How An Episode Of The Phantom Gourmet Helped Me Understand An Important Economic Lesson

Three new posts in less than two weeks! You never know what you're going to get around here. "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen" -Lenin. Pretty sick quote.

A couple quick updates before we jump in. First off, follow @poogsBLOG on X/Twitter for updates.  Also, one thing I forgot to mention in my last couple posts was the ending to the BlockFi saga. If you don't know, I got caught up in the Blockfi debacle that happened a couple years ago now. Basically, they got in bed with FTX and ended up with their pants down and froze withdrawals. I had about half of my stack on there at the time (big time No0b move. I have since moved everything onto a cold storage wallet and I highly recommend you do the same) split between a regular "wallet" and an "earn account." After months and months of litigation and back and forth, I ended up getting 100% of my wallet funds back and about 20% of my earn account. The wallet funds came in crypto which was ideal but the earn funds came in cash, valued at the time of the Blockfi blowup, which just so happened to be at the very bottom of the market. All in all it cost me about a couple grand but like I said before, I am honestly happy that it happened. I probably wouldn't have moved my funds to a real cold wallet if this didn't happen, and something like this was for sure going to occur at some point. So it's good that it happened when it did as opposed to years from now when my stack was much larger. I consider the money that I lost the cost of a much needed education. Everything that went down is now baked into my numbers.

For a quick update: my average BTC price is $27k. ETH: $1720, LINK: $6.6, LTC: free rolling but own small amount, MATIC: $.8. Not bad, considering we're bumping up against an all time high for BTC right now at about $72k.

Now, onto the meat of what we're going to talk about today.

The Phantom Gourmet is a pretty legendary TV show that is on in the New England area every weekend for two hours starting at 10 AM. When it started in 1993, it gained a cult following immediately and was given a "Best of Boston" award by Boston Magazine in 1994. The basis of the show was that a secret shopper, or 'The Phantom' would go to restaurants/bars/chains all around the New England area and give them number grades on different aspects of their business, culminating in one overall grade. They would be very honest too, often times giving places bad reviews. They earned quite a reputation around here and I would bet that something like 90% plus of all people in the NE area are aware of the Phantom Gourmet. They would give the store owners stickers that they could put on their front window saying the "phantom was here" which generally meant that they had received a good review from the Phantom. (Their stickers and the whole look of it all was cool, too. The "phantom" was made to look like the phantom of the opera guy and when they showed him on the show, it would just be his purple arm. They took his anonymity seriously and still to this day, no one ever found out who it was. They made sure to always pay for their own meals, too. So the restaurants didn't even know they were serving a food critic).

And it had real tangible results. Getting a good review from the Phantom would increase a restaurants profile immediately. It was fairly common for people to see a new place favorably reviewed on there and check it out that weekend. I know I personally have been to at least a dozen places I wouldn't have otherwise gone to, just because they were featured on the PG. If you were out walking about, you might choose to check out a place based on nothing but the PG sticker on the front window. And on the other hand, getting a bad score from them could be a death sentence to a restaurant, especially a new one. 

In other words, people trusted and respected The Phantom Gourmet and their judgement. The fact that they gave out plenty of bad reviews made people realize that a good review meant something. It was scarce. A good review from The Phantom Gourmet had real, tangible, intrinsic value.

However, The Phantom Gourmet of today is a shell of itself. They stopped doing the letter grades completely and now the show is basically a two hour commercial. They do full features for a place and have the owner come in and talk all about the food, location, etc. They basically never say a single negative thing about anyone anymore. Ever. I was watching an episode this past weekend and actually got pretty sad at how cheesy and downright bad it was. I don't know if the restaurants actually pay to get on but I wouldn't be surprised. The show is, for all intents and purposed, a two hour long advertisement and pictures of cheesy food. 

So you might be wondering, that's a great little story Poogs, but what does it have to do with economics? Well, my friend, it perfectly encapsulates an economic 'theory' that I've been abstractly thinking about for a few years now. The best way to describe it in one sentence would be this: "anything that has value will have that value extracted from it at some point". Let me explain.

As I stated, the Phantom Gourmet built itself a well earned reputation over the years for being a trusted and honest eatery critic. They did everything right, filled a hole in the marketplace and were rewarded for it. Their reviews had value. And now they're cashing in on that value. No more report card, no more brutal honesty, just gushing, glowing reviews of everyone. They're trading on their old reputation but are not doing the necessary things to keep that reputation. And the results are obvious. It had such a strong reputation for so long that a sticker/endorsement from the PG still means something, I suppose, but not nearly as much as it used to. And a year from now, it will mean even less. Two years from now, even less still. They are extracting value from the PG's reputation and unless they go back to the old format, which they won't, eventually that value will run out.

You can find similar examples everywhere. One that springs to mind is trust in the police here in America. Decades ago, people really did trust the police. Whatever they said was thought to be true, period. They were given the benefit of the doubt. In other words, the word of a police officer had value. So how do you extract that value? You trade it for money or favors. Every time you extract, you damage the reputation, or decrease its value. A cop can lie and get away with it, ONLY because cops were known NOT to lie. However, every single time they do lie, they hurt their reputation and decrease its value. They're cashing in on, or extracting its value.

Another example is peoples trust in the dollar/trust in America in general. For a solid two hundred years, roughly, America had built itself a reputation of a fair, hard working, industry friendly country. We were the 'good guys' and we had a strong dollar, backed by actual gold, to show for it. However, ever since the 70's when we took ourselves off the gold standard, we've basically been slowly extracting value from our reputation. Or, put more precisely, had value extracted FROM us. Now it's really only a matter of time until it runs out.

It's easy to think of inflation as a sort of esoteric, intangible 'thing' that doesn't really effect you. "OK, so maybe the government does print money and just give it out to a select few. How does that effect me?" To answer that, think about exactly what is being done. Someone is printing paper, putting ink on it, and giving it to someone else (actually not even that. These days it's all electronic so all they do is change a line of code to show a 1 instead of a zero on a computer screen). The only reason anyone values that line of code or that piece of paper is because you will get up and go to work tomorrow. Think about it. If Americans weren't as productive as they are, those dollars would mean less. That is your value being extracted. It's robbery just with extra steps. It is literally no different than someone taking money right out of your pocket.

I was talking with a few people a couple weeks ago and the topic of the moon landing came up. Someone asked if I thought we really did land on the moon and I said that I think we did but if it was faked I wouldn't be shocked. But that we basically fake a moon landing every single day. The federal debt, the money printing, the 'housing crisis', the dollar bubble, real inflation being probably 10 times the "official" numbers. That's worse than pretending to land on the moon one time, in my opinion. It effects every single one of us, all the time. The reason housing is so expensive these days has very little to do with actual houses. It really isn't that housing got more expensive, it's more that the dollar/your purchasing power got weaker. Obviously there's more to it than that, including existing homeowners colluding to limit supply. But the main reason that housing, groceries, energy, basically everything is so expensive is largely due to an increase in the money supply, aka inflation. Something to keep in mind as we head into an election year.

Tha'ts about it for today. Check back soon, buy Bitcoin, store it yourself and talk soon!

A Back Of The Envelope BTC Price Prediction

There is certainly no shortage of Bitcoin price predictions to be found. There are seemingly endless data points and different things to look at. Prior price movement, macro environment risks, social risk like twitter mentions and Youtube subscribers. Moving averages, Stock to Flow Ratio, prior ROI's, RSI, MACD, Golden/Death crosses. And that's not even getting into the on-chain stuff which looks at actual transaction on the blockchain, what miners and exchanges are up to. You can do technical analysis for pretty much as long as you want. So I generally don't throw my hat into that ring too much. I love Bitcoin for my own personal reasons, largely dealing with how corrupt and stupid and evil the current system of money printing and its ensuing inflation is. Which is a big, round about way of transferring wealth from people with assets and 'suction to the system' to people without it. Inflation is literally no different than someone reaching into your pocket and taking your money. But it's so embedded into our system that people are just used to it now, which apart from being incredibly evil, is exactly how regimes collapse. 

