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Old 11-22-2022, 09:46 AM   #1
Aerocraft67
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Sports betting resources for new Maryland punter

Sports betting arrives in Maryland tomorrow. Thought I'd ask y'all for recommendations about resources. Basically, the equivalents of PaceAdvantage, DRF, and Twinspires for other sports.

Are there a forums you recommend? I'm inclined to follow NFL and NHL. At least until I learn the rules of cricket.

How about betting-oriented coverage and analysis? Who are the Aragonas, Beers, Milkowskis, and Serlings out there?

What sportsbooks do you like? Maryland has the following so far:
  • BetMGM
  • Caesars
  • FanDuel
  • DraftKings
  • PointsBet
  • Barstool/Penn
  • BetRivers
  • Caesars and MGM are the premier brands with traditional on-site sportsbooks. Caesars bought William Hill then divested the European assets. Has a site at CapitalOne arena in DC. MGM has lots of formal partnerships with major league teams.
  • FanDuel and DraftKings came out of daily fantasy. FanDuel shares an owner with Timeform, Betfair, and others. I'm a TimeformUS customer, but haven't received any incentives. I did get a Fanduel solicitation via TVG—used their ADW back when they had free TFUS PPs. I dabbled with DFS at DK, seemed competent enough.
  • PointsBet is an Australian shop that owns Premier Turf Club, a longtime presence here at PA with a favorable following. Hasn't been available to me in Maryland, but I get the sense they have rebates achievable by mere mortals. Does PointsBet have a similar approach with competitive viggorish or rebates? Question for another thread, but will I get PTC in Maryland now?
  • Just read an article in the NY Times about Barstool. Sounds more sordid than "edgy." Pass.
  • BetRivers seems provincial with no exceptional incentives. Pass.

Otherwise, seems like you want several accounts to fetch the best odds (and grab the sign-up incentives). I have three ADWs, but rarely use two of them, so don't want to get carried away with multiple accounts. Leaning toward Caesars, Fanduel, and PointsBet.

Any other resources you recommend? Odds aggregators, handle trackers?

I perused a few simple sports betting how-to books. It's like a world of short-priced win bets out there. Hard to bet a little to win a lot.

I doubt I'll abandon my penchant for clever verticals and horse racing's charming anachronism. But It'd be nice to rise out of obscurity to wager with more mass awareness from time to time.
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Old 11-22-2022, 10:55 AM   #2
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You should have a really nice advantage in the beginning by milking all of the bonuses and promos that you can.

After that it will be much tougher to be profitable

Not at all easy……so many different angles

You should develop a betting style that you are comfy with and never feel like you are out on an edge

Hope that helps
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Old 11-22-2022, 11:01 AM   #3
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First thing, if I were you I would research all the incentives to open new accounts and take advantage of all the ones with the best perks. Make sure you read all of the fine print, twice. Free bets and credits usually come with strings attached, some require churning, others opting in and some have conditions.


I have to make bets for a friend because he lives in California,
he thought he had a $500 free bet coming on a 50% match of any NBA wager up to $1000, in free bets. A free bet is a bet on the house but you only keep profits. It said the free bet will appear once the original bet was settled.
He bet his $1,000 on a first round play-off series with low odds like a vs seed match up, looking for an easy free bet.


His free bet never showed up, he did not read all the fine print. The fine print said all qualifying bets needed to be settled by a fixed date that only gave it 5 days or so. So betting a play-off series does not qualify for generating a free bet in that circumstance.



I never bet cricket, but if you are betting the 4 major sports from my limited experience I would use Fan Duel. You can bet money line, point spreads, run lines, goal lines, and make your own spread. You can also parlay basketball to football, to hockey, etc. You can also do in game betting by money line and spread, while parlaying them.


Fan Duel also allows you to check spreads without logging in, they also allow parlaying division winners, something you can't do on Bet MGM.


I will see what incentives Fan Duel has and report back.
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Old 11-22-2022, 11:08 AM   #4
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The new customer promotions bounce all around, Fan Duel only has a $75 free bet for a referral by November 24th. That is if a member like me invites you to join we both get a $75 free bet.
I will go check Bet MGM on my friend's account.


That $75 free bet just requires a $10 deposit that is bet on Fan Duel.




Bet MGM's free bets for referrals require you refer people in the same state and they won't even give an amount. Bet MGM has other quirky crap where they only offer promotions to certain states. I would eliminate them from consideration. No other promotions currently for new customers.

