Speaker 1: Good afternoon. You're listening to Gambling with an Edge.
Speaker 2: Now Here are your hosts, Bob Dancer and Richard Munchkin.
Speaker 3: Hey everybody, and welcome. It's been quite a while since
our last episode, but I am happy to be back
and I am here today with Elihu Feistel, and we
are here to talk about his new book, Beyond the
Odds and whatever other topics we end up talking about.
So elahu, welcome to Gambling with an Edge.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me. It's always fun. You never
know where you'll end up talking, so sometimes you get
right off the road, which is fascinating.
Speaker 3: I know we are going to get a lot of
questions about where is Bob, And.
Speaker 1: To tell you the truth, I don't know where Bob is.
Speaker 3: I kept trying to get a hold of him to
this episode, and but I never heard back. So but
I wanted to talk to you about the new book,
Beyond the Odds, and I have a lot of questions because,
as some of our listeners know and maybe others do not,
I got dragged out of retirement about a year ago
by my longtime partner and convinced to get into sports betting.
So I've been betting sports full time for the last year,
and and so the book I thought was came at
a great time for me. And so that's what we're
going to talk about. You had said at the beginning
that this is not really a book for beginners.
Speaker 2: No, it it starts. It's more built for people who
already win and are probably members of an existing syndicate.
If you're a beginner, Conquering Risk is a much better
book to teach some basic basic analytics. This is more
of a way if you have the tools to win,
how you can win more or price more markets or
get more volume.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would agree with that, and I so I
want to start with well, actually chapter one has a
very interesting title, which is exploiting efficient market theory without handicapping?
So can we talk about that? Can we talk about
efficient market theory? And then how can we beat that
without handicapping?
Speaker 2: Yes? Go ahead, ask.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, why don't you we start with what is
efficient market theory?
Speaker 2: All right? Efficient market theory is the idea that closing
lines are generally pretty accurate. So, for example, if an
NFL line closes at seven, you know, have a seven
point favorite, then pretty close to half the time that
team is going to cover seven points, you know, excluding pushes,
half the time, the dog will cover half the time,
the favor will cover, and even if it hasn't done
that in the past, going forward, it will. And that's
a very critical concept because twenty years ago you could
get value betting all the dogs. You know, if you
bet every big dog in the NFL more than twenty
years ago, you I thin think they ust to hit
at a fifty five percent rate. But as time has evolved,
the markets have become more efficient and strategies that used
to work in the past no longer. Will. You know,
Monday night bet the dog and under doesn't work anymore.
You know the Super Bowl that used to build the
middle of Super Bowl pretty consistently, where you bet the
dog on the spread and the favorite on the money
line and play for the middle. But all these things,
as more and more smart money comes, the closing lines
and the markets become more efficient. And the way answer
key works it relies on this. So, just like with
black soles relying on the prices of the commodity being
correct to price youre derivatives, answer key assumes that the
price of the parent line, the game spread in the
game total are correct fifty to fifty markets, and then
you use that with the pass results to price derivatives.
Speaker 3: Okay, so this is true for the NFL, and I
would assume for Major League Baseball is another one that
I would think is pretty efficient.
Speaker 1: But what about other sports?
Speaker 2: So the idea generally works in all sports college basketball,
college football, NFL, NBA, but you have it is best
when there are not team specific tendencies. So, for example,
in baseball, if you try to use answer key to
price a first inning prom for example, will there be
a run score in the first inning, that is a
horrible matchup, a horrible use of answer key, because that
is not a good The money line for the game
and the total for the game are not very predictive
of if they'll be a run in the first inning.
You need to price that. You need to say, well,
how good is their starting pitcher? How good you are
the first three batters on each side? Are they home
run hitters? Or is it a small ball lineup? So
in some cases it's bad. Another case where it doesn't
work terribly well is in NBA because the NBA the
teams will run different lineups. Actually, I knew this was
a problem abnormally distributed. Pointed this out why it didn't
work in NBA, and that's you know, a seven point
favorite has a different lineup that may run at different
times of the game, so not all seven point favorites
are the same. Whereas in football, especially in the NFL,
you can pretty much say all seven point favorites on
a total forty five are pretty similar. Their distribution of
scoring is going to be very similar. Not perfect, but
good enough to beat the markets.
Speaker 3: So kind of the first thing that people find when
they're getting into sports betting is top down betting, which
is all so trying to exploit this idea of the
efficient market by grabbing lines that haven't moved yet at
some books, right, But what you're talking about really is
more thinking a level deeper about what is some other
thing that is affected by this that maybe the book
is not pricing correctly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so most sports books use charts that are outdated,
like they had some person who just looked at it
and made a guess. For example, when you look at
NFL money lines, there's a chart that says seven point favorite,
here's the two money lines, and the charts don't even
look at totals and anyone who's looked at NFL money
lines with you know, fairly closely will see that if
you have a seven point favorite, that's going to be
a bigger favorite on the money line with a low
total and a high total. Same thing in NBA. Ten
point difference on an NBA total makes a very substantial
difference on the money line, so you may find spots.
