Requiem for a Sports Bettor
 

https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/1...ill-new-jersey


Long article but interesting, for sports bettors, especially those at the new casinos in NJ.

A friend of mine, who is a professional sports bettor in Nevada, sent it to me.

nobody gone give their money to you whether you wanna bet sports, or anything else these days.

i have plenty of experience at this having had 2 good goes in Nevada betting sports and one good run betting on horse racing.

if you have anything good, it never lasts forever, no matter what you do in life.

That is an awesome article.

Back when I played BJ for a living... just after the stone age... they used to use flat rocks for cards. Took two days to shuffle.

But seriously, folks.

Back when I played BJ professionally, I understood that a casino is a profit-making endeavor. They didn't owe me a living, and I had no problem when the barred me.

And when I was barred from a joint, I always tried to leave on pleasant terms. In fact, several casino managers apologized when the barred me.

But sports betting...
...is a different game.

If you make a bet, the bookmaker has the ability to adjust the line to get money on the other side.

Not saying that they owe anyone a living, but they have means to let the winning bettor play and still make plenty of money.

Instead of barring them, cut their betting time off early!

For example, for a Sunday NFL game, don't allow them to wager after (say) Saturday at noon. That gives the bookmaker a chance to adjust.

Or make it even worse and cut them off at 48 hours before the event. This way it becomes a "handicap" but allows the player to continue betting.

The last time I heard that joke I fell off my dinosaur. :D

So, "breakage" was a big deal even back then!

Thanks for posting -- fun piece. Given that getting cut off is a perennial problem for sports bettors, somewhat difficult to think of as exactly a pressing human rights issue. But the cowardice of places like Wm. Hill, who would only win an infinitesimal fraction less than the tsunami of $ it takes in if they operated like U.S. books is funny. Story also raises the issue of how many people are getting the hook who are (potentially losing) high rollers. The common spectacle of seeing casinos boot obviously non-counting players for being card-counters is a longstanding subject of humor for counters.

One possibly valuable takeway from this -- if W.H. isn't allowing it's lines to be hammered into greater accuracy by sharps, they must be incredibly easy pickings for recreational players.

in horses, you could get a guy that is a high roller at the casino to beard for you.

but with the sports, i only had about 5 minutes to beat the ticker on the lineups to get down, i didn't have time to send a beard in.

Enjoyed reading the article. Thanks for posting it.

Could you please explain the reasoning behind your conclusion?

If horse racing suddenly decided to severely restrict the wager sizes of the game's best players...won't that make the toteboard odds much more lucrative for the game's recreational bettors? Similarly...disallowing the large wagers of the sharpest sports bettors allows the odds-lines on the games to be a lot less accurate, and much easier to beat, than they would otherwise be.

My thinking was exactly as Thaskalos says above, and the CEO from Pinny and sports bettor and author Jeff Ma say in the article -- why not take the action of the sharps and use it as signal to tweak your line, as many books have always done? It sounds as though all these corporate betting shops which now dominate so much of the legal sports betting market in the U.S. are taking the same tack re sharp bettors, but iased on what I read here, it sounds like W.H. has the dumbest response on this issue. Most of these shops offer a nearly identical number on the bets they offer, but a difference of half of point is not uncommon. How meaninful is that? Of course someone would have to do the research, but it would be interesting to see if a large sample would reveal long-term, profitable differences between, say W.H. and Draft Kings, on the accuracy of their lines. And of course it could also be sliced and diced any way you want.

My overall take re Wm. Hill, and this piece confirms it, is that they haven't stayed on top of the exponentially increasing sophistication of bettors per math/computer models. The company lost a billion dollars a couple of years back on their fixed-odds betting operation in the UK, and may have to shut it all down. Wondering who thinks you can make money offering fixed-odds betting anywhere anyone has access to a computer.

AH... Now I get your point.

I thought you were saying that a banned player could use it to his advantage. Now I understand.

A decade ago a couple of off-shore bookies that I know of were always on the lookout for consistent, small winners. They'd track those, and bet as they bet but for more money.

Of course, very few players qualified. LOL

As a general rule, most people who play with bookies have to be losing players, otherwise the book loses money on them. Philanthropic they are not.

This article reads as pure bullshit.


I don't believe a single word of it. Too easy. Too much convenience in happenings.

Still play BJ? I assume you count. Not really much of a reason to play BJ if one doesn't count.

Have not played in almost 2 decades.

I barely know the rules any more. LOL

Yes, I was a card counter. Boy, could I tell you stories.

(Most would be true. LOL)