Because Bitcoin solves this problem (among others), it is incredibly valuable for preserving wealth. The fact that it also can act as a currency is just a bonus in my opinion. You don't see people pay for things in gold bars, yet we all agree gold has value. No one pays for anything with a building, but we all agree that a building has value. Anyway, the dollar value of Bitcoin has gone from $.07 in 2010 to about $70k in 2024. That is a 1,000,000% increase. A one million percent increase in price in roughly 14 years. So I usually think price predictions are largely useless. It's volatile and the swings can be big, but just zoom out and you'll see that all it does is go up. (By the way, volatility in any asset largely is a good thing. It means it's alive. People are using it, buying and selling, trading it back and forth. Don't be afraid of volatility.)

Since we have a nice little surprise snow day here in the Northeast, I have a little time to myself and decided to do some back of the envelope math and come up with my own little price prediction. The metric I'll be using is from Ben Cowens Into The Cryptoverse Premium: BTC Logarithmic Regression Bands. It won't let me share a picture of the chart, but here's a link to a video of him explaining it 2 years ago with the chart up on the screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI1tFhop8Do&ab_channel=BenjaminCowen

So click on that and have it up in a second window as you read this. The green bar on the bottom is fit to thousands of data points and is "non bubble data". The red bar on the top is only fit to a few data points and is fit to "bubble data". The price on the left up and down axis is on a log scale, so it goes from .$01 to $1,000,000, but $1k is the middle. (If you don't already, you should read up and understand log vs linear scales if you want to understand charts like this a better. I know that helped me a bunch). The chart I have is similar to the one in the video except it's up to date and instead of solid green and red bars, there are three green lines and two red lines.  If you look at that chart, you can see that since its inception, Bitcoin spends a good chunk of its life in those green 'accumulation' phases where it still goes up, just slower, and then blasts off until it hits a blow off top somewhere in that upper red band region, or right up against it. You can super zoom in on any portion of it of my chart, so I thought it would be good to know exactly how many days we've spent in the green portions in each cycle.

I measured the days in each cycle starting from where the price entered the green zone and ending when it left the green zone and had a blow off top to the red zone. July 2019 was the only time it left the green zone and came back into it without having that red, blow off top until it left the green zone again in November 2020 and hit the red zone a few months later.

Going back to the very start of Bitcoin puts us at July 7th, 2010 when it came onto the scene squarely in the green zone. It bounced out of it briefly, came back down to the very top of it, then took off to its blow off top of $25 right under the red zone. It was in the green zone from July 7th 2010 to April 12th, 2011. 264 days. 

It came back down into the green zone on November 15th 2011, and then took off towards the middle of the red zone on February 13th, 2013 for a local top of about $800. 455 days in the green.

It stayed hot until March 16th, 2015 when it came back into the green accumulation zone and stayed in it until May 11th, 2017 when it broke out. 786 days.

This time is went all the way to the top of the red zone with a local top of about $17k, then came back into the green zone on November 20th, 2018. It stayed in the green until July 2019 where it poked its head out for about 3 months, then came back into the green. The next time it broke out, November 16 2020, it went to the very bottom of the red range, bouncing off it almost perfectly with a local top of about 55k. The time from when it first entered the green and had its real bounce out to the red 55k was 726 days.

We re-entered the green zone on May 9th, 2022, and we've been in or under it ever since. Right now, April 4th 2024, we are just under the very top of the green zone. So we've been in the green for 696 days so far.

So here are 'our days in the green to a breakout to the red' since Bitcoins inception: 264, 455, 786, 726, 696 plus. Going from 264 to 455 is a 72% move. Going from 455 to 786 is also a 73% move, almost exactly. But then you go from 786 to 726. It goes backwards. Now we're at 696 and counting.

