20%ish ROI.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that the BlockFi stuff did, obviously, happen, and my actual current holdings are this:

BTC: Avg buy price: $30.4k, avg sell price: $28.7k. Overall average buy price: $63k. Stinks!

ETH: Overall average buy price: $7k. Not good!

LINK: Overall buy price: $10.9. Bad, but not horrible.

LTC: Unaffected by BlockFi, average price of $56 only owning a few hundred worth. I love trading Litecoin. LTC is one alt-coin that I do actually like. It does basically the same thing as bitcoin but even faster. It uses proof of work (the super secure method) and its reputation is sort of like a rock solid, boring, safe alternative to BTC. It moves around a good amount but with a decent sized market cap (it's #11 crypto in the world by market cap) it doesn't move TOO crazily. So I like to sell tops and buy back in lower. Right now I like 95 and 100 as a local top and buy back in at 89 or below.

Polygon/Matic: Also unaffected, average price of $.87 but owning a little bit more. I'm not super interested in Matic and its use case but I know that it does get used a lot and the news around it always seems pretty positive. It moves around a lot too and I'm scooping some back up after taking profits at $1.3.

So obviously the BlockFi situation was a pretty big disaster but I am a little bit proud of myself for staying the course. Eventually the whole mess will get absorbed and my buys will be lower than my sells. That will be a happy day.

My overall outlook right now is that it feels like we're in the middle of a bear market. A good tried and true fact of the crypto space is that prices always bottom on apathy, not on bad news. When you look back on prior bear markets, prices bottomed out when simply no one was talking about Bitcoin or crypto. A good metric for that is new subscribers to popular youtube crypto channels. There's a guy I follow who charts this stuff and the general interest in crypto is definitely down and waning further, but it does look like it still has a ways to go. There's a big annual crypto "conference" in Miami happening this week and from what I've gathered, attendance is around 15k people. Last year it was 35k. So that's a pretty good snapshot of where we are, interest-wise right now. I think this whole year is going to be choppy/flat and then we might get a bull run with new highs in mid 2024 which is also about when the halving is expected to happen. So my general strategy is to slowly keep buying and building up positions and probably fading any runs. If we dip under 17k again, that'll be the time to back the truck up. 

I read a decent book recently called "The Lords of Easy Money." It's by a finance journalist who covered the Fed for two decades. It was a good look at not only the Fed and its policies, but at the people who make up the Fed. It was similar to "The Creature From Jekyll Island" except way less conspiracy theory-y (and a lot shorter). I took away a few tidbits that I thought were interesting. For one, the whole money printing/QE disaster came from Ben Bernanke who was the chairman from 2006 to 2014. He was a super academic, bookworm nerd type guy and he operated exactly how you'd expect one of those guys to. He was famous for super complicated, mumbling speeches where people were always confused trying to decipher what he was saying. He loved equations and acronyms as these sort of guys usually do. He directed the Fed to print trillions of dollars during the 2008 crisis and a big chunk of the book was about how people inside the Fed warned against it for one major reason: it would be hard to stop. And the detractors were right. Once they started printing money, the market started to expect it. And once that happens, it becomes hard to stop doing it and not crash the economy. 

We all know what happened in 08 and in the subsequent years, but it was interesting to learn that Janet Yellen was Bernanke's like little protege. Their offices were right next to each other and they had lunch and hung out often. I think anyone who has worked in an office knows that stuff like that is important. So it wasn't any big surprise that Yellen managed the Fed similar to how Bernanke did. But the most interesting thing I learned was that Jay Powell was very much NOT in the little academic clique. He came from a private equity job and bounced around a little bit from the public sector to private sector before joining the Fed. 

I say all this because I think it's at least a little indicator of where the Fed terminal rate ends up. Ever since the government really turned on the money printers in 08, a huge factor in the stock market (or any market now, really) is what the Fed does with its rate. This effects the interest rate of every other bank and institution across the country and has big ramifications on big, publicly traded companies. And the history of the Fed is generally that they start hiking rates and announce that they're going to keep raising rates until some benchmark is reached (right now it's getting inflation under control and, believe it or not, INCREASING unemployment). But what usually happens is that while they're increasing rates, something breaks or some big business goes under or almost goes under and threatens to take everyone down with them. And then the Fed has to either stop raising rates and keep them steady, or decrease them. That has happened so many times that the market actually expects it. So the futures on where the rate ends up always prices in a rate cut before the date that the Fed says it'll cut. However, I think this time may be different. I think Powell MAY be a little bit different than the norm and he may stick to his plan more than the market thinks. He's been pretty consistent so far, even with the whole SVB bank fiasco. 

With that in mind, I think stocks along with crypto will come down this year. I think these last few months are a little bit of a dead cat bounce. It just didn't quite feel like enough of a dip, did it? The unwinding of all this silliness and can-kicking has to come for us at some point. I think best case scenario is some sort of a soft landing but really, who knows. If Powell does stay on track and keep raising rates, which he should, maybe we get inflation at least a little bit under control (at least with the public numbers. I don't trust CPI reports anymore. Did you know that they constatnly change how the CPI is calculated? Which makes it pretty hard to use it to compare inflation data of the past). If that happens, when the Fed finally does reverse course and starts to bring rates back down again, that might be the catalyst for the next bull run. It may all line up for mid 2024 with the BTC halving (and maybe a new President, friendlier to the economy). I think a year from now could be the start of a new run. If we do get a big crash in the meantime and we see new lows in crypto and in equities, that is when you need to pounce. You make money in bull markets but you get rich in bear markets.  That's my outlook right now, anyway.

That's about it for now, check back soon as I will be writing more in the near future. See ya!

Reflections on a Decade-Plus of Semi Pro Advantage Gambling

Well, it's official. Officially official. My career as "semi-pro" handicapper is over. I haven't made any money on props for almost two years now and my volume has dropped to just about zero. I'm still involved in sports betting, I've still never had a losing year, I still manage/operate multiple accounts (something I can't quite get into here) and I'll probably always bet stuff like team totals, off market straights, teasers and I'm always on the lookout for correlated parlays. But what I've always considered to be actual sports betting; modeling/handicapping, creating and improving models, I do think that is done for me.

 There are two major reason why. Number one, I just don't have the time or the will to dedicate to it anymore. I used to fucking LOVE it. Seeing a book release it's props for the day used to be like taking a hit of something. It was all I thought about, all the time, and I was good at it. Now I'm married, have a kid on the way and a real career. You can't just pop in once or twice a week for a couple hours and beat these props anymore. Like anything else worth doing, it takes a lot of time to manage accounts, create models, tweak them, follow lineup changes and rule changes, who got pushed off the power play, who's injured, etc. It's a lot.

When I first started, no one even knew what a prop was. Season long fantasy sports were just starting to really take hold, but daily fantasy was still over a decade away. I used to handicap props with pen and paper, spend maybe two hours a day, and turn a profit. I didn't even start using excel until after I moved back from Las Vegas. But right around the time daily fantasy became a thing, suddenly everything changed. Everyone was interested in player props and the lines got way, way sharper. And that's reason number two. I HATE to admit it, but I just can't beat em anymore. I know a few guys that do/did what I do and everyone is pretty much in the same boat. It really was free money for a while and part of me knew that it couldn't last.

So with that being said, it feels like a good time to detail my "career", how I started, how it all went and some lessons and wisdom I've gleaned from it over the years. Let's get into it. Little bit of story time...

It all started with poker. No one in my family or friends was remotely interested in poker, so it wasn't like I was around it when I was young. The first time I remember being interested in poker was watching an episode of The Shield. They were playing cards, drinking, having fun and I thought damn, that looks fun as hell. So I got some of my friends into it and we played little friendly home games, trying to figure out the rules. I slowly learned and read books and got better and better and started playing online (Party Poker!). I'd play in local VFW tournaments and always did pretty good.

When I got to college, I met a group of kids who had a small little weekly dealer choose friendly game. That got me into the scene a little bit and there were a few kids who were decent and took it seriously. I eventually morphed that game into a real weekly $1/2 no-limit game at my apartment, ran it well, and I ended up running that game my entire time at college. I had professional dealers, $1 drinks and even girls giving massages for a while (which, by the way, was the official line. There's something brutally awkward about girls that you know giving massages who aren't masseuses). Eventually we got a real solid group of regular players, some that didn't even go to college. I raked max $4 a hand and also played in the game. Running and playing in that game was honestly the most fun and rewarding thing I think I've ever done that also made me money. 

I met a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise and some of them had a pretty profound impact on me. There was one group of older Spanish guys who were regulars who were absolute hustlers. They had a friend who wrote a script for ticketmaster and were able to buy up tickets quick for stuff right when they came out (mind you this is well over 10 years ago). They'd rent out computer labs and have rooms full of people just typing in captchas. They had a Tickle Me Elmo scheme where they bought garages full of these things before they were huge for one Christmas and made a ton re-selling them. The schemes weren't exactly my style, I like to try to bring a little value to people in whatever I'm doing, but I admired their hustle. They were day traders too and I learned a lot about the Fed and why their press conferences were important. There was another guy who came who was a real pro poker player and it was cool just to see him operate. I learned so much from that game. It was kind of like the education I was supposed to be getting in class.

Through that game, I eventually met someone who we'll call Jay. One thing that always bothered me growing up was that I was always looking for someone who operated the way I did. I was always hustling, I had all kinds of little "businesses" (I even had a little 'record label' at one point) and money making schemes, but I could never really find a partner. Even with the punk band I was in in high school, it always felt like I was kind of dragging everyone around me into whatever I was doing. I was dying to meet someone who'd approach ME with something. 

I knew right away that Jay was that guy. He was like a version of me but from a different town, and I know he felt the same way. We got pretty close in college and I found out he was a bookie. Or, more precisely, trying to be a bookie. He was pretty degen which will come into play later on, but he introduced me to the world of sports betting and PPH books and taking action. 

So college comes and goes. The poker game dies out once I graduate, but me and Jay stay in touch. I became a "bookie" by myself for a while, taking action over the phone, and that eventually morphed into teaming up with Jay onto his book as well as buying up a couple of local smaller bookies. So we had a pretty decent sized sports book going. He handled the people, I handled the lines and the money. We were two young kids chasing guys all over the place for money and we always let everyone believe that were just agents working for some big scary boss man. But it really was only us the whole time.

And let me tell you, being a bookie is a nightmare. The nuts and bolts of it are brutal. The lies, the complaining, the nonsense, it's way too much. Ever had a grown man cry to you? When you're like 20 years old? It's uncomfortable. But I did get very valuable information from it. Everyone knows that the average sports bettor loses, but to actually see it from the bookie side is different. You honestly cannot believe how bad the average person is at betting. It always used to astound me how it seemed like people were actually trying to lose. If you just bet straight bets, you're betting -110 on something that should be even odds (generally, of course.) That's bad enough. But most people just have to add to it. They do parlays with no regards to price or odds, they buy random points, they get the worst number possible, they tease stuff like basketball totals. I could go on and on. I'm not kidding, it was shocking to sit there and watch the bets come through. I remember putting teasers from -110 to -120 and having absolutely no drop off in action.

But that was one of my first light bulb moments. Instead of looking at it like I was the house "taking" bets, I looked at it like I was the one making the bets. I was simply getting the opposite of what the customers were betting. So if someone bet the Patriots at -7.5 -110, I looked at it like I had the bet of whoever the Pats were playing at +7.5 +110. And for some reason that really clicked with me. Instead of waiting around for these deadbeats to "give me bets," I could find them myself. 

Around this time I stumbled upon a pretty obscure message board for sports bettors. It was a sub forum of a poker forum and for whatever reason, this little message board was where some of the absolute top level guys in sports betting hung around and talked about beating sports (for you youngins, before social media, message boards was where everyone hung out online and traded information). I got pretty immersed and engaged in it, read every book I could find, every post from the top guys. It's AMAZING how much free information is out there if you know how to look. And one of the books I got from those forums was "Attacking Las Vegas" by Justin7 (that was his username, I forget his actual name). In that book he outlines how to price a couple different props. And that was all I needed, really. I took that logic and just applied it to other props/sports and those little examples in that obscure book became the genesis for just about every model I ever made. 

