Photo: USA Today Sports

A good sports betting column should be backed by a profitable gambler with a proven track record. It should offer picks generated by a sophisticated and conceptually sound model. Most importantly, it should treat the subject with the seriousness it warrants.

This is not that column.

Instead, this will be an off-beat look at the sports betting industry-- why Vegas keeps winning, why gambling advice is almost certainly not worth the money, and the structural reasons why even if a bettor were profitable, anything they wrote would be unlikely to make their readers net profitable, too.

While we're at it, we'll discuss ways to minimize Vegas' edge and make recreational betting more fun, explain how to gain an advantage in your office pick pools, preview games through an offbeat lens (with picks guaranteed to be no worse than chance), and tackle various other Odds and Ends along the way.

Pulling Back the Curtain on The System

A lot of the stuff I do in this column-- like occasionally picking both sides of a single game or retiring the name of my "lock of the week" when it's not performing well-- is tongue-in-cheek. But, like any good joke, there's a kernel of truth to it. So-called touts really will change the names of their picks to inflate their record (when they don't just lie about their record outright). And in one of the best-known scams in the industry, they really will pick both sides of the same game. Why would they do that? Let me introduce you to "The System".

In the least sophisticated form, a potential scammer gets a large pool of potentially interested gamblers and gives them a "free pick". For half of the pool, the scammer will tell them to pick one side. For the other half, the scammer will tell them to pick the other. This way, it's guaranteed that he gave the correct pick to half of the pool (ignoring ties and pushes). The half that gets the wrong pick shrugs their shoulders and moves on; after all, what more would you expect out of a free pick?

The scammer then takes the half of the pool that received the correct pick and gives them a new "bet of the week". Again, he or she will split the pool, giving half of it one side and the other half the other side. Again, half of the pool gets an incorrect pick and moves on with their lives, while the other half has now gotten two correct picks in a row.

Then, the scammer repeats it and repeats it. Every week, the size of the pool gets cut in half, but the remaining gamblers have gotten more and more correct picks in a row. Eventually, the scammer says, "I've now given you six consecutive picks, and every one of them has been correct; I have three "locks of the week" available, and I'll sell them to you for the low price of (insert absurd price here)". The recipients of six consecutive correct picks are unaware of the thousands and thousands of incorrect picks the scammer has given along the way, so many of them will pay only to find out that the scammer has no real edge after all.

There are lots of variations on this scam, but they all revolve around finding a group of people who see all of your correct picks and none of your incorrect ones. In one of my favorite examples, a user on Twitter correctly predicted very specific details of a World Cup match the day before to "prove" that the game was fixed. But it turned out the user had simply made thousands and thousands of predictions the day before, watched the match, and then deleted all the ones that were wrong.

At the end of the day, it's much harder to beat the house than it is to trick people into thinking you can beat the house. I'm not saying no one is ever profitable betting sides, but there's a reason profitable bettors hire other people to submit their picks for them-- the quickest way to lose an edge is to let people know you have it.

It's a dangerous world out there and you should be careful who you trust. Except, of course, for me; you should trust me completely.

Tracking the Unders

In 2022 and 2023, mass-betting the unders was incredibly profitable over the first 6 