Photo: USA Today Sports

Gambling on the NFL is big business, especially after a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down a federal ban on sports betting. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 46.6 million people will place a bet on the NFL this year, representing nearly one out of every five Americans of legal gambling age. As a result, there's been an explosion in sports betting content, most of which promises to make you a more profitable bettor. Given that backdrop, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Fortunately, you can trust me when I promise that I'm not going to make you a more profitable sports bettor. And neither will any of those other columns. It's essentially impossible for any written column to do so, for a number of reasons I detailed here. (I'm not saying it's impossible to be profitable betting on the NFL, just that it's impossible to get there thanks to a weekly picks column.)

This column's animating philosophy is not to make betting more profitable but to make betting more entertaining. And maybe along the way, we can make it a bit less unprofitable in the process, discussing how to find bets where the house's edge is smaller, how to manage your bankroll, and how to dramatically increase your return on investment in any family or office pick pools (because Dave in HR and Sarah in accounting are much softer marks than Caesar's and MGM).

If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join me as we discuss the weekly Odds and Ends.

Checking In On The Unders...

It's been two weeks since I noted that the "Under" bets were having a phenomenal season but cautioned that Vegas updates to new information, so even if there was an edge, it was probably gone already. The unders went 8-7 in Week 8 (and had Cincinnati attempted a 2-point conversion on its final touchdown, they might have gone 7-7-1), which makes them 15-14 since I predicted they'd go back to being about a .500 bet going forward.

Yet another reminder that "(specific bet) has gone (high winning percentage) over the last (smallish sample size)" is ultimately meaningless. Vegas is good at what it does.

Now, About Those Office Pools

Back in Week 2, I went over the basics of how to put yourself in the best position to win your office pick pool. The three basic principles were: make sure you got all your picks in (ideally, just submit random picks early in the week and go back to change them later in the week), take advantage of line movement (if the lines in your pick pool lock early, then any time the line moves in the direction of a team over the course of the week always pick that team in your pool), and make as many office-contrarian picks as you can (because it's easier to differentiate yourself from the pack if you... differentiate yourself from the pack).

All those principles are great! If you're already doing those things, keep doing those things. But with eight weeks down, it's a good time to take stock of where things stand and start deciding if you need to adjust your approach to be more or less risk-averse.

There are going to be 272 games played this season (assuming your office runs a separate pool for the playoffs). 118 of them are gone, which leaves 154 to go. After this week, we'll be as close to halfway through the season as we're going to get (131 down, 141 to go, or 48% of the way through). This means that if someone is 3% ahead of you at the end of this week, you'll need to outperform them by about 3% the rest of the way to secure a victory. (And likewise, if you have a 3% edge, your competitors will need to beat you by 3% down the stretch to catch you.)

Take this time to identify your primary competitors. If possible, find out if anyone else in your pool is also relatively sharp. The easiest way to do this is to watch the teams that you bet solely because of line movement and see if anyone else in your pool is also picking the same teams every week. If so, it's probably not a coincidence, they probably know what they're doing.

Beating other sharp managers can be tricky, but you can kick that can down the road for a bit and focus in the meantime on putting more distance between yourself and the non-sharp managers in your office. The last quarter of the season can be devoted to mind games against the other leaders (provided you're fortunate enough to find yourself among them).

If you're down big by now, you're going to have to focus even harder on contrarianism. The more you're down, the more important it is you're picking teams your competitors are not. If you're up big, you want to do the opposite and focus on picking the popular teams because your competitors can't make up ground if you pick the same teams. Also, at this point, make sure you're tailoring your idea of "contrarian" and "chalk" to your actual competitors. If someone is 20 games back, it doesn't matter what they pick because they're probably not catching up. Only concern yourself with those who have a realistic chance of winning it all.

Sometimes two of your "rules of thumb" will be in conflict. Most often, this will be because there's line movement in the direction of the "popular team" in the office. If the standings are relatively close, it's best to pick conservatively still at this point and let your "follow line movement" rule trump the "pick against the home team" rule. With good line management, anticipate being able to pick about 55% of games correctly instead of 50%. If that kind of edge is going to be enough to have you among the leaders eight weeks from now, stick with it. If you're so far down that even a 5% edge won't be enough, start taking bigger risks.

Remember, once you're out of the money, it doesn't matter where you finish. If payouts go three deep, 4th place is no better than 40th. When high-variance strategies fail, they fail bad. But it's better to try and fail than to just coast along and delay the inevitable, so once you fall far enough behind that embracing variance becomes your only hope of catching up, make the switch.

Lines I'm Seeing