There's a few different ways to look at that. First off, it's only 5 data points so it might not mean anything predictive at all. But if assume for a minute that it is meaningful, the way I see it that we sort of 'leveled off' our time in the green. It had a short period at first and then grew incrementally all the way up to 786 days. Now we might be coming down the other way a bit. I'll be very interested in what this next number comes in at, which we won't know for a while since the price needs to hit or come close to the red area for confirmation. If it ends up being 786, that would be exactly 90 days from today. To me, that feels like the max it could be. I can't imagine we spend more time in the green this cycle than ever before but of course I could be wrong. If we take an average of the four numbers, it would be 558, which was 138 days ago.

Either way, it looks incredibly bullish to me. Like I said in my last post, even though it might feel like we're a little heated right now, we're still very much in the green accumulation zone. And sure there could easily be another pullback, but I think there is no chance we don't get a push to at least close to the red zone this cycle, if not further. 

And now we get to the meat of the matter. What price is the red zone? Right now, the very bottom of the red zone is 190k. If we move it out 90 days, the bottom of the red zone is 200k. So I think we might actually touch 200k this cycle. We've spent just enough time in the green zone, we're almost poking out of it, and except for a couple small instances, every time we leave the green zone we don't stop going up until we hit the red zone (or come extremely close). Even if I'm half right, that puts us at 100k pretty easily. 

So my official low confidence prediction: BTC hits 100k this year and tops out somewhere around 200k in late 2024, early 2025. We'll check back on this post in 6 months and see how I did.

That's it for today. Buy Bitcoin, store it yourself and have a good day!

Active Investing, BTC ETF And Everything Else

 Hello again everyone. Sorry again for the long time in between posts. Quite a bit to get to so let's jump right in. I'm going to take a look at the crypto market a whole with the big ETF news among other things. Some stocks and macro market updates and some other stuff.

Quickly before we get into it though, remember I have a twitter account that you can follow for updates @poogsBLOG. You can also send me a message on there if you want to get in touch with me. 

The NFL season has come and gone and it was just about break even for my own action. Actually down slightly, including props. I know we've been through this before and I've gone back and forth a little bit on throwing in the towel or not. I actually updated my NFL prop models for the playoffs and Superbowl and did OK so I might still put some action in next year. But my big betting days are largely behind me (he said for the 7th time). I am still somewhat involved with a group though so my offer on account sharing still stands if it's really good.

Let's jump into what we're all really here for though and that is a discussion about Bitcoin, crypto in general, where I stand personally, what the market looks like and where I think it's going. First, an update on all my positions: (Today March 29th 2024 current prices are: BTC: $70k, ETH: $3480, LINK: $19, LTC: $105, Matic: $1).

The only crypto's I'm invested in are the aforementioned: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, Litecoin and Matic. Those are in order by my amount owned and how much I like them. My overall average BTC price is $25,500 which, not to flatter myself here, is fairly impressive. I've done a good job selling tops and scooping dips. My average buy price is $28750 and average sell price is $29050 with way too may buys and sells. I'm working on building up to a full coin and have been doing a lot less selling lately. My overall ROI on BTC is 177%.

For Ethereum, my overall average buy price is $1688. My average buy and average sell is almost exactly the same which is bad. I started out doing amazing with trading ETH but I made one big essential error. During the bear market, I thought ETH was for sure going at least sub $1k so I sold off a huge chunk at $1200 and missed the boat on getting back in under $1200. I did of course make a bunch of buys on the way up and having a $1688 average price is nothing to complain about right now, but I essentially sold at the bottom of the market, which, by the way, is not what you want to do. Overall ROI on ETH: 115%.

