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!
