Couple More Free Picks

Just a couple more free picks for today. This isn't at all going to become the new format or anything, just a little something in between posts. 

Nick Seeler u2.5 Blocks +105

Jacob Middleton o2.5 Blocks +135

I'm getting a bet on Nick Seeler unders almost every time I do these. That happens a lot with modeling/betting. It's (hopefully) finding some kind of market inefficiency and not a model bias. I remember when I made my first player vs player NHL points model, I had a bet on Claude Giroux just about every single night. Which makes sense since in his prime, Giroux was an elite playmaker and filled the stat sheet with primary assists. Assists are 'easier' to get than goals but the goal scorers tend to get all the attention, so a highly skilled playmaker could be a source of hidden points. It was important to separate primary from secondary assists as this somewhat shows that it was a repeatable skill and not simply running good or playing with better linemates. 

That's it for today, I should have a new real post up sometime this week.

Talk soon!

Pick Results

Another nice little win last night.

Under 2.5 Blocks for Nick Seeler -120. W

So we're 3-1 and up 1.58 units so far. I am happy with my model and the results so far with this market. I've been slowly tweaking and adjusting my model as I learn and think more about it. I was reading a post from a fellow sharp whose newsletter I get, and one of his 'edges' he mentioned was getting plays from sharps or other originators who didn't really understand how valuable their plays were. Made me stop and think a little bit. I've been so gun shy with props over the past few years, going back and forth between throwing in the towel and thinking about capitalizing on my edge a lot harder. These plays are for sure +EV and I'm betting peanuts on them. It's something I might reconsider my approach to. I don't know. Anyway, I'll definitely be posting some more plays here and there, hopefully right through the NHL season. I don't think I'm betting enough money to even get noticed by Draft Kings but you never know. So make sure you check back regularly, I don't post on X when I make a strictly 'picks post' like the last few so bookmark me and drop by everyday.

Talk soon!

Free Pick

 Another quick free NHL prop pick for tonight.

Under 2.5 Blocks for Nick Seeler -120.

That's all. Up .58 units so far through 3 picks. I'll probably keep doing this and tracking it like this. I have a real post coming up soon too.

Don't forget to follow me on X: @poogsBLOG

Talk soon!

Picks Results

In the interest of full disclosure and before I forget, results from my 3 picks:

Ryan Lindgren u1.5 blocks -120 W

Brandon Carlo o1.5 blocks -142 L

Jake Mccabe o1.5 blocks -182 W

Nice little .58 unit pick up. {Unless otherwise noted, anything I post is to win 1 unit if it's a favorite or risking one unit if it's a dog, which is standard.} I'll probably do this here and there and these picks are for sure +EV (they better be at this point in my life) so make sure you bookmark me and check me out from time to time. I post on X (@poogsBLOG) when I make a new post but I'll be sneaking these little picks-posts in here and there too. (By the way, make sure you use bookmarks in general. That's something that apparently not everyone does. I find it's a great way to sort things on your computer. Make a bunch of different folders and when you come across something good, like a blog or a substack or maybe a good tiny little site with analytics, you bookmark it and save it for later.)

Check back soon, I'll have a real post up in the next few days.

Free Picks!

 Little treat today for any of my regular readers. I'm not even going to post on X that I have a new post up so this is a little 'reward' for anyone coming here randomly.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I had made a new model for 'Blocks' for NHL players. It's a nice, small, fairly obscure NHL prop market which historically has been my bread and butter. I have about 3 weeks of sample and so far I'm doing quite well in it. Well today I'm going to give out my bets for tonight. There's only two games on the board so not a whole lot to choose from, but I see some fairly decent edges on these bets and I figured hey, why the hell not. So here's what I have tonight:

*Obvious disclaimer: these are NOT 'locks'. There is no such thing. I'm only sharing with you, for free, a couple bets I made today, all on DK. Do with them whatever you want. If you are a regular reader here, I honestly do appreciate it.

Ryan Lindgren u1.5 blocks -120

Brandon Carlo o1.5 blocks -142

Jake Mccabe o1.5 blocks -182

Lots of chalk and a couple overs which isn't typical but there ya go.

Check back soon, I'll probably do this more often.