Next up we have Chainlink. LINK is my little alt-coin side piece. It's the only alt-coin that I truly believe in (as much as you can believe in an alt-coin) and I have done a really good job of holding steady with it and accumulating during the bear market. Thinking back, getting LINK at under $6 all the way up to September 2023 was a literal steal. You can read all about it elsewhere, but Chainlink provides a way to connect real world assets to the blockchain. Think smart contracts with real estate and buying/selling cars as well as live odds and scores. If you've ever bought or sold a piece of property, you know how BRUTAL the process is. So many forms, so many different people and entities involved all with their hand out. It's a big, slow, inefficient, dumb process that was put into place decades ago and seems oh-so ripe to be completely overhauled. Quite similar to taxi's and Ubers IMO. And blockchain technology is perfectly tailored for it. I'm about as close to a Bitcoin maxi as you can be without actually being one, but if there is one alt-coin I can get behind, (excluding ETH) it's Chainlink. Anyway, my overall average price for LINK is $6.55 and my LINK ROI is right about 200% with owning a decent amount.

Rounding out the list we have Litecoin and Matic. I own a tiny amount of LTC with an overall buy price of $44 and 110% ROI. For Matic, my overall buy price is $.812 and 30% ROI. I'm actually looking to mostly get out of my Matic position as I don't really care for the coin. However, I do like Litecoin and have always felt it was a little bit undervalued. Like I said before, LTC is basically a faster Bitcoin. It doesn't have the name value and might just be the single most unsexy alt-coin of all time, but it's a solid, reliable coin and I think it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of exposure to. Although, on the other hand, and I almost made a complete post about this, but when you put it up against BTC it trends mostly down. That's a very, very important piece of the crypto/alt-coin puzzle. Does it bleed against bitcoin? Almost all of them do. On Tradingview you can change the right hand up and down axis to anything. Its default is USD but if you change it to bitcoin, you can look at how anything has done against bitcoin. Tesla and Apple stock, gold, any alt-coin, put them up against bitcoin for pretty much any amount of time. I haven't found anything that beats it. So sometimes I wonder if it would be better to invest in literally nothing but bitcoin. Over the past 10ish years that would have been about as good as you can do. I like being a little bit spread out and I actually, very simply, enjoy the process of investing and trading and having different positions. But it's always in the back of my mind and I think it should be in every investors mind. If it bleeds against bitcoin, and your sole objective is to maximize wealth, what are you doing exactly?

The other thing I like to do with my five crypto's is trade them against each other. If you aren't into trading you can skip this paragraph as we're going to get into the weeds a tiny bit, but if you are then this might interest you. My average price for BUYING Bitcoin and SELLING Ethereum is .0737. My average price for buying ETH and selling BTC is .0662. Right now the current BTC:ETH price is about .0505. So what that means is it would cost you .0505 bitcoin to buy one ETH. Or, put another way, you can buy .0505 bitcoin with one ETH token. Whenever that number trends high, you want to be buying bitcoin and selling ETH. When it's low, you want to be doing the opposite. With my numbers being .0737 and .0662, that means that anytime the current price is between that, I make free money. And if I do it evenly, that is, buy and sell the same amount of BTC and ETH, I'm completely freerolling. I break even when the current number is anywhere outside of that range and I make money when it's in between them. So the goal there is to get as big of a spread as possible. This actually took me a little bit to really understand and I promise it isn't as complicated as it seems. You really need to have a good system of tracking everything to do this right. But if you're an active trader like me it's a no brainer strategy. Right now, at .0505, ETH is pretty "cheap" compared to Bitcoin. So I have been trading tiny amounts of bitcoin for ETH. I actually think it'll continue to drop as bitcoin dominance increases, but I like taking nibbles like this. When/if it bounces back the other way, which it typically does during the second halves of bull markets, I'll sell some ETH back to BTC. I do the same for BTC:LINK and ETH:LINK but it isn't really worth it to post my exact numbers. The system is the same though. Whenever the number is high you want to be buying the bigger asset and when it's low you want to be selling the bigger asset. Again, the goal is to get your spread as wide as possible.

