Pro sports bettors meet in Vegas

A group of top sports bettors met recently in Las Vegas and the Sun ran an interesting interview with one of the participants. The interviewee wanted to keep a low profile for obvious reasons:

A tableau reminiscent of that classic exchange played out this weekend in a well-appointed conference room at a Strip resort, where a small group of sports bettors had gathered for a private meeting to network and exchange information on their trade.

One guest speaker, going by the pseudonym “Mr. X,” runs a major sports betting syndicate that wagers large sums of money through offshore sports books as well as in Las Vegas.

One thing that surprised me is the rate of return expected by pro sports bettors. I expected something more than 1% of total amount wagered, but this is what is reported:

Overall, Mr. X said, his syndicate “holds,” or wins, about 1 percent of the amount of money it puts into action. To put that in perspective, if you bet $1,000 a week for 17 weeks of a football season and had as much success as this group of high-level professional gamblers, you could expect to pocket a grand total of $170. This sports betting stuff truly is a game of inches.

Sure, 1 percent of a big fleet of new cars can be quite a nice score. But even that rate of return requires an enormous amount of work, according to Mr. X. His team completes much of the “heavy lifting” in analyzing the forthcoming football season by June, then relies on statistical models throughout the season itself.

Typically during football season, Tuesday is a big day for placing early wagers. But the action kicks into high gear Thursday through Sunday, when Mr. X sleeps about five hours a day and works the other 19 hours.

“Thursday and Friday, we’re betting all day every day,” Mr. X said. “That’s when we start doing a lot of ‘halves’ (first-half lines), which start coming up (on betting boards). Last year we were betting a lot of college totals on Fridays because there’s so much other stuff you can be doing Saturday morning. On Saturdays, you can really get money down, particularly if you have a network.”

I really enjoy interviews like this that give the reader a small window into the world of pro sports betting. I’m looking for a video interview along the same lines – if anyone knows of one please forward me the info. Thanks!

Sports betting systems don’t work. That is to say, sports betting systems that are openly for sale on the internet won’t work in the long term. The problem is that if a system is successful, it will attract a lot of users. When too many people start using a system, the sportsbooks adjust their lines to compensate for the predictive effect of the system rendering it useless. For example, if a system recommends betting on the Celtics -9 over the Knicks, the line will quickly move to Celtics -10 as the users of the system start piling on their wagers, rendering the initial pick obsolete. This may be extremely obvious to some people, but based on the number of sports betting systems I see advertised regularly, it seems that the message hasn’t gotten out to everyone quite yet.

This is not to say that sports betting systems can never work. The fun part about sports betting is that, unlike casino gambling, there is no deterministic advantage for the house. Like the stock market, in sports betting smart money takes dumb money. The issue is that if you did have a successful sports betting system, you would really have very little incentive to share it with anyone else. A person could make more money off of the successful sports picks generated by their system than they would selling those picks and, eventually, killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Again, I know this seems painfully obvious to many, but it’s news to some and a message worth repeating.

This idea was nicely summed up on a recent thread over at Black Hat SEO:

Bookies change the odds (or point spread) based on the amount bet. If your system works and you sell it, and people make money on it regularly, they will bet more and more until you start shifting the odds and it will no longer work. If it really works you are much better off if you keep it a secret and use it to bet yourself.

The following video from our youtube friend parlayhelp does a great job of explaining the games played by purveyors of sports betting systems and why the potential buyer should beware: