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
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