Anyway, my overall ROI so far on all crypto right now is 146% which is obviously quite good. It's very volatile, and lots of people have a lot to say about it, but if you just stick around you are almost guaranteed to be rewarded. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself for not having weak hands and accumulating through the bear market. Maybe not as much as I should have but I at least never panic sold anything. Quite a few people bailed out completely during the bear market which is really the opposite of what you should be doing. Speaking of the bear market... so... that was it, huh? Clearly the bottom is in. And now that I've been solidly in this space for 3 plus full years, I feel like I have a bit of perspective. I came in right at the start of the last bull market, rode it all the way up to the top and right through the bottom. Now it looks like a real, full bull market is headed our way. But let's look back a little bit, shall we?

One thing that sticks out to me when I think about it is this: absolutely no one, and I mean NO ONE, called the bottom. If I'm wrong please show me, but I don't know of one single crypto or investing guy that called $15k as the bottom for BTC. Everyone and their mothers was calling for it to go lower. I think that is a terrific lesson to take away from the past couple years. NO ONE called $69k as the top last cycle, and even less than no one called $15k for the bottom. Even I fell for it a bit with my big ETH sell. And I think it's interesting, if you look back on my blog, you'll see the one and only time I showed even a hint of capitulation was when it was at that $15k bottom. And man, I gotta tell you, I will forever regret not absolutely backing up the truck and accumulating a bunch more at $15k in Nov/Dec 2022. It's all so much easier in hindsight but when you think about it, that really was the big opportunity, maybe the biggest one we'll see in our entire lives. That was only a little more than a year ago and it has essentially 5 x'd from there and feels like it's only going to continue. I didn't panic sell like a lot of people I know, but honestly for the rest of my life I think I will regret not getting to a full coin when it was well within reach and, even more crushing, was kind of all going to plan. 

I think the big lesson to takeaway from what we saw in the crypto markets this past cycle was that, again, NO ONE called the bounce. The closest I can remember anyone coming was my favorite youtube guy, Ben Cowen. He didn't call $15k as the bottom, but he did say that in prior bear markets everyone called for it to go lower, it will bounce back and we'll all look back and wish we had bought more. And he was the most right of anyone I follow. So I think it's important to remember that 'momentum bias' is absolutely a real thing. People always think that whatever the current trend is will continue far longer than it does. I think it's important to have a strategy and stick to it. So many people online and in my little circle completely capitulated and threw in the towel when BTC went under $20k. I didn't really fully grasp this until about a year ago, but apparently the bias in the general noob-investor population is that people tend to pile into an asset when it's on the way up and then panic sell when it starts to fall. Which is the exact opposite of what you want to be doing. I think my sports betting background helped me avoid this, but it is a little perplexing when I see just how fickle people can be. I remember being at a wedding couple years and over hearing someone talking about their experience getting into Dogecoin. Now mind you, this was a complete capital N N00b, but literally all he did was FOMO buy high and panic sell low. Like, over and over, just locking in loss after loss. It was astounding hearing him. Sometimes it's good to remember that these people are in the market with you. Not every single trade is against an algo-hedge-fund and the market isn't anywhere near perfectly efficient.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the big BTC news and definitely the biggest catalyst for the latest bull run: the spot BTC ETF approval. It's been discussed to death at this point and I meant to make a post when it happened, but essentially what this means is that now people (and more likely institutions) can purchase Bitcoin through a broker without having to actually buy and store Bitcoin. It's a way to get exposure to BTC without having to deal with actually buying it. This is obviously HUGE for Bitcoin and the crypto market in general. It finally gives Bitcoin the seal of approval for big time investors and institutions and makes it way more feasible for them to purchase it. It puts on big time buy-side pressure and I think that lightning fast move from $40k to $70k was pretty clearly due to the ETF approval. 

I think it's quite amazing how fast the narrative has changed on Bitcoin. It wasn't that long ago that BTC was considered a joke and some random, silly 'internet money' that people only used to buy drugs and hire hitmen with. Now you have literal countries buying up billions of dollars worth at a time. CNBC has BTC, ETH and Solana price updates on their screen right next to the S&P and the Dow Jones like it's been there the whole time. (By the way, I find it quite interesting how much of a weird institution-y backing Solana seems to have. I always see those three: BTC, ETH and Solana. Feels a bit fishy, honestly. None of what I say is financial advice, but I'd stay away from Solana. Something about it feels very weird and future-rug-pully to me).

Speaking of CNBC, I watch their morning show sometimes in the background when I'm getting ready and they had Gary Gensler on not that long ago talking about BTC and the ETF approval. Gensler is the head of the SEC and has always been anti-crypto (although he won't really come out and admit that). They were talking about Bitcoin and one of the hosts mentioned how it's a ledger that can be used for smart contracts and about the blockchain more broadly, and he said something to effect of "does anyone really want to invest in something just because of the way they set up their books?" Think about that for a second. It's a pretty revealing statement. He CLEARLY does not even remotely understand it, at all. And even more damming, like I say all the time, he doesn't even know that he doesn't understand it. It reminds me of a great little nugget I remember reading a few years ago. There was some kind of investing forum and Paul Krugman was talking. Paul Krugman is an establishment acadmic economist, the kind of guy that will smugly tell you that 'actually you can just print as much money as you want!' He's actually most known for this Nostradamus-esque quote: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." He is, of course, an anti-bitcoin guy and at this forum when someone asked him about it, he said something like "well we already have internet money" and held up his credit card "so I don't know what bitcoin solves exactly". Like, can you imagine someone pretending to be some sort of expert saying that? I think it shows that we're still early. These dinosaurs are all over the financial space, fighting their hardest against crypto. Once they get out and some younger, more BTC friendly guys take their places, we might see even faster and faster adoption. 

Oh and one last thing about the ETF approval. The actual way it was rolled out was hilarious and perfectly on brand for the SEC. Everyone knew it was coming and was just waiting for the official word. A couple days before the actual announcement, the official SEC twitter account tweeted out a statement that the ETF was approved. The BTC price immediately spiked up from $44k to $48k. Then, the SEC posted that they had been hacked and the ETF was NOT approved. THEN, a few days later, they posted that now, in fact, the ETF WAS approved. After they made a fuss about being "hacked" and wanting to go after who ever did it, Elon Musk commented that the SEC twitter account did not even have two factor authentication set up and it wasn't so much of a "hack" as someone in the SEC jumping the gun, most likely. So a complete clown show. Perfectly on brand for the SEC. A member of the SEC penned a really good op-ed that I can't seem to find now about how terrible of a job they did with rolling this out. She said that by dragging the process out and delaying and denying approval over and over, they ended up doing exactly what they tried not to do, which was draw undo focus onto it and make it a circus. The SEC shouldn't be in the business of telling Americans what they can and cannot do with their money. They're supposed to be referees, not commissioners. I thought it was a great showcase at how inept the traditional financial landscape is, how capricious and downright petty it all is.

By the way, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to buy BTC than through an ETF. It quite literally defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. I'm not opposed to the existence of the ETF per se and the brokers are of course actually buying and storing bitcoin "for you", but the whole point of bitcoin is that it is peer to peer, no bank or institution needed. And that's to say nothing about the premium you're going to pay in order to have someone else purchase, store and manage your bitcoin when you could pretty easily do it yourself. But I suppose I'd rather own ETF bitcoin as opposed to no bitcoin at all. But if you're sharp enough to be here, you're certainly sharp enough to buy a cold storage wallet and buy and store it yourself. Also quite interesting: when the official ETF news hit the price actually went down first for a few days. Seemed like a buy the rumor sell the news event until people saw the inflows and the amount of BTC actually being scooped up. And then the price went from 45k to 70k rather quickly. 