Last edited by Inner Dirt; 11-22-2022 at 11:20 AM.
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Old 11-28-2022, 01:14 PM   #5
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Opportunity: the basic pre-requisite for long term chronic gamblers
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Old 11-28-2022, 01:40 PM   #6
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Opportunity: the basic pre-requisite for long term chronic gamblers

Thanks for your helpful post. I have gambled ever since by great grandfather taught me how to play blackjack and poker when I was 7. I think he was trying to teach me a lesson, but it failed. When I visited he would have a bunch of chores lined up and there were plenty as him and my great grandma were slowing down, and they lived on some country acreage. I pretty much lost back most of what I earned, but that did not stop me from reinvesting
the day's wages after sundown.


It gave me an edge when I started gambling against my peers. I know for a fact I am the mother load ahead when in comes to "friendly" card games.


People are going to gamble on sports anyway. Might as well make it legal, keep the money in the USA, regulate and tax those that profit from it.
The first illegal gambling I did was when I was 14, playing the parlay cards my step dad got from the lunch truck driver. Then there was Al the bartender who would take basketball or football bets. I never played anything that was just chance, but plenty of people played the numbers before legal state lotteries come around.
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Old 11-28-2022, 08:12 PM   #7
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[QUOTE=Inner Dirt;2843968 I have gambled ever since by great grandfather taught me how to play blackjack and poker when I was 7.[/QUOTE]
That is YOU ...someone who has spent TIME LEARNING a craft, not the rank and file Chevy truck driving beer drinking uneducated fools
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Old 11-29-2022, 11:42 AM   #8
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That is YOU ...someone who has spent TIME LEARNING a craft, not the rank and file Chevy truck driving beer drinking uneducated fools

I used to have a Chevy truck and drink beer. You can buy lotto tickets everywhere, why not sports betting? The take out on lotto is like 50%, I think playing parlays with what a person budgets for lotto tickets is a lot more entertaining. I could never understand people who enjoy gambling on games that require no skill. When I used to go to Sin City back in the day
I would kill the time between races playing video poker, I don't get the slot players.
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Old 11-29-2022, 02:17 PM   #9
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not the rank and file Chevy truck driving beer drinking uneducated fools
elitist...nice...

you sound like a Republican there...hanging out at the all-white country club...LMAO
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Old 12-02-2022, 12:27 PM   #10
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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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Old 12-02-2022, 12:58 PM   #11
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Sounds like y'all could use an update on my exploits.

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.

Decades ago when I lived in SoCal, I went to sportsbooks in Tijuana Mexico
by myself and with various friends. I went with a new guy at work and made the mistake of letting him drive. California was easily behind the rest of the USA in horse wagering options and I knew this guy liked horses, so I figured
the latest he would want to stay is midnight. He wasn't an educated gambler,
never looked at a form, all his bets were based on odds, like boxing the 1st and 3rd choice in an exacta. From 10 am (East coast T-bred simulcasts) and 11pm (Last west coast harness race) he rarely cashes a ticket. He is broke at 11pm.


He asked borrow money as all the places to get cash are closed. The guy did stop and fill up before we walked across and refused gas money, so I figure I owe him a loan. I didn't think there was anything left to bet on. I asked him how much he needed and why. He said "Jai Alai starts in 15 minutes."


I loaned him $100, I would have said I was broke but he knew better. 13 hours of Coronas and strong Margaritas and I had enough. I figured he would bet the whole thing on an exacta (yes Jai Alai bets were like betting horses) Not to happen the SOB made $2 bets and made that $100
last the whole 3+ hours on the Jai Lai matches.


Needless to say I never went to TJ with that guy again, and I thought you were serious talking about cricket.
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Old 12-02-2022, 01:04 PM   #12
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Back to betting sites. If you have multiple accounts not bouncing back and forth with probably get you better promotions trying to lure you back if you have been away a while. A few of them used to offer deposit matching, with you keeping the stake if it was bet once. Those seem to have went away.



If you are making a lot of single game bets, odds shopping makes sense, with
parlays of 3 and up it doesn't seem to matter much.
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Old 12-02-2022, 02:39 PM   #13
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Needless to say I never went to TJ with that guy again, and I thought you were serious talking about cricket.
Funny thing is, the other obscure sport I considered joking with was jai alai. That's the go-to. Cricket just seemed slightly more plausible to make the gag. And I really would like to learn about it someday.

There's always snooker or darts!
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Old 12-02-2022, 11:49 PM   #14
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Fan Duel has snooker, cricket, darts, but no Jai Alai, that sucks, I wanted to relive some bad memories.
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