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Sounds like y'all could use an update on my exploits.
Promos
The risk/free bet promos are better described as second-chance bets. If your bet loses, you get a wager credit of the same bet amount. But can’t cash it out, and it doesn't come back with the payout. You have to wager it, within as little as a week. You only keep the winnings of a bet made with bonus credit. If the credit bet loses, you get nothing, and lose the original stake.
That's hardly risk-free, but it does boost your expected value. The more you bet, and the higher the odds, the more you increase the expected value. Of course you also escalate the likelihood of losing the bet. So you should still bet within your budget.
Some of the sites offer either the second-chance wager up to $1,000 or so or a straight wager credit of $200. I took the latter where I could.
Sportsbooks
I tried FanDuel, PointsBet, and Caesars. FanDuel has the sharpest usability. Pointsbet may have the best kickbacks, but I need to investigate that. Caesars has a pretty terrible platform. The odds don't refresh on the mobile app, and the desktop browser version just boots me out after a few seconds. No response from customer service on that. Any one of the three can have the most competitive odds. Sometimes only one of the three offers a particular parlay.
The hardest part is tabbing and clicking through different sportsbooks to compare real time odds. In some ways sportsbooks are much slicker than ADWs, but in other ways, the ADWs are more professional. For example, it's much easier to evaluate your wager history with an ADW. Two out of three of my sportsbooks won't even let me download wager history. WTF?
Wagers & odds
Much of the action is an exercise in odds shopping. I figure "the public," filtered through sportsbooks, gets aggregate odds right enough, with an substantial margin of error. Given a basic opinion on an event, you try to find the best odds for your proposition among the sportsbooks.
I like to take a stand on an event just before it starts, then pounce on odds movement after the first 1/8 or 1/6 of the game or so. The odds often jump substantially by then, maybe after the first score, and I'll either double down on my initial opinion or try to collar the other side and win both bets in the middle. It also hedges an extreme outcome on either end.
That said, I don't factor steam and sharp money per se. I just assume them away with the aggregate odds movement and look for opportunities at face value. Sort of like giving up on trying to discern whether a surprise chalky runner is taking sharp money for good reason or just getting underlaid by the crowd.
Instead of plunking down big wagers at the onset of the event, I'll play several small bets—more like buying tranches of exotics rather than a big win bet.
I don't like odds-on propositions, so I'm biased toward underdogs, and simple parlays with favorites. My kind of parlay is a winner plus the over/under. That turns an odds-on favorite into something closer to 2/1, without getting into goofy bets on particular scores and player performances.
Sometimes I can find a simple enough proposition up to 5/1 or so, but it's hard to form an plausible opinion for much more than that. Although I have found a few not-impossible 15/1 propositions worth a few bucks, and hit one. Put another way, I've had to recalibrate a longshot as 5/1 rather than 15/1, and 2/1 isn't particularly chalky.
Applying wisdom from the track
Putting aside reckless propositions and parlays, I do feel like more sports bettors have less imagination and risk tolerance than longshot horse race bettors. I try to look at an event and find a plausible outcome with good odds in a similar way I'd try to make a case for a 15/1 shot being more likely to cash than that. Seems like more of the sports betting world is trying to grind out profits like horseplayers would with short-priced favorites. Conventional wisdom says the crowds are biased toward favorites and high scoring as well.
If nothing else, this has certainly re-invigorated my interest in sports. The years I've toiled on race betting has afforded keen insight into sports betting, even though I'm otherwise an entry-level/intermediate student of the sports I bet (NFL and NHL).
I was joking about cricket, but I have followed World Cup more than I ever would with the opportunity to bet a little on it. Compelling way to learn a new sport.
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