I know I'm a little bit all over the place here but let's shift focus a tiny bit and look at the macro environment and where I think the price of BTC is headed. Jay Powell at the Fed recently had a press conference where they announced that they were staying put on the federal funds rate at about 5.25%, which was what everyone pretty much expected. As insidious as the Federal Reserve is, I have to say, Jay Powell has done a decent job. He's been pretty clear about what they're doing and has resisted pressure to cut rates. That means they still have rate cuts in their pocket which is a good thing for markets in general, but especially for more 'risk-on' assets like BTC. I recently starting paying for some premium access tools from Ben Cowen called "Into The Cryptoverse Premium" and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. Namely, right now we're barely above 'fair valuation' for the overall crypto market cap which correlates almost perfectly with bitcoin. In other words, we aren't even remotely overheated right now. In other other words, it looks to me like there is still plenty of room to run for this bull market. Personally, it feels like 100k will be the next big number to claim and I could see this current 60-70k level being the next floor. The next halving is coming up in about 20 days. If you pull up a bitcoin chart and look at the price action for the couple years after a halving it's always basically straight up. And the reason for that is simple and makes perfect sense. The halving refers to the event that happens roughly every four years (or more accurately every 210k blocks mined). The amount of bitcoin that miners receive for mining gets cut in two. So the rate of new supply coming into the market gets halved which makes bitcoin more scarce which drives up the price. Add in a rate cut or two on top of it and it all looks very, very bullish to me. 

People always talk about the 'risk' of investing in Bitcoin but I like to flip that around. What's the risk of NOT investing in Bitcoin? In less than a day, you could open a Robinhood account, schedule weekly deposits and weekly purchases of Bitcoin. Every month or so, transfer to your cold wallet. You barely need to do anything. With rampant inflation, trillions in federal debt, I think it's more risky to not do that than it is to do it. I think there is a hole in the beanie bag chair that is the US dollar. We're printing more money than ever, faster than ever. The federal debt right now is $34.6 TRILLION and just going straight up. In 2008 it was $15 Trillion. So that's over 100% increase in about 15 years. Our debt is 123% of our GDP! It's almost an admission that the dollar is worthless. If there is one simple thing to remember about economics, it is that you cannot violate the basic laws of reality, no matter how many charts you make or how many acronyms you invent. You cannot get more out of something than you put in. You can't take more than you produce and that is exactly what we're doing. Printing money will work for a while but it will not work forever. ALL fiat currencies eventually end up worthless. Literally all of them. It's just a matter of time. Now, is that time horizon 10 years? 50? 100? I really don't know and I don't think anyone else does either. But it will happen someday. And I think Bitcoin is the perfect replacement. So what is the risk of NOT investing at least a small amount in it? Michael Saylor has a fantastic quote you've probably heard before but it's worth repeating. "Everyone will buy Bitcoin at the price they deserve." Worth thinking about.

Wrapping things up here, I heard a great interview the other day that I'd like to share. It was an interview with this guy Aswath Damodaran, a "Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University and is known in the finance industry as the “Dean of Valuation”". He isn't a lifelong professor though obviously and had a bunch of real world experience. He's a real trader.  Here is the link to the full interview.

They were talking about active investing/trading VS just parking your money into an index fund and barely checking. He said something like "assume you're an active trader who reads earnings reports, doing your own valuations, doing the work of active investing. And on your deathbed, someone shows you your portfolio versus someone who just bought an index fund and left it alone. If the returns were similar, how would you feel? If it would bother you, don't be an active investor. Just buy the index fund and leave it alone." I found that quite interesting. Because for me, I actually enjoy it. Investing doesn't feel like work to me and it really wouldn't bother me if someone with an index fund beat me in 50 years. Just something to think about.

I suppose I'll wrap it up here. I still have a book review I want to do as I've been reading a lot of good ones recently. Next post will for sure be sooner than this one was. Until then, stack Bitcoin, store it yourself and have a good day!

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!