In fact, I think I have a couple bets tonight
where I'm gonna end up betting the dog on the
money line if I can get a good price.
Speaker 3: So we are recording this on Monday the twenty third.
So are we talking about the the NFL game tonight?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they are actually two Monday nine games tonight. And
I just now, anytime now, anytime I announce something i'm betting,
it almost always loses. So I'll have to make sure
no one is able to bet this until after it's played.
But let's see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I won't release this until until you've already lost.
Speaker 2: Yes, so I see that if you can get Jacksonville
at plus two twenty three, I think that's cheap because
the fair price should be about two to one. And
same thing with Washington getting Washington at three hundred, and
it should be about two seventy. So it's it's surprising
that even on NFL, money lines are not very efficient.
So the spreads and totals are extremely efficient, and the
best way to look at the efficiency is to look
at how much can you bet in one click, and
if it's a big number, it's going to be efficient.
And I'm just going to log into bookmaker and see
what their limits are for NFL just for a comparison
of money lines to spreads and totals. Yeah, we go
to NFL right now. If I want to bet the spread,
I can bet Jacksonville plus five and a half of
risking one hundred and eleven thousand. If I want to
bet the total, I can bet twenty two thousand. If
I want to bet the money line, I can still
risk twenty thousand. So that's so the money lines are
about as efficient as totals, but the money line as
a derivative using the spread and the total, I think
is beatable in pretty much all sports for the main
game money lines.
Speaker 3: And I would assume that NFL is better at it
than other sports, but it's still not as good as
it should be.
Speaker 2: I agree NFL derivatives are generally a lot better priced
than college football derivatives. For example, if I'm going to
bet the NFL stuff, I want it either bet it
early in the day or but the day before, whereas
college football you can probably beat it thirty minutes to post.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I see you know people there are it seems
like a lot of people are originating college football, especially totals,
and it's it's really hard to know what's going on
when they often do not agree with each other.
Speaker 2: And there's so much rampant manipulation as well. So you
have groups. You have groups that want to bet a
number and they'll push it point two points so that
they could play the paper heads that are following the
market makers. So they like over forty four, so they
vetted down to forty three and then bet over forty three,
which they like even more. So they pay a few
thousand and juice to move Bookmaker and Pinnacle and circa.
And they come smashing back for ten times as much,
ten times as much equity. So they if they paid
one thousand in juice, they may want to bet one
hundred thousands of the paper heads on it. Wow, And
then so they paid, they paid a one percent tax
to get a half point or full point. So in
terms of an investment on the return, it makes perfect
sense to do it.
Speaker 3: Of course it does. But so here's one thing I
don't understand. So you will see that Pinnacle and Bookmaker
have have moved down to forty three, but all of
the wreck books here in the US, you know, Fan Duel, DraftKings,
all of those guys are still at forty four, and they're.
Speaker 2: Not taking sharp bets and the sharp markets don't really
apply to them. So this is another problem with the
legalized industry when they call her, and this creates all
kinds of headaches for them as well. When you kick
out anyone with the pulse, how can you tell what
the right number is? You can copy the off shores,
but the offshores might might be getting manipulated, so they don't.
Speaker 1: Seem to be copying the off shores.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they have to choose do we copy blindly
or do we wait for bets to come in. And
if you don't have a known group of smart players
to watch, you don't know what the right side is.
So these books, like you know, Pinnacle and Bookmaker and
even Circa, they take a bet and they know how
smart their players are. And when you have hundreds of
smart people telling you what the right answer is, it's
pretty easy to get to the right answer quickly or
to choose to be off of it if you want.
You know, there's situations when you may not want to
deal the best number. But the draftings, especially when these
draftings as an example, because they're easy to beat up on.
If they lower your limit, everyone's limits to thirty eight dollars,
who can beat them? Then all they're left with are
people who they don't they haven't profiled, that they haven't
recognized as winners, plus the squares. So they throw a
number up, they don't know if it's good. They don't
care if it's good, because the losing players are going
to lose no matter what number you put up, and
anyone who wins they'll toss. But the risk to that
is when you have people coming in that are unassessed
and they can come in and actually abuse your bad lines.
Speaker 3: Well, and not only that, the sharp players can move
your lines in the wrong direction for thirty eight dollars.
Speaker 2: Well, generally, I don't think they're going to move off
of any thirty eight dollar bets. If if I were
running DraftKings and I saw one hundred guys with thirty
eight dollars limits are betting me, I'd say I better
cut their limits down to two dollars.