The Colorful Characters In The Underground World Of +EV Sports Betting

Little bit of a Part 2 on my last post. While writing it, I was brought back in time and thought about all the different people I've worked with or for or against in my now almost two decade sports betting career. So many bookies, agents, dirty-agents, sharps, middle-men, wanna-be's, etc. They were all unique and I like to think I learned at least a little bit from every single guy (and one girl, actually). So today I'm going to go through and write a little bit about all the whacky characters from my 15+ years of advantage gambling, specializing in 'face to face' PPH accounts. Obviously I'm not going to use any real names or anything that could remotely reveal anyone, not that anyone would know (most of) these guys. And I'm not going to talk about anyone I'm currently working with, not that that list is long or anything. If you're into this world at all, I think you'll find this interesting and a lot of fun. Even you aren't, I think this will be a really good look into the nitty gritty of the PPH ecosystem and a look at how people work with each other in a completely unregulated and mad max-ish system.

The first guy that really got me going in the PPH world was a friend I had named 'Jay'. I talked about him in my "My Time As A Semi-Pro Gambler" post. He was a true hustler, super out-going and charasmastic. People just seemed to gravitate to him. He was a "former pro poker player" (mind you, we were like 22 at the time) and a really terrible sports bettor. He definitely had a degen streak in him which will come into play later. We met during college through my poker home game and he was really the one that got me interested in sports betting in the first place. He was kind of a bookie but he was one of those kids that just could not hold on to money. It would burn through his pocket. He seemed to know every single local bookie though and had all kinds of accounts, all of which were lifetime losers. So you can probably figure out how this went. He got the accounts and dealt with the bookies and picking up, and I made the bets. It was glorious while it lasted. Eventually though it all became too much for him, having lots of cash on him that wasn't his. He had to go away and we had a pretty bad falling out after he used my money to pay off a bookie after he lost a ton of money trying to martingale horse racing. The degen in him was always there and was always going to wreck him. That was honestly a good lesson to see up close and so early on. He'll come into play again later.

I met quite a lot of people through Jay. Once you get your foot in the door, it's really up to you how hard you want to push it. Another quasi-friend I had in this group was another kid we'll call 'Jon.' He was a wanna-be bookie taking action on the phone and I quite literally put him out of business. He used to give out NHL lines and make the totals -110 both sides! (Unders on 5.5 in the NHL are typically lined at like -250 or something like that). I beat him so bad that he had to stop taking action and could only pay me on a weekly payment plan. A lot of these guys were very slow to cut me off because they literally have never cut someone off from winning too much in their lives. I don't even think they thought it was possible. When you're an old-school phone bookie, all you're really doing is chasing people around for money that they owe you. EVERYONE loses to you. Everyone. The idea that someone could be a winning player isn't anywhere remotely on their radar. They just think that you're getting lucky and you'll give it back eventually. Jon eventually squared up with me and was really interested in what the hell I was doing. He was actually kind of sharp. He'll come back into play later.

Next up was an older guy that one of my friends worked with at a car dealership. (I got a few accounts this way. Car dealership guys were some of the absolute softest bookies I ever came across. And, to be honest, some of the stupidest guys I ever met). This guy was no different. I didn't have him long at all, maybe only a month, but I remember distinctly he gave out a CFB line of Alabama +6 when the market was +2. He paid me no problem though and passed me off to another, bigger bookie. The car guy was very small time.

This other bigger time bookie was the real deal. I was moving up the ranks fairly quickly, now that I think about it. This guy, we'll call 'A.C.', was the first real-deal, respectable, old school type bookie that I came across. I had to meet him in this seedy, dark little bar in the middle of the day and I remember he took my drivers license and copied down my name and address for me to get the account. I wasn't scared at all though, I actually liked it. It showed me he was serious and I probably wouldn't have to worry about getting stiffed. He looked the part, too; pretty much exactly what you'd expect a real old school bookie from New England to look like. Big, scary looking, tattoos. The kind of guy who never ran 'because he didn't have to move fast for anyone'. He was the former head of security for a huge Boston rock band and he looked exactly like that and booking were his jobs. I beat him up pretty good and he was sharper than most so he knew to cut me off. I took a little bit of a gamble the last time we were to meet and I tried to turn him dirty. This was my first time attempting this. I told him something like 'you've seen what I can do, I do this full time, if you can get me accounts you can have a percentage of my weekly action.' It took some coaxing and explaining but he eventually agreed to try it out and off we went. We worked together like that for years, him getting me accounts and me betting. Having a guy like that out there collecting for me was a goldmine. I knew I'd never get stiffed. I still remember the very last time we met, he owed me a good chunk. As he paid me he said 'a lot of guys would have kept this.' He was a good dude and that really was a great partnership to have, especially early on. Eventually thought we burned through everyone he knew and it fizzled out.

