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.

Let's Talk About Those Lines

Every week in this space, I provide a table of "lines I'm seeing". I've discussed in the past how useless this is in practice for a picks column; Vegas can shade the odds on a given line to make it a better or worse bet than the spread itself would suggest, and if they cared about me (they certainly don't), they could even change lines in response to any inefficiencies I wrote about so by the time you read this column that inefficiency would be gone.

There's another way those lines are misleading, though; it acts like they're a monolith.

I get all of the lines I post here from nflgamedata.com, run by a guy named Lee Sharpe. I use that site because, while many sites want to keep their data in their own little silo, Lee is an open data evangelist; it's not just possible to scrape data from his pages, it's actively encouraged, and he goes out of his way to make sure everything keeps working. For someone like me who is working with NFL lines on a weekly basis, that's a massive boon. He even keeps a csv file of all of his data that anyone is free to access at any time.

Lee doesn't set the lines himself; he mostly gets them from Pinnacle sportsbook, but in cases where Pinnacle doesn't offer odds for a particular game, he'll find them from somewhere else. (As an aside, Lee gathers these lines for a "Confidence Pool" game he runs where participants assign confidence levels to specific game outcomes and see if they can outperform the Las Vegas lines. At the moment, just 20 out of 706 users are ahead of Vegas. Last year, 21 out of 982 participants beat Vegas. Only three people have managed it in both years so far. Vegas is very, very difficult to beat.)

But different books will have different lines. One book might have a team at -3 while the other has them at -3.5. Even if two books both have a team at -3.5, maybe one is giving -105 odds on it while the other is giving +105 (meaning a win pays out more money on the latter book than the former). Lines and odds don't vary a ton from one book to the next (if they did, algorithmic betters could place contradictory bets on opposing sites with the most favorable odds for each side and book a small but guaranteed profit). But these small variations are often the difference between a 52% bet and a 53% bet, and that difference is often the margin between a profitable week and an unprofitable week, which is why serious gamblers engage in "line shopping", or hunting for the best deal they can possibly find.

As I've mentioned before, the more of your money Vegas is willing to take on a bet, the sharper you should assume its odds are. That plays out here, too; these variances are much larger on bets with lower maximums. Totals and odds on player props, for instance, can differ quite substantially from one site to the next. Here's an example from September showing Cooper Kupp's estimated chances of scoring a touchdown ranging from 54.5% (-120) all the way up to 66.7% (-200)

Shopping around for Kupp ATD 👀

bwin: Risk $200 to win $100 🧐
SIA: Risk $135 to win $100 🧐
BetFred: Risk $120 to win $100 ✅

In the case that Kupp doesn’t score… you could save $80 on a $100 wager.

Line shoppers win, lazy bettors lose. #GamblingTwitter pic.twitter.com/ibgfKBke0C

— betstamp (@betstamp) September 8, 2022

Often times books will deliberately add "juicy" odds on a lower-limit bet in the hopes that once you're in the door, you'll make several other more profitable (for them) bets as well. But the end result is that a substantial percentage of gambling profitably is just constantly shopping around for the best odds you can buy.

For recreational gamblers like us, it's not as big of a deal; we're losing money in the long run, but hopefully, we're having fun doing it. But it might at least be worth keeping two or three different sportsbooks or betting apps handy and looking for the best odds you can find between them.

Lines I'm Seeing