Speaker 1: Don't give them ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you brought up the word collared, So can
you explain what you mean by collard?
Speaker 2: So normally a market making book has house limits that
everyone can bet. So I just read you earlier the
house limits for tonight's Monday night football games a bookmaker,
everyone can bet. Going back to the spread, any person
can bet to win one hundred thousand on tonight's NFL games.
If you are Billy Walters, if you are a great winner,
if you're Floyd Madweather, whoever you are, you're going to
have at least those house limits of one hundred thousand dollars.
And if you're up a million dollars against them, you're
still gonna have limits of one hundred thousand dollars. And
because these limits are big, every smart person knows that
they can bet here, and they can bet as probably
as much as they want to eat here. When a
book collers you, they are making it creating an inefficiency
in the market by lowering how much you can bet.
So DraftKings might take one hundred thousand from known losers,
but if you have a precluded to win, they made lawyer.
I used thirty eight dollars because that's my limit on
the Super Bowl last year. So any you know people
one hundred thousand, these smart people can bet thirty eight dollars.
So in fact, you see a lot on Twitter one
of the ways you can recognize losing players as they
post big bets at DraftKings.
Speaker 3: And you also talk about these auto movers. Yes, so
this is a bot right that utters aligned.
Speaker 2: An algorithm run by a market making sports book, and
its purpose is to prevent them from taking two bets
at the same price from a smart person. So if
you wanted to bet Jacksonville plus five and a half
minus one eleven, and say you want you wanted to
get half a million down, if you bet that first
one hundred thousand and your account's profile, that's going to
move that number. It's going to automatically change, and on
a super liquid market it might move four cents. Maybe
it move from minus one eleven to minus one fifteen.
That would be consistent with the twenty percent auto move
and what that does is if I want to bet
or I have to pay a higher price, I can't
just repeat bet and quickly get in a half a
million at once. And pretty much at least all the
offshore market makers use this in circa since they don't
take you know, automatic I don't think they let you
re bet without at least adjusting the line, so they
have to do their banially without an auto move. But
it's still the same idea that if a smart player
is firing into you, you don't want to give them
the same price twice. They have to pay a penalty
for every successive bet.
Speaker 3: So how can the sharp player move the book maker
and Pinnacle line? If they're taking one hundred thousand on
the game, how can they move it for only, you know,
a few thousand dollars?
Speaker 2: And they can't move it on game day. It has
to be before game day. So the earlier it is
in the week, the lower the limits are. The spread
limits might be five thousand on Sunday night and the
total might just be a couple thousand, so it's much
cheaper to move it on a Sunday night or even
a Monday than it is on game day, and the
college football limits are much lower than the NFL. Let's see,
if we're dealing Monday, we're always I'm not gonna see
what they have right now. So looking at the Army
Temple game three days away, they're taking three thousand on
the side, a thousand on a total, and well up
to a base you of a thousand on the money line.
So if you're paying basically five percent of that is
a tax if you put in a if you put
in a so you put in a three thousand dollars bet,
you're paying one hundred and fifty and juice to get
one auto move. So let's say you do that twice
at Bookmaker twice, at Pinnacle twice, at bet online, you're
paying a thousand and juice, and if you have a
sharp acount, you might move the price.
Speaker 3: I was at bet bash. You were at bet bats,
and I don't know if you attended. Well, maybe I
shouldn't talk about that.
Speaker 2: I think you could talk I think anything about bashlist
fairy game here. I don't think Spanky would mind.
Speaker 3: Okay, well it was it was Spanky who basically said,
you know, I mean the way he sounded, he sounded
like a ninja like that he likes to bet, you know,
an hour before a game and not move the market.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, and that's correct. So there's there's two styles.
If you bet into a market maker, if you're betting
a lot into these books, you will move the line.
If you bet into the paper heads, the paper heads
are following the market makers, that doesn't tend to move
the line nearly as much. And if you have one
hundred accounts at these paper heads and each of them
takes five hundred dollars, then you can get you know,
you can get fifty thousand without doing anything to the market.
I see, or I mean, some of these books will move,
and some of them might actually lay a little bit off,
but in general most of them don't.
Speaker 1: But the other thing, the other.
Speaker 3: Thing that always perplexed me was when the Pinnacle and
book maker are below the market of everybody else. There
are other sharp people who know that. Why aren't they
going and betting that when they know that that must
be good?
Speaker 2: Well are you saying so? Maybe I don't understand your example.
Let's say the market makers are at three and the
US legal are at four. What do you contend to
sharp players to do in that situation.
Speaker 3: Well, let's make it better than that. Let's let's say
that that the recreational books are at three and a
half and Pinnacle and book Maker are at two and
a half.
Speaker 2: Okay, now I correct.
Speaker 1: The top the top down.
Speaker 3: People are gonna say, oh, I should take this three
and a half because Pinnacle and book Maker are sharp.
Speaker 1: But I would think the sharp.
Speaker 3: Guys would know no, that that's actually the good side
is to bet the two and a half.
Speaker 2: So in that case, if the market makers were two
and a half, yeah, if you believe that, If you
believe those are the market makers, that's my source of truth.
And I would say the true number, the fifty to
fifty numbers two and a half. And if you bet
either side of two and a half laying juice, you
have a bad bet.
Speaker 1: So what I'm saying is.
Speaker 3: The the sharp guys, no, we'll look at that and
say the line is really three and that's been manipulated
down to two and a half because sharp guys are
busy betting it at paper heads.
Speaker 2: Okay, maybe that's you have much more situational I think
to predict, it's very difficult to predict when manipulation is happening.
You know, when you see a move early, it might
be a sharp bet or it might be a manipulation.
And another one of the games that happens, Especially with totals,
you have competing groups that are trying to figure out
you have. So you see, you have three differn groups
and they all have their opinion on what the total is.
Generally they mostly agree. So if Group AA starts manipulating
down they's at one, They're going to push it down
to one thirty nine because I think the role number
is one forty three. They bet it down to one
forty you know, one thirty nine. Another group sees it, no,
they because they think it's one forty four. They know
it's a manipulation and they can come in and front
run the other group and feed off of their manipulation
before the original group gets it.
Speaker 1: In, right. That's exactly what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you have a strong you can't if you're
going to front run manipulation, you have to have your
own opinion. You can't just rely on the market because
you don't know if that move is a legit move
or if it's a manipulation move.
Speaker 1: Got it? Got it now?
Speaker 2: I don't have opinions. I have no opinions, so I
can't spot manipulation. I can't tell it's manipulation until the
end of the day.
Speaker 3: Well, wait, you must have opinions because you're betting, so
you I have no opinions.
Speaker 2: I have no handicapping. It's just efficient market theory. So
I do zero handicapping.
Speaker 1: Well, I would call.
Speaker 3: Obtaining the right price of a derivative better price than
the books. I would call that handicapping.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's just the math problem. I view handicapping as
dissecting personal team information and status to try to come
up with an opinion that's other than fifty to fifty
on something.
Speaker 1: Gotcha? Okay, So that that sort of brings us to.
Speaker 3: One very good place to look for these things is
correlated parlays. Yes, and the casinos both love correlated parlays
and hate them. I think they they love the dumb
players who bet same game parlays where they're paying a
ton of Jews, but hate it when sharp players sort
of figure out the same game parlay that is correlated
that they didn't realize was correlates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's actually two different ways to exploit same
game parlays. One is you find a pair of bets
where there's simply no correlation. There's no correlation priced into it.
And an example of that would be when a book
lets you bet the favorite in the over. The closer
those two numbers are to each other, the greater the
correlation will be. If you're betting minus forty and over
forty four, the correlation is almost one hundred percent. If
you're betting minus three, you know, over forty two, maybe
there's a five percent correlation. There's still a small correlation,
but not enough to overcome the juice. So if a book,
so a book has to guess where do I want
to take it? I want to take I want to
take it more than you know, three and forty two. Yeah,
I want him to parley that forty and forty four.
I don't somewhere in the middle, because every time they
reject a bet, they're losing money. So should they take
six and forty four? Yeah? Should they take ten and
forty four? Yeah? Should they take fifteen and forty four?
And it's just a math problem, which is, you know,
how strong is a correlation? So the strongest way a
book can do is to actually just use a figure
out what the correlation is in price the four parlis correctly,
but in most cases sportsbooks don't have the math teams
in place to do this correctly for every possible wager.
Why what Why? So to get it's not enough to
get a data scientist. You have to get number crunchers
that also have expertise in a sport and also have
expertise in betting. If you try to use data scientists
in this industry that are missing a component, you can
have some disasters. You can just you can get you
can come with something worse than old school book making.
And remember, I think Canter Gaming they got a bunch
of wall I believe it was Canter who had a
bunch of Wall Street quants come in and try to
price in game, and they built their own model and
they I think they call it Midas or something very pompous,
and they just got utterly buried. And it's not the
first time I've seen quants just get destroyed. So it's
if you don't have all three and they don't come cheaply.
To get good mathematicians and sports betting, you need, like
I said, a variety of skills, and they're not very common.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and they they could they could just go
out and and bet themselves and and maybe make more
more money than the book could afford to pay them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes, So you have a situation where either they
don't try to price a correlation and we're just gonna
assume it's zero no correlation for everything, and we're just
gonna cut off at a certain point, or you see,
I'm gonna call what's called bad correlation math. If you
look at Draftking same game parlays, they overcharge. They assume
every when they're you're betting things that are positively correlated,
they're gonna pay you less. They drastically cut the payout,
whereas they don't increase the pad enough for negatively correlated events.
So they just you know, it's it's safe to do
it that way, but it's not very consumer friendly. And
then you have some teams that do actually a pretty
good job of pricing their their same game products. So
you know, I would say FanDuel does probably a better
than average job on their same game parties of actually
paying what the true probabilities are. But again, it takes
a lot of money and commitment to trying to do
that well.
Speaker 3: It's very encouraging to hear that so many of them
are so bad at it. Yes, okay, But so now
I want to talk about something that is the bane
of everyone's existence, I think, and that is adverse selection.
Speaker 1: Can we start with what is adverse selection?
Speaker 2: Adverse selection is you're looking for good plays, and things
that stand out are often as often from just noise
as they are a successful strategy. So if I look
in the past and I say I think I have
an approach that in the past has done well, and
then you carry that forward to the future, suddenly it
doesn't work as well because it's you're confusing noise with predictability.
So if you aren't very careful in your methodologies, you're
going to find things that may have worn in the
past that have no prayer of whinning going forward and
then lose horribly. I don't know if that's what you're
getting at.
Speaker 3: Well, it's that, but I'm also in there somewhere. Is
also this term market resistance.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, market resistance. Yes, the more you can bet,
the more likely you are to be wrong.
Speaker 1: Right, So what do you do well?
Speaker 2: You pay attention? Well, one way to measure to assess
if you have if you think you're gonna win going forward,
So is to look at your closing line value. If
you're making a good play in GM, more often than not,
the market will move your way. If I think minus
three is a one to ten is a good play,
If it really is a good play, and this set
of plays is good for the long term, it's very
likely to close at minus three minus one fifteen or
minus three minus one twenty. But if I'm you know,
in real time, as I'm betting this stuff and tracking
it week to week, I see that these plays at
minus three are one ten are closing pretty close to
the same price I bet them. Then, even if I
were winning, that's a pretty pretty good warning sign that
I'm not going to win going forward.
Speaker 3: What about so when you have a market that's really
efficient like the NFL or MLB, great, what about a
market that maybe is not as efficient, like MMA or
something like that.
Speaker 1: Where so here here's an example.
Speaker 3: Let's say that you have five MMA bets and you
don't want to bet them in the beginning of the week,
right and now it's you know, Friday, and you're ready
to bet, and you look and like four out of
the five, the line has moved the way you thought
it should, and one of them has gone. Instead of
minus one ten, it's now plus one twenty five.
Speaker 2: The market gave you the middle finger.
Speaker 3: Yes, so do you still bet it? Or do you
say my model's better than their model, because that's not
a really efficient market.
Speaker 2: That's that's a very tough question, and that I guess
that depends on how your model works and how confident
you are in it. Now. Some people, some of the
MMA modelers, are very They know more than the market.
They know how the training camps are going, they know
about their injuries, they know about tendencies, they have fight stats,
and these people can probably again ignore the market. But
MMA is a weird market, and that it doesn't appear
as efficient as a lot of the other stuff. Right,
there are people who can win an MMA who don't
care about the market. They don't care about the price.
They just know the right side and they know that
some of these markets are horribly mispriced. Yeah, so it's
MMA is kind of is a weird. It's weird compared
to the stuff I do. I wouldn't try using answer
key on on MMA.
Speaker 3: Actually, So we've heard this term a lot already answer key.
What is answer key?
Speaker 2: Answer key is an algorithm to generate a SAMP based
on a parent price, and that you can then ask
questions from the You can answer questions by looking at
that sample. For example, tonight's NFL game, If I'm gonna
use answer key on let's see. So right now Cincinnati
is playing Washington tonight. Cincinnati is a seven point favorite
minus one twenty four take back one oh four, and
the total is forty six. So I could generate a sample, well,
you know, four or five hundred games that best describe
that matchup, and in that sample, I would have minus
seven covering about fifty four percent and plus seven covering
about forty six percent. Again just because of the implied
win rates of the money lines, and in that sample,
I would want half the games to go over forty
six have to go under, and I would want the
mean spreads to be in the mean total to be
similar for the sample. So I generate this. You generate
a sample, and then you can add ask questions about
the game. So, in that game, what are the odds
of a team scoring three times in a row? And
I could look at my data set and count and
get a pretty good. Guess what is the fair first
half line? Where is the fair first half total? What's
the average team total? So you can use your sample
to price just about any derivative. And as long as
the game is good for lining up with answer key,
it works very well. If it works especially well in
football because you have non normal distributions. It works less
well in college basketball, but football is really the strongest area.
Speaker 3: Okay, So let's talking about maintaining your accounts. I mean,
this is I think one of the best chapters in
the book and applies to anybody who knows nothing about math,
even right. I mean, this is what everyone cares about
is how do I not get collared?
Speaker 2: And this is such a problem for me that I
mostly use movers now, so I don't use many of
my own accounts. I can bet into any market maker,
which I generally don't want to do, And then I
have other people who I just say, you know, when
you're working with a mover, you say here's what I want,
here's how much I want, and they just try to
get it for you, and if they fill it, you
get the whole amount, or you may get less. Usually
they're going to use prices that are available at Buckeye
or Metallic and uh, it's it's it's a different world
from the solo operator, like how many how many people
are you working with in your or you have a
group or you mostly solo?
Speaker 1: I have a group, Yeah, okay, And.
Speaker 2: Well it's most operate. Most individuals are betting into their
betting into the draftings. They're betting into Caesars and then
maybe betting into Bavada and some of the offstores. But
most of those recreational books, you only get one bite
at the apple. So when you're at a different level,
you're not worried about the w rec books. You're not
trying to beat. You're not trying to beat the these
soft books. You're actually trying to hit bigger you know,
somewhat bigger markets. But you know, as I discussed in
the book, the best way to keep accounts is to
lose money. Well, yes, so if you lose money and
get no closing line value, every book in the world
is going to love you. So how do you generate
a plus EV strategy that has the best of it
long term but can look horrible short term? And that's
you know, one of the ways to do that is
is high variance strategies, so you're gonna lose early or
you're gonna blow it up. And if you blow it up, okay,
or you may lose early, you blow it up and
then blow it up again. So right, parlays are a
good way, whether they're correlated or round robins of other plays.
The books are getting resistant to the round robins. A
couple of years ago, when I first started it, I
think they were laughing at me, and they were, you know,
just giving me higher limits because I was doing it. Uh,
you can still do it to a degree, but it's
not quite the open season it was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So did I hear you? Right?
Speaker 3: You are not trying to bet into the recreational books
like Draft Kings and Fan Duel and right, not just
because you can't bet enough or.
Speaker 2: Uh well one, I okay, I'm basically collared everywhere for
in my accounts my own name. I don't. But you
have a moving for you, I don't. I personally don't bear,
I don't multi account. The movers think it's so much
easier to bet into buckeye skins and metallic skins. That
is the legals. Uh, It's it's kind of an interesting
problem that the legals are causing for themselves. They're help
they're helping the college bookies by banning everyone.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, okay, anything that you think we haven't covered
that I should be asking that, I'm forgetting about.
Speaker 2: Well, it's your show.
Speaker 3: I oh, well, you know, I guess you know you
do talk about abusing the bonuses, so I guess we
should cover that a little bit with these you know bonuses, Right,
you want to bet them on long shots. But aren't
the casinos sort of smart enough to know that that
people who bet them on long shots?
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're smart enough to know that.
What you have seen is the behavior of the legal
sportsbooks has been changing, so they're offering smaller and smaller.
They're trying to offer bonuses that are less lucrative to
professional players. So if you're a professional player, the bigger
the bonus, the better. And you ever bet Rivers and
Caesars both had five thousand dollars risk free bets. So
if you give me a risk free bet for five thousand,
that's worth just as much as twenty six hundred cast
for me pretty easily. What you're seeing now is much
smaller amounts two hundred dollars or bet five dollars and
get two hundred dollars in free bets. So they're looking
at it from a cost per acquisition. If I can
get a person by giving him two hundred dollars in
free stuff, I spend some money for advertising. I spent
two hundred to bring him in the door, and that's much.
And you're less likely to get a professional player doing
it that way than you are with the five thousand dollars.
So if you get the five thousand dollars bonus, you
pay twenty six hundred dollars to acquire a vampire who's
going to suck your blood out.
Speaker 3: You know, if you want to squeeze out some extra
ev and you bet on a longer shot. Do the
casinos recognize that?
Speaker 2: Do they? So? The most I don't know how how
closely the US books look at bonuses, but the offshores
they look for something that's There's there's two behaviors you
see from professional players with bonusing. One is you see
them playing the long shot. Two as you see them
going all in. So say they with the with the
offshorees general, you don't have a risk free bet. You
have what's called a free play. You don't have to
lose that first bet to get the free bet. So
if you say you send one thousand dollars and you
get you have a thousand dollars deposit plus one thousand
dollars free play. What you'll often see the professional players
do is they will bet both on the same play,
so that if they lose, they lose their first bet
on a long shot, they lose their deposit, they lose
their free play, and now they have no rollover to meet.