Another guy I had around this time was a similar guy to A.C. but not nearly as scary looking. 'Jim' was another guy I met through Jay. He was an older guy with a family and was fairly high up in the ecosystem. He had agents under him who will come into play later, but for some reason I don't remember, I dealt with Jim directly. And to this day, I will say that this guy had the softest accounts I ever got in my life. Barely any parlay restrictions, props completely divorced from reality (and tons of them), big moves on local games, whacky team totals, you name it. And he was solid in that I didn't have to worry about getting paid. I destroyed this guy and he kicked me out, but I kept finding ways to get back on his accounts. This was the only time I ever came close to really getting in trouble with these guys. I went through someone else, probably Jay, and got back onto one of his accounts through an agent of his. 

This guy was a real wanna-be. He looked the part but he was one of those guys that seemed to think that looking the part was the most important aspect of it all. He was clueless though and he let me stay on way longer than he should have. This was the guy that tried to copy my correlated parlays into his own account, and when they rejected them, he finally figured it all out. I got stiffed on the last week and that was actually the main event that led me to move to Las Vegas. I felt like I had out-grown the whole PPH world, which was a badly misguided idea in retrospect. Anyway, I made a big stink about getting stiffed that last week and some threats went back and forth. There was talks of 'sit-downs' and 'the mob' but it was all nonsense. One of the biggest lessons I took from all this is that these guys are mostly all phonies. They've seen Goodfellas and The Sopranos and honestly, that's about it. They didn't even understand bookmaking, really. That wasn't a great situation though and it's funny looking back at how ballsy/stupid I was for a naive, still really green kid. 

Up next is the one and only woman to enter the fray, 'Kay'. I was trying to bang friendly with this girl who knew what I did and apparently knew some kids in a neighboring town who took action. I got an account from them with her as the de-facto agent. And this went horribly. They cut me off a couple months into betting with them even though I was down! I guess they had a clue what they were doing and saw what I was betting and decided they didn't want my action anymore. In the world of PPH betting, this is a no-no. It's the equivalent to hitting and running in poker. It's not 'against the rules' but it's frowned upon. This was bad because it made me look stupid to Kay who thought I was some sports betting savant and who I told was about to make a bunch of money. But the worst part was that I had made a few big MLB future bets on this account. When they cut me off they obviously changed my password so that I couldn't access the account anymore. It was right at the start of the season, too. So they cut me off, I'm pissed but whatever, I move on. Months and months later I hear from Kay that suddenly I owe these guys money. The futures bets settled and they lost. This was another sticky situation. It was a pretty clear freeroll to me. If the futures had won I would have NEVER heard from them again. I wouldn't have even known as I wasn't keeping track of everything the way I do now. But even if I did they would not have paid me. They pretty much said as much. I didn't want to pay and again there was some back and forth, veiled threats. I couldn't really explain it to Kay though and if I didn't pay it would make me look really bad. She knew a lot of the same people as me. I tried to negotiate to pay only a chunk of it but they wouldn't hear it. I ended up paying them and still to this day this whole situation irks me. It's the only time I was sort of 'had' like that in my career.

Not everyone I came across was a bookie/agent, though. Later on, I started meeting and partnering with fellow sharps and would give them accounts I couldn't use, or sometimes share them. One guy I dealt with was this weird guy I 'met' online. He seemed to be the real deal and was apparently a guy who could beat straights. I was always looking for a guy like this to share accounts with because the biggest red flag for my betting was that it was almost 100% props. Having a guy bet straights on an account of mine would provide me some cover at least, plus I had a piece of his action too. But man did this guy turn out to be a dud. When we first started talking about sharing accounts, he kept going on and on about me not copying his bets. This was his big thing, by far. He did not want me copying his bets. I had no problem with it as I didn't plan on doing that at all but man was he paranoid. He ended up being a pain in the ass and just took loss after fucking loss. I don't really remember but I don't think he was even beating the closing line most of the time. I know edges are a lot smaller on straight bets and you can easily run bad for weeks, if not months, but you combine that with how annoying he was and it just didn't work. I told him to back off a few accounts that I was afraid of getting stiffed on a couple times and he lost his mind. And he would not stop accusing me of copying his plays, which were getting killed. It was really strange and I was happy to get rid of him.