I became obsessed with being a professional gambler. It really was my singular focus. I was scooping up all the low hanging fruit around me. All the kids who called themselves bookies and gave out lines over the phone I absolutely obliterated. I'd destroy one guy and then have him get me an account with someone else and cut them in. I had a BoDog account that I ran up from a $500 deposit to over 13k before they threw me out. I mean, I really was doing it. 

Around 2009, my friend and I moved to Las Vegas. I told everyone I was going to play poker, which was true, but my main focus was betting sports. Maybe one day I'll go into detail into my Las Vegas excursion, but it only lasted a year. I wasn't even keeping track of my results back then but I pretty much broke even after expenses out there. I never had to work and lived fine, but I wasn't growing my bankroll. I learned a lot out there, of course, but the main thing I learned was that I didn't want to live there and do that forever. Las Vegas is kind of depressing. Every single atom out there is trying to separate you from your money. There's no roots, no one is from there, no one really knows each other, people come and go like nothing. Between the non stop bachelor parties and the slot zombies giving away their pensions one spin at a time, it didn't feel like home to me. At all.

So around 2011 I moved back to MA thinking that I was pretty much done with advantage gambling. Little did I know though, that was really the beginning of my sports betting career. The years between 2011 and about 2016 were the top of my sports betting/poker days. I finally started keeping really good weekly records (which you 100% have to do if you're at all serious about this) and put everything onto excel. I had killer prop models for all 4 major sports and hooked back up with Jay. I kept a tiny piece of the sports book but that was mostly his thing. We had a great system though where he would get me all these amazing PPH accounts but have me betting. He'd handle collecting and the bookie thought it was him betting, but it was really me. And it was great because he was a really outgoing, sociable kid with a reputation for being a bit of a degenerate gambler but someone who *almost* always paid. He definitely always lost though so people couldn't wait to give him accounts. 

Some of the stuff that happened in those years was really funny looking back. The first local guy I remember literally putting out of business was this kid who took action on his phone. He didn't know anything about hockey so he was giving me NHL totals at -110 both sides. You might realize, lots of times these lines are priced at something like -250 or worse. So I'm getting -110 on stuff that should be -220. That lasted a while before he figured it out.

 Another time I remember using this guy who worked with my friend at a car dealership. He gave out a line of +6 on some Alabama football game when the market was +2. 

The stuff I got away with with correlated parlays was borderline obscene. I had one book with a beefy credit limit, something like 20k a week, and they took correlated parlays (I'm going to call them CP's from now on). I would max bet every single CP, both sides, full game AND first half. That lasted for a while until one day the bookie, mad and confused as to why I kept winning, tried to copy my bets. The place he tried to use wouldn't let him, obviously, and he finally figured it out. 

I had an account with a huge scary looking guy who used to run security for Godsmack. I had to give him my ID in a creepy bar to get the account. I beat him up on props for a while and when he gave me the boot, I told him what I do and I cut him in. He got me a few accounts after that that lasted for years. 

I got a guy to give me 25% off of WEEKLY losses. 

I found businesses in Lawrence that are secretly bookies who take CP's, and I've had some Spanish speaking friends go with me to translate. The tickets are all in Spanish, it's pretty funny. It's so hard to get the bets in that I want through the kid translating that it isn't even worth it anymore though. 

I've been threatened by "the mob" (which was bullshit), I've paid people to collect for me, I've had lots of money 'stolen' from me from people not paying when I win. Honestly I could go on and on. I have a terrible memory too so I know there's stuff I'm forgetting. The days of running around getting my own accounts was pure whackiness.

I played poker throughout this time too and would go to Foxwoods for a couple nights at a time about once a week. I got pretty good at a fairly niche limit game down there and that was a great way to break up the monotony of being in front of my computer all the time and keep my poker skills sharp.