And by finding a way to evade the rollover, that's
how you break the bonuses. And books are catching on
to this. This is why you're again seeing the a
lot of the bonusing, a lot of weirdness in the
way they're handling bonuses. Levada has a rule that you
can't bet more than ten percent of your bonus amount
on any play, and if you do, they just I
think they're conface getting balances. And wow, I think bet
us has a rule that you know, no more than
ten percent or deposit can count towards any rouleover.
Speaker 3: Well that us also has a rule that you can't
bet anything higher than plus one point forty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think Ben online has that has a rule,
so that's similar. So the idea of capping where you
can bet a free play is to minimize how much equity.
You know, your average players, your normal players are going
to bet minus one twenty plus one twenty in that range.
They're not looking to you know, it's just it's a gamble.
Whereas the you know, the math nerds were coming after
with all our calculators.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is breakthrough theory.
Speaker 2: Breakthrough theory is a way to bet more. The idea is,
if you have an edge, how do I get as
much down on it as possible? And if you have
if you're better at pricing something, you want to come
at it from every possible way you can. That means
you may want to price multiple markets. You may want
to include parlays, you may want to include teasers, party cards,
even any way you can. You can come at it
to get more than just you can't that you can
on a straight bet. And this you know, round robins
are most of the books still take eighteen round robins.
You know, if you if you go to bet us
still take an eighteen round robin. So they recently they
recently cut my limits to twenty five grocery dollars on parlays.
But if I put an eighteen round robin by threes,
that's fifty six different bets, So you know, now you start,
and so you start to get some volume down and
every dollar bet, if you bet it by threes, is
actually put into play three times. So if you if
you risk a thousand dollars in a round robin by threes,
you have the equivalent action of three thousand in at risk.
So if I had eight teams, you know with a
round robbin of one thousand dollars, that three thousand divided
by eight, you know I have four hundred dollars or
is that risk effective risk of the team even though
my limits were twenty five rosary dollars. So you can
do So you can do some, and if they don't
limit you, or if they take higher ones, you can
do a lot more. I think campy books taken by tens,
drafting takes by twenty caesars, takes by twenty fives. So
if you get an account that isn't limited, a twenty
five team round robin by threes I think is twenty
three hundred legs, so forty two dollars a leg gets
you one hundred thousand dollars swing.
Speaker 1: Wow. But I have to say this about Ron Robbins.
Speaker 3: The record keeping is an incredible pain in the ass,
and actually for me just the record keeping in general
seems to be one of the most challenging parts of
this business.
Speaker 2: So there are two parts of the record keeping. There
is making sure you don't over beet. That is, how
much effective risk do I have on this? And then
there's how much money did I make at the end.
And of the two, making sure you don't over better,
I think is much more important. So when my when
my group and we're betting something, the way we notate
a round robin is you select the plays, you say
how much is that risk on the whole round robin? So,
say if I have a one hundred thousand dollars round robin
on twenty teams by threes, that would be a three
hundred thousand at risk divided by twenty. I would trint
that as a fifteen thousand dollars straight wage ring of
those teams. So and then if I wanted more than fifteen,
I would add it in. But that would be my
starting point. And usually when we're if you're betting you
want to hit, you do your round robins first, and
so then then you fill up the remainder. Now you
can get really convoluted if you bet a round robin
and you either win a couple legs earlier or lose
a couple legs early. So if I, for example, if
you have a twenty team round robin and you lose
four selections on Thursday and Friday, now you have have
your effective act. Your effective risk went from fifteen thousand
to a team to maybe ten. So you may have
to say, oh, look, i'm short. I need to put
in another round robin with the more stuff to get
back to where I want to be. But there, yeah,
go ahead, Well.
Speaker 1: No, I'm just yeah, it's just the record keeping.
Speaker 3: But a point you make in the book is that
a lot of people are over betting and maybe not
realizing that they're over betting.
Speaker 2: No faster path to help.
Speaker 1: How can they so?
Speaker 3: Is it because they're overestimating their edge or or just
not things?
Speaker 2: One is they don't overestimate their edge, And two sometimes
they just don't even think about it. They don't sit
back and say, take a minute, what is the optimal
amount for me to bet here? Given the risk I want.
So if you have time to breathe, you say what
Kelly frocks? And am I comfortable using? And this is
this becomes a nothing question later if you keep winning,
your money grows, Kelly becomes irrelevant in most cases, but
it's very important early. And what having a fractional Kelly
does is it it protects you from yourself and from
your mistakes if you overestimate your edge or say you
mess up. Have you ever doubled bet a game, bet
twice as much as you intended to.
Speaker 3: I haven't done that, but I've I've done other things
where I realized after the fact ooh I think, I
think I bet I've done that.