Another sharp I worked with was a guy I 'met' on the old forums. This one went a little bit better. This was actually really early on, before I even knew what correlated parlays were. I let him use one of the super soft accounts I got from Jim. This sharp told me he would bet straights and I'd use the account for props. What he was doing though was betting hockey correlated parlays, and not even NHL ones. This was one of the first times I had even heard of/seen CP's. He was on one of the accounts when everything went tits up when the wanna-be guy cut me off and stiffed me for the last week. Some of that money was owed to the sharp. I didn't cover it though which I technically should have. He had won a ton though up until that and he was fairly understanding. This was when I was just starting out and if that happened today I would have covered it. I thought that he kind of took a shot at me though. He knew what he was betting and he knew that I really didn't. If you're hammering away at obscure KHL correlated parlays and are way up, you really can't be too shocked when you get cut off and stiffed on the last week. He left the partnership with more money than when he started so all in all it was fine, though I will admit it wasn't my finest moment. If he had to go back in time though, he would definitely have still taken the accounts. The PPH world can be messy.

The funniest/weirdest account/agent I ever dealt with was this guy 'Keno-Bill' I met through Jay. I talked about him in one of my older posts but not in great detail. Jay had an account with this new guy Keno Bill. I saw the account and was absolutely licking my chops. I wanted my own though, I think this was when Jay was starting to get sloppy. Jay set up a meeting for us and I walked into this little hole in the wall dive bar where this guy Bill ran the Keno games. (By the way, Keno is maybe the single worst possible game you can gamble on. The house edge is somewhere in the 30% range. Never, ever play Keno). I can still remember walking in there and seeing him for the first time. He didn't see me though, so I sat there and watched him a little bit, trying to get as much info on him as I could. He was like the mayor of the place, chatting everyone up, friendly but a little full of himself. Perfect. One random thing I still remember; while I was watching him waiting for an opening to approach him, I saw him blow his nose and get boogers all over his hand. When he met we had to shake hands and I remember feeling like I had radioactive material on my hand. We chatted for a bit and he gave me an account and on the way out I booked it into the bathroom to wash my hands. I can still picture the old dusty arcade game right near the bathroom. It's weird the stuff you remember. This account ended up being an absolute goldmine, maybe the best I ever had. The account itself wasn't particularly soft, for those days anyway, but he let me bet forEVER. I couldn't believe how long he let me stay on there. And he couldn't hide either as he was posted up at that keno place all the time, so I wasn't worried about getting stiffed. This was also when I got the idea of getting a percentage back on losses. I had a bad stretch starting out, losing something like a month or more in a row on this account. And I paid him every week no problem. Once I heard of the percentage-off deal, I approached him. I said something like 'I have another account and the guy is offering me 15% off my weekly losses. I really like your account though so if you can match it, I'll stay with you'. He must have thought I was a whale because he ended up giving me 20% off of weekly losses. If you know anything about betting, you know how absurd that is. I could be a break even or a slight loser and still come out way ahead. Well in the months that followed, I absolutely crushed him. Week after week. Even the rare losing weeks were softend with the 20% rebate. Every week I thought for sure I'd go to log in on a Monday and the account would be closed. But it didn't happen for a long time. Finally, when it did, some real hijinx ensued. One day, after another huge week, I go to log in and the account is off. Bill is not responding to my calls and he still owes me a good chunk. I'm going crazy, calling different people, trying to get a hold of him when I suddenly get a call from a random number. It's Keno Bill's boss, the head bookie. Apparently he had been away on vacation for the last month and went crazy when he got home, seeing how much I had won. He kept giving me the sob story about how Bill was now buried in make up and 'wasn't going too good'. He was incensed at me for winning. And he had a wicked feminine voice with a lisp and everything, and he kept talking about his mother? I guess they lived together and ran the book together or something. It was surreal. At one point he said something like 'ya know, back in my day, when a guy won a bunch in a week he'd tip his agent 100 bucks.' And I shot back 'I lost a ton in the first couple months and no one ever 'tipped' me.' And he said exactly, and I'll never forget this in his weirdo Mark Harris voice 'ok ok ok, let us forget this and never speak of it again.' After we hung up, he called me back and started ranting again ABOUT me. He thought he was calling Bill and called me by mistake! Still to this day I kick myself for cutting him off and not letting him go on, just to see what he had to say. I ended up never seeing or hearing from either guy ever again. Keno-Bill disappeared from the bar he worked at with the last couple weeks worth of money he owed me.

I had another car dealership old guy who was a little bit of a dummy but was more solid than the usual car guy. We got along pretty good and once he cut me off, I flipped him into a dirty agent. He got me accounts for a while until it dried up. He was amazed and what I did. 

Eventually me and 'Jon' hooked back up and he started getting me lots of really good accounts. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was going through a tough addiction thing and apparently owed money all over the place. He started getting sloppy and started shorting me here and there, rolling it over until the next week. One week I won big and poof, he disappeared. I tracked him down and got a little bit out of him plus an excruciating payment plan that fizzled out. That turned into a bit of a sticky situation, too. Sometimes guys will just be down BAD. They owe money to all kinds of people, they can't make any money and even when they do, they can't hold on to it. So what do you do in a situation like that, exactly? It's easy to think and talk about what you'd do, but reality is different. He wasn't ducking me, he was just beyond broke. This kid was my friend at one point, I was doing really good back then and he was down and out. So how hard did I really want to lean on him? At one point he had his mom giving me money for him. That didn't feel good, even though it was my money. I got what I could and moved on which is typically what happens in situations like that. It's not like the movies. 'We're not makin a Western here.'

Last one I'll get into here, just because it was so weird. At the very beginning of all of this, before I sort of switched teams, I ran a book with Jay, taking action from absolute deadbeats. One of our customers was this group of Albanian guys that Jay knew from some bar. I think it was their bar, actually. They were always just hanging around, all day, every day. They seemed like absolute whales and we were happy to take their action. The way they bet was bizarre and to this day I still don't understand what happened exactly. During the MLB season, they used to take the four or five biggest dogs on the board and max parlay them. Like, every single day, for months. And they CRUSHED us. They weren't getting good numbers on the teams and our parlay odds were normal, if not slightly worse. We actually put a max win on parlays and they would still bet them, even though their wins were capped. So we were getting way the best of it, or so it would seem. They just won, week after week. It made no sense. I guess it was just a good streak but man, I don't know. Eventually we gave them to another bookie we knew and they won a HUGE amount the first week he took them. Like, a really big amount, way bigger than we could have paid. I don't even know what we would have done to be honest. My life could have taken a whole different turn if we waited one more week to cut them off. (Fun/scary little nugget: Jay knew roughly where and when they were going to meet to settle up for the huge week, and Jay and one of his friends floated the idea of robbing them. Thank god I heard about it and talked him out of it, not that I think they would have actually gone through with it. Jay got weird towards the end. Stay away from pills, my friends.)

That's about it for today. This is only a snapshot, really. I've had many other partnerships that were a lot less dramatic. A lot of them are just silky smooth, barely any bumps in the road. Those are the best and mostly where I'm at now. The ones that blow up or are bizarre are the fun ones to think and write about though. Nowadays it's a lot less frantic and I barely deal with anyone anymore. I'm always in the game though.

Thanks for reading, check back soon!

On Working With Others, A New Model/Prop Market, A Crypto Check-In And More

 One thing quickly before we jump in today. I want to clarify something I said in my last post about the average home being cheaper today than in 1900 when priced in gold. I got it from a blog I read and in that blog, they don't really show their work. They show a graph from the Fed but it's a little hard to read and it doesn't let you click through it. It stuck with me for a while after I read and wrote about it so I decided to look into the data myself.