Eventually Jay's demons caught up to him and things blew up pretty spectacularly. He had to "go away" for a while so I ran his book myself for a month or so until I just literally could not take it anymore. I think I just gave it up, I don't remember selling it or anything. Being a bookie really is a hard way to make an easy living and was so not my style honestly.

As the scammers and dead beats came and went, I did eventually fall in with a really solid couple of groups who I've worked with for almost a decade now. The cream really does rise to the top. In this scene, tons of people come and go and if you ever stiff someone, it's over for you. So the guys that last, last for a reason. I get accounts now and don't have to deal with any nonsense from either side. I pay for it by having to give up more equity than normal but it's a trade off. I have a good thing going now that is way less work and stress but still keeps me involved.

Anyway, like I said, the handicapping has been drying up for awhile now. The first prop market I ever learned how to beat was NFL sacks. For whatever reason, I've always done well with them and really enjoy betting them. NHL shots on goal is a close second. And I'm down on both for over a year now. This years NHL playoffs was sort of my last hope. My last attempt at real modeling and it has not gone well at all. If I can't beat NHL shots on goal, especially at playoff time, it's probably time to pack it in. So what have we learned? Well, if I had to make a quick list...

1) KEEP RECORDS. That is rule number one. You must keep track of what you're doing if you're doing this at all seriously. All you really need is money won/lost too. I separate everything so I know how I'm doing in, say, football props vs teasers vs straight bets, and I keep track of my overall ROI, but all you really need when you're starting out is weekly win or loss. Do it every Monday, make a little sheet in excel. It's fun. I guarentee that no matter what the results are after a month or two, you'll be surprised.

2) STOP BETTING STRAIGHTS. You are not going to win betting straight bets. Period. You gotta stop. Start with the smallest limit markets and go from there.

3) DON'T MAKE THE BOOKIES LIFE EASIER. Stop betting parlays! Seriously. Same with buying points. And learn how to bet NFL teasers. You can learn about Wong teasers in literally 5 minutes.

4) IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR EDGE IS, YOU DON'T HAVE ONE. 

5) KNOW AT WHAT PRICE YOU WOULD TAKE THE OTHER SIDE. This is a good one. If you'd bet "your team" at any price, you're a sucker. Being a sucker is ok but only if you know you're a sucker.

Another thing is that you don't really choose to "go pro." It isn't like one day you're not a pro and one day you are. For me, I was just working less and less and betting more and more until I was barely working at all (I did usually keep a real job but for a while I was working like 10 or less hours a week). It's a cool feeling when you have a solid year or two under your belt and you realize, hey, I really am a professional gambler.

I do have two major regrets about all of it though. The first one is that I wish I had taken it all more seriously (which is a bit odd for me since I generally take everything too seriously). I always felt like a little bit of an imposter, like I wasn't REALLY a pro sports bettor, and I'm not even sure why. I should have learned about excel and databases way earlier and way more in-depth. I took some free online courses about modeling and statistics, but I didn't really take them seriously. And then towards the end I actually had a little bit of the opposite problem. Once I had like 5 solid years behind me, I thought anything I touched would be profitable. I did some dumb things that I should have pulled the plug on way sooner. I thought I could model team totals better than the market which never worked. I beat my head against the wall trying to beat some obscure props for way too long when I should have stuck with what worked. I for sure should have at least tried to make some money with daily fantasy.

My second regret is not being better with the money. I'm generally pretty good with it, I'm not one of those guys that it just burns a hole in their pocket. And I did save and have a really good chunk for a long time. But I so should have bought property or a laundromat or something. Some passive income. I could have honestly probably set myself up, not for life, but pretty close. Oh well.

Overall though I look back very fondly of those days. The first few years were absolute craziness. I really wish I had this blog back then. I can't even imagine the stuff I'm forgetting. And even though it didn't last forever, I never really expected it to. I think I did better and lasted longer than anyone would have expected when I started.

So that is just about it with sports betting. Crypto trading now scratches that itch for me and that and stocks will be the main focus here going forward.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon I will have some crypto stuff up.