Speaker 2: Have you bet something that was that had a correlation
that you didn't think about? For example, if you bet
a first half over and a first quarter over, then
there might be a fifty percent correlation, and if you
treated those as independent bets, you probably over bet.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: The other thing that happens to me is I bet it,
and my partners bet it, and then we go back
and compare notes and realize, oh, you know, we we
got more on this than we and then we go
is it adverse selection?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: Not only did we over bet, but maybe it's.
Speaker 2: A better bet. So one thing, if you're if you
have multiple people betting, I would strongly recommend it to
use Google Drive. Google Drive so we have a Google Drive.
We have every game, and generally we have a captain.
So there's a person who's the captain on a weekend
and they get they get to call all the shots,
so no one bets unless the captain signs off or
delegates a certain part of the card to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, what we learned from this is you have to
attach an amount of risk for that one person too,
because if you're sending it to three different people, yeah,
you know, you can't give them all like the top
end because they could all three fill it, and so
you have to kind of make some decisions about I
think this guy can get this much down and this
guy can maybe get that much.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's a it's a juggling act.
Speaker 3: This is in blackjack too, when you have a blackjack
team and people are in different sometimes in different countries,
and then they were ported back and three guys all
lost on the same night and suddenly you.
Speaker 2: Know your session bankroll is too small in that country. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've so Normally when I put in an order, I'll
say I'll cap the amount this much up to this.
Uh and if you if you know how much the
sky can get, you can arrange it. And if you're
not betting weird stuff, are you mainly betting size and totals?
Speaker 3: We're betting weird stuff, I mean, but we're also betting
sides and totals.
Speaker 2: Well, betting weird stuff. I mean, I joke about betting
team totals like FCS team totals. But man, you get
these weird markets. It's just it's so much easier to
and despite me losing every bit I've ever posted.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we just have to look at your posts
and bet the opposite.
Speaker 2: Then yeah, that's it. That's all right.
Speaker 3: Well great, I uh, this has been great, really informative
for me.
Speaker 1: I don't know about everybody else, but but I appreciate
it a lot.
Speaker 3: So yeah, any any final thoughts anything that that you
want to leave our audience with.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm thinking about baccarat right now, so.
Speaker 3: Okara, Oh well wait a minute, what are you thinking
about baccarat?
Speaker 2: I'm just wondering how much how much more tolerant the
casinos are relative to blackjack on like the side bets.
Speaker 3: Well, the problem with the side bets is it's kind
of really obvious what you're doing.
Speaker 2: And they still let you do it.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, that's true, that is true.
Speaker 3: But you know, I have a good friend who was
playing a side bet on Bakara and his BP was
a particular Asian ethnicity, and when he would come over
to bet, he was playing two tables at once, and
when he would come over, he would talk to this
girl on the table that was also of the same ethnicity,
and when they barred him, they barred the girl and
she was just she was just a djen you know,
that happened to be, you know, and they put him
together because they were from the same country, whereas the
guy actually counting the side bet was a white guy.
That's file so, but but I will say this, my
experience is that anytime you move to a game other
than blackjack, and even if you're on blackjack, if you're
not counting cards, you get way more leeway then, you know.
Speaker 1: And the other thing I would say is.
Speaker 3: As you move away from Las Vegas, you know, the
further away you get, the casino IQ goes down.
Speaker 2: Considerably. Ye.
Speaker 3: So, but yeah, Okra, it's a it's out there.
Speaker 2: I was kind of shocked at the bank requirements to
play Blazing sevens.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah yeah, and it's such a boring play.
Speaker 2: I mean you win one hand, like one side bed
every four or five hours. Yeah, I mean yeah, but
the I think one of my scouts reported hard rock
Head has a five hundred dollar limit on it, so
that's like one thousand dollars an hour game. If you
can get heads up until they needcap you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you're You're better off building a bot and
do it online.
Speaker 1: You know, have a Bob does it for.
Speaker 2: You can do it online. I couldn't know that.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I haven't scouted in years, but there used to be
some you know, online live games that you know had
side bets.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, okay, yeah, well it's I ought to pick
your brain more later.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, all right, Well, I guess that's it for today.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 3: I want to thank you and that's it. So I'm
not bob ed answers, so I'm not going to go
tell everybody to hit lots of royal flushes.
Speaker 1: Have a good day, everybody. Hey, thanks for having me
Rich absolutely well, there you have it.
Speaker 3: I want to thank Ela Hugh Foistel for being my
guest today and remind you the book we were talking
about is called Beyond the Odds, Efficient Market Theory and
Tools of Warfare for the Modern Sports Better and his
other book if you haven't read it, I also would
recommend that it is called Conquering Attacking Wall Street and Vegas.
So pick those two up and until next time. I
will see you then