I skipped the Week 4 recap because it was rather uneventful and I'm not sure how captivating these posts are exactly. I had one of those strange weeks where it felt like I did good but when all the dust settled, I was down about a unit. That's a unique thing about being a semi-pro bettor; I usually have no idea how I'm doing until I do my figures for the week. Especially when I was full time, I would have something like a dozen accounts, each one with a different percentage and most of them being shared. You add in props and the phone only guys, and I typically would have no idea if I was up or down for the week or what I needed to happen in any given game. It would be a running joke between me and a couple of my degen friends who were always sweating some awful parlay.
'How are you doing today/this week? What do you need?'
'I don't know.'
Anyway, Week 5 was a damn near catastrophe. Except for one, every single Wongable game lost. Just a bloodbath for teasers.
Before I dive in though I want to make one thing clear. I know I've made a few 'culture war/politics' posts on here lately. And while I absolutely stand by every thing I've said and make no apologies, I don't want any regular readers here to feel ostracized or feel like this blog isn't for them anymore. The political stuff is few and far between. So even if you're a true shit-lib marxist, you are more than welcome to be here and enjoy my inane ramblings. Not that anyone needed my permission or anything obviously, but I just wanted to put that out there.
On to the Week 5 massacre.
First Wongable game was the Thursday night game with the LAR closing at -8 against SF. I had LAR teased down to -2 with a SF +3.5 and +8 hedge/middle. LAR ended up losing in OT which was a heart breaker but luckily I didn't have much on this game at all. This game bothered me for a different reason though: Mac Jones. I have been quietly waiting for this spot for years, only to pass on it when given the chance. See, I have always felt like Mac Jones was a decent QB. He had an incredible rookie year (something everyone forgets) under Bill Belichick and it looked like the Patriots weren't going to miss a beat after Brady. Then Belichick went literally insane and started banging girls FIFTY years younger than him and coaching like he was actually trying to lose. He fucked Mac Jones up about as badly as possible. He made a defensive line coach and a special teams assistant Jones' offensive coordinators and tanked The Patriots, Mac Jones, and even himself. Jones had a terrible last couple years here in New England, then played one game as Trevor Lawrences back up and threw one of the ugliest pick sixes I can ever imagine. It was all over the highlights that week and ever since that throw, people have written Jones off. But I always felt like he got a raw deal, especially here in New England. How many second and third year guys would excel in a system where the head coach is arguably trying to lose, and also not talking to you because you dared to ask your college QB coach for help dealing with Matt fucking Patricia calling your games? So I always sort of kept it in the back of my head that if Mac got another crack at starting a game, the market would probably under value him. Well, he played his ass off against the Rams but I just couldn't pull the trigger on him. Sad! It'll be interesting to see what happens with him this year and next year though. I think he's clearly better than at least a handful of starting QB's in the league today.
Anyway, the possible Wong's for the 1:00 slate were: NYJ, BAL, NYG, and CAR. The Jets were playing DAL and a ton of late money came in on the Jets to move them from +1.5 to -2.5. My book was slow to move so I hammered the Jets +7.5 pretty hard. I was able to get Dal +7.5 in a couple teasers and hedged a bunch with Dal -2.5 but I was heavy on the Jets +7.5 and it was over before half-time. By the way, how many times in my life have I had this situation play out? I get in 'great' on the Jets only for them to get completely blown out. I think the NYJ might have cost me more money than any other professional sports team on the planet.
Similar thing with BAL. Most books had them +1 where mine was at +1.5. Super late money came in on HOU to make the closing line mostly HOU -2.5, but it was HOU -1 for most of the week. Another one that was over before the half. (WTF is up with Baltimore? It looks like their window is closed before it even opened. It'll be interesting to see what happens there in the next few months).
NYG/NO was a little interesting. When the line opened at about NO -1, I actually jumped on NO -2.5 +116 pretty hard, which is the opposite of what I normally do. I just knew that the Giants won last week but it was all smoke and mirrors as they got insanely lucky. I figured the line would move in favor of NO and then I could pounce on the Giants with a teaser. That did happen pretty much exactly as I thought so I had a really juicy middle of NO -2.5 at plus odds with a NYG +8.5 Wong. It was looking good for a while and then somehow NO ended up winning by 12. This wasn't so bad as I had more on NO than I normally would have, but still stung.
CAR was the only team that prevented the clean sweep. I got in early on CAR +7.5 pretty big and also had it as the last leg in a few 3 teamers left over from Week 4. With game day money coming in on CAR, I mostly let this one ride and it was my biggest position of the day. Even though they quickly went down 17-0 (there was a 15 minute period yesterday where every single Wong I had was losing by like 4 scores), then managed to come back and win and save me an 0-4 start to the day.