First off, when you're looking for historical information, sometimes you have a tendency to think that the internet just sort of sucks up all the info itself. You forget that an actual person has to literally type all this stuff in. I've run into this issue when making models for sports, too. It's a lot harder than you might think it is to find the average price of a home in America in 1900. Everything is divided by region and they're kind of all over the place. The best I could find though was an actual ad for homes in a newspaper, and I got the following prices: NYC: $3500-6k, Boston $2k, San Fransisco $2-3500k, and Philadelphia $1500. I thought about keeping it to one city but that isn't really fair since you might just be capturing the growth rate of one individual city. Using a couple different sources, I deduced that $3k is a reasonable estimate though. In 1900, gold was selling for $20.7/ounce. So an average home would have cost roughly 145 ounces of gold. Today, the average home price is somewhere around $500k. It all depends on location, of course, and we're treating all homes as equal, which we know isn't exactly right. But if we use $500k, we know that gold goes for $2885/ounce today, so that comes out to 173 ounces. We could drill down into this and try to get a number per square foot in, say, the top 10 cities based on population, but I think the point stands. It may not be completely accurate to say that housing prices have decreased when measured in gold, but it's about break-even. Which is extraordinary when you consider that when priced in dollars, going from an average of $3k to $500k is a 16,667% increase. Over sixteen thousand percent. And the worst you could possibly say about the price in gold is that it went up by maybe 50%. That is all inflation.

It's like you're heating a home that's missing an entire wall. The heater is the collective manpower and brainpower of the greatest country on earth, so the house stays hot and most people don't even notice the missing wall. And there's a whole bunch of people standing right outside the missing wall, getting heat for free. And they've been there for so long that they start to think that they deserve the heat, simply because they aren't capable of building their own heater (if they could, they would have by now). Not only that, they've convinced a lot of the people in the house who are paying for the heater that these people standing outside deserve it, too. Whole industries have sprung up where people sell heat to the people on the outside in exchange for a kickback of a little bit of heat for themselves. As more heat spills out of the house, more energy has to go into it to keep everyone warm. Now, in 2025, the people who are paying for the heater have finally started to notice the missing wall and the hordes of people standing near it, getting heat for free. That is really inflation in a very simplified nut shell. 

I could go on and on but we're going to change gears here today and talk about sports betting, namely the PPH world. Getting back to basics.

I have said many times that when it comes to advantage gambling, almost everyone approaches it differently. You have the top down approach, the bottom up approach, and everything in between. And even the people who only do top-down (pure market capping) can do it in all different kinds of ways. Same thing with bottom-up, which is another word for originating, which is exactly what it sounds like. Originating plays, usually through models but not always. And as we've discussed on here before, even just the modelers, who I would count myself as one, solve problems and come up with +EV plays completely differently. We all basically end up in the same place but the paths to get there are seemingly endless.

However, there is one constant that I always see anytime I see an interview or read something about these guys. And that is that real +EV players work with a lot of other people. I honestly can't think of one guy I've ever heard about or read about that was a true lone wolf. And the reasons are obvious. With there being so many different ways to skin this cat, you get all kinds of people who specialize in one thing or another that when paired up with the right person, can amount to a very profitable combination. For instance, one guy may have access to a multitude of soft PPH accounts. On his own, this guy can't really do much. Access is great but you gotta know what to do with them. Now say you have another guy who is a great modeler, can originate all kinds of plays on his own, but doesn't have access to many or any good, soft sports betting accounts. Well, you pair these guys up and it's like putting a key into a lock. That is just one example but the combinations are endless, and they don't have to be between only two people. You might have on guy who crushes straight bets, one guy who crushes props, and one guy who gets them accounts. It's kind of a beautiful thing if you think about it. 

I have had many, many partnerships over my sports betting career. Most don't work out but the ones that do more than make up for it. They don't always end well. In fact, they almost never do. But that's ok too. It's not shocking when a partnership ends, the miracle is that it ever worked at all. A lot of sports betting partnerships are between people who have never met face to face, moving a lot of money between them. It takes an enormous amount of trust. 

The basics of the PPH world ecosystem is that you have the originators, or the bettors, on one side, and you have the guys who can get accounts on the other side. Most of these guys are 'dirty agents', or agents working for a bookie. The agent has a foot in the door in the PPH world and can usually get all kinds of accounts on all different kinds of skins. The bettor makes a deal with the agent where he pays him a percentage of his winnings. It's really a classic kick-back scheme. The agent usually has so many other losing customers that he's still making money for his boss and himself, while also pocketing his little 10 or 15% from the bettor. I've actually been on both sides of this arrangement. I'm way more of a bettor looking for accounts, but I've also got accounts myself and either given them to other guys/groups for a piece of the action, or shared them with them. Or both, usually. (Which is a whole world to itself. I've been on accounts that had more than 3 different groups on them, all with different deals/percentages. Imagine the accounting, every single week).

Which brings me to my main point in all this. When I first started this blog, half the reason was that I was looking for partnerships for new accounts. I did get quite a few offers but nothing really came of it. And every once in a while, still, I'll get comments or messages from people looking to partner up. I haven't been great at replying to them so I just want to say to anyone who has wrote to me, I have read every single message. The truth though is that I'm really not looking for anything new anymore. I just don't do it enough to justify going through the whole process. When I was doing this full time I was constantly on the look out for any kind of partnership, anything that might work out. That was one of my main skills, having a foot in the PPH world and having access to all kinds of soft accounts. But I've been largely out of the scene for a little while, and even people looking to give me accounts, while I do appreciate it, it's just not worth the headache anymore. Also, I have no fucking idea what telegram is. Or discord. I've heard of them, I have a general idea of them, but I'm not going to find you on there. I'm a little bit more old-school than you might think. If anyone ever really wanted to contact me, the best way would be through my X account, @poogsBLOG. But by and large, my partnering days are behind me. If you have something really juicy I'll certainly take a look, but I assume that most people reading this know what to do with a soft PPH account themselves anyway. 

In other somewhat related news, I found a new prop market to delve into and the results have been encouraging so far. Normally I would never post publicly about something like this but I don't really mind anymore. I've found mostly that the guys who can beat this stuff are already doing it. I was scrolling through Draft Kings a week or so ago, just looking at the different little prop markets they offer. I know I keep saying this but it really is astounding how many different markets DK offers. Some really obscure stuff and tons of it. There is simply no way they can accurately price all these different markets. One of them I came across was 'Blocks' for NHL players. Which is exactly what it sounds like, when a player blocks a shot. It caught my attention and I began to think about it some more. First off, there is absolutely no way DK has a team of people pricing this prop. I mean, who is even betting on this? They must be just be taking a players season or career average. I bet it's one single guy at DK that I'm up against. (By the way, if you're new at this, this is how you beat sports. You aren't going to beat straight Team X vs Team Y matchups. Look for really obscure, low-limit stuff. The more obscure and low-limit, the better. Worry about being able to get enough money down when that problem arises. I have found that that problem will actually kind of solve itself if you're really beating a market. Accounts will find you.)

Anyway, I tinkered around in excel for like an hour and I came up with a simple model for it that I think is profitable. It has been so far but the sample is small. The logic behind it is sound though, I think at least, and pretty simple. The first thing I do is pretend I don't even know what the sport being played is. Think about really what a blocked shot is and what affects it. Well, to block a shot, you need the opponent to first shoot a shot. What is a shot, exactly? In NHL terms, a shot is any shot attempt ON goal. We want to zoom out more and we're looking for any attempt AT the goal. This brings us to Corsi, or 'shot attempts'. If you can predict how many shot attempts the opponent will take, and the rate of which a player blocks said shot attempts, well, buddy, you got yourself a little model. At least the beginning of one you can keep adding to and trying things out with. Stuff like this is easier than you might think and just trying at all will put you ahead of the average bettor. I might post some bets from this market and track them on here but we'll see. And if this market suddenly sharpens up or disappears, I'll know my reach and what not to talk about here. But I think I've largely made too much of that notion.

When I first started really getting into stuff like this, the knock was always 'yea the low-limit stuff is easy to beat but you'll get limited/shut down fast and will have nowhere to play'. Well here I am almost two decades later, still getting down on some of the most obscure stuff imaginable. Yea the bet sizes are small but I know how to stay in action. I think that because I took action before I became a bettor myself, I know what it's like to be on the other side of the coin. I was that guy for a while. I know what it's like to look over players' betting histories and what you think about when considering not taking a guys action. 

You can't completely hammer a guy/account. If you have a really good week or two, go easy for a week. Throw in a small favorite/over parlay on the Monday Night game. Make a couple square looking straight bets that probably cost you less than $10 in expected loss. Don't make him come to you to meet up, go to him. Make settling up easy for him. Have a little small-talk, get to know the guy. When you get a dirty agent, let him in on what you're doing a little bit. Make him feel part of it. They love shit like that. I've worked with guys who are terrific modelers, super smart guys but they lack a certain sixth sense. It's hard to even come up with a word for it. But over time I've developed a sort of feel for when I'm about to lose an account. It can be as subtle as the way the agent texts you, or even when he texts you. How he acts when you meet up. Sometimes you have a good month or two and think you're about to lose the account but you get the sense that the agent isn't even paying attention. It's a feel that I didn't really understand I had or how valuable it can be until way later in the game. Business is always personal, you really can't forget that. There's a great line in Mad Men that always stuck with me. "Pete, you know how often in this business it comes down to 'I just don't like that guy'". The people who say 'hey it's not personal, it's just business' are usually people not actually doing any business.

In other news I'm sure you've heard, Trump made a big announcement about a 'crypto reserve' and the markets pumped a good deal afterwards. They've since corrected a little bit with BTC bouncing from $85k to $95k and now sitting at about $90k and falling. I actually made a nice little sell at $95k yesterday and am slowly buying it back now at these slightly lower prices. "Announcements" are, to me anyways, good times to make a quick sell and buy back in later. You almost always see a big pump, a big re-tracement, and then a slow climb. The market had been fading for a few weeks leading up to yesterday. It feels a little bit like $108k was the high and now we're heading for a bear market, but the technicals don't show that at all. I still think we're square in the middle of a bull market and will see at least $150k this cycle, if not $200k, but I'm not married to that idea. Even at $100k, we were nowhere near over-heated. We still haven't broken out of the accumulation zone in Ben Cowen's logarithmic regression model. 

But like I've said before, I've mostly taken myself out of price predictions for BTC. The bottom line is that the number goes up. Just zoom out. It's done the hard work and it's here to stay. I read somewhere the other day that BTC currently has about 3-5% adoption so far. So about 4 out of 100 people own or use it. Which is the same with the internet in about 1990. There's countless articles and charts about it if you just google 'bitcoin adoption'. But the bottom line is that we are still very early and I'm sticking to my plan to DCA every week and keep it in cold storage.

Every cycle, it seems, has its own little narrative. The 2016/2017 cycle was really the first time BTC penetrated mainstream news when it broke $10k. Then you had the 2020 cycle where, for some reason that looks more and more ridiculous every passing day, NFT's really took center stage. This cycle has sort of been the BTC-ETF/alt-coin reckoning cycle where we've seen Bitcoin dominance continue to grow. I was always worried about Ethereum and other alt-coins over taking Bitcoin but the opposite has borne out. The ETH/BTC ratio topped out at about .15 in 2017 and has been slowly falling downward ever since with a big dead cat bounce in 2020. It's at .025 right now. (All that means is that you could have traded one 'eth' for .15 BTC in 2017. Today, you'd get .025 BTC.) Which makes sense if you think about it. The vast majority of alt-coins are useless, if not outright scams. The NFT stuff was absurd and I said so in 2020. Compared to the bells and whistles of a new shiny alt-coin, Bitcoin is boring and unsexy. But in 2025, the shine has largely come off the alt coin market as a whole and we're seeing money flow out of the risky alt-coins and into Bitcoin, not the other way around. 

I have a friend that I secretly use as a small top-signal. He's a super normal, respectable, charismatic people-person who has does quite well for himself in his own little niche. This is the guy you picture when you think 'normie'. And he follows crypto and the news in general from afar, like I imagine most people do. When we were hanging out in 2021, right before the bubble burst, he was all of a sudden interested in crypto. He's like a solid 5 years behind the cutting edge and I think a pretty good barometer for the public as a whole. And you know what he's talking about now? AI. Just something to consider. (He never actually invested in crypto which was probably a good thing. He always asks me what to buy and I always tell him the same thing: buy Bitcoin. But he just can't. He wants the next thing. The shiny new alt-coin. It's a good lesson.)

That's about it for today. I will definitely have some more posts up soon. Thanks for reading!

BTC price: $87k

BTC marketcap: $1.73T

BTC dominance: 60.2%

Total cryptos on coinmarketcap: 12.2M