The 4:00 slate was more of the same. I had a middle with ARZ -1.5 and TEN +7.5 that didn't hit thanks to another player celebrating a would-be touchdown by dropping the ball before he crossed the endzone. Is that not the most braindead fucking thing you have ever seen in your life? And it's already happened a couple times this year! (By the way, I have to mention this little fun piece of trivia: in the history of the NFL and players dropping the ball on purpose before scoring, it has never happened to a White player, as far as I've seen and I've looked into it. Funny!)
I got SEA -3 -118 (which lost) on Draft Kings early in the week which was a good bet considering it closed at a heavy -4. I also did a small -2.5 -120, +3 -110 middle on the LAC game which obviously didn't hit. Draft Kings put up a CIN +10.5 -112 line for most of the day where Pinnacle was at DET -10.5 +120ish. I unloaded my entire balance on CIN +10.5 at -112 and -115 and set up a nice scalp with Pinnacle. It made my effective bet something like 3 units of CIN +10.5 +150 where the market was at -125ish, no vig. So obviously an incredible bet that just didn't go my way.
Lastly, we had the SNF game. I put BUF -1.5 as the last leg of every single teaser I made. Even though most of them were toast by then, I did have a few sneak through. So I had a pretty big position of BUF -1.5. I hedged it out evenly though and got a decent number on the Pats ML so I made it so I made money no matter what happened. BUF winning would have been way better but I lost a lot of my risk appetite after the 4:00 slate and mostly evened the bet out. (For any n00bs reading this, that is generally what you should do during a downswing or even a really bad day/session. Lotta people do the opposite. They start pushing it if they lose big, especially at the starts or ends of sessions. I've seen it first hand countless times in many different forms/games. When things aren't going your way for the month, week, or even day, you slow down. Maybe take a little money off the table. The time to push is when you're already winning or up, which is usually when most people start to get a little risk averse, wanting to 'book a win.' This isn't just me saying that either, that's the correct thing to do in theory, too. You want to push edges when you're winning and protect yourself when you're not.) The only nightmare scenario was BUF winning by exactly 1 but I was ok with the risk.
As bad as this week was, the final count could have been a lot worse. I lost 7ish units for the week which puts me down roughly 5 units for the NFL season. I'm up about 20 units total for the year, largely due to crushing Wongs at the very end of the last NFL season. Despite a rocky start to this year, I feel as confident as ever. I know I'm getting in good and it's only a matter of time before I have a week where I hit a few of these Wong middles clean. I'm fine with busting my DK balance too. I should have a decently long leash there and I should also be seeing a reload bonus in my promo's soon. Weeks like these make me appreciate my hedging/middling strategy when it comes to Wongs. If I had been riding naked on these, it would really have been a bloodbath.
Shifting gears a bit, I have been getting more and more into futures trading on Robin Hood. Their sports markets are mostly un-usable with the high juice, but the other future options are very interesting. I bought a bunch of bullish options on the price of BTC a couple months ago, and then did something I rarely do: I doubled down a couple weeks ago when BTC corrected down to $110k. I had a bunch of bets that BTC would hit $125k this year and before Nov 2025 which obviously cashed this weekend.
Looking at these futures everyday has made me get in tune with the flow of them a little bit. One thing that stood out to me right away was how panicky they feel. Wild swings every time BTC drops or gains a couple percent. It made me think, is it possible that the market for crypto futures is largely old school Wall St, finance guys? And could it be that they aren't exactly familiar with the volatility in crypto markets? A 10% drop in a day with Bitcoin is really nothing. But to a grizzled 55 year old Wall St. guy, a trillion dollar asset dropping 10% in a couple hours is probably panic-inducing. It was weird seeing my entire slate of futures go from green to red and then back to green with a super typical BTC day/week. Perhaps it's a good strategy to scoop up bullish futures on red BTC days? I mean, that's fairly obvious I suppose, but I do think there's a good chance that the futures market hasn't fully absorbed the volatility inherent in crypto markets.
My crypto outlook has really solidified for the next few months. Pretty much the same thing I've been saying: we haven't really even started the bull run yet. We've been hugging the 'fair value' trendline since June 2022, more than 3 years now, by far the longest we've gone without a blow-off top. For the past 4 cycles, BTC has been fairly predictable in post halving years. Up in the summer, down in Aug/Sept, touch the 50 week MA, and then up in Oct into our alt season/blow off top. The big question now is will there even be an alt-season this year? Alt-coins have really kind of shown their ass this cycle as BTC dominance continues its steady climb. As long as we stay above $100k, I think the bull cycle is still firmly in play. This cycle will be a really big one for the future of alt-coins. If retail doesn't come back and we get no alt-season at all, I would be really nervous holding a big bag of any of them, ETH included. The King stays The King.
Anywho, that's it for me for today. Talk soon, bye for now!
BTC price: $126k
BTC marketcap: $2.496T
Total marketcap: $4.29T
BTC dominance (including stables): 58.1%
Total cryptos on coinmarketcap: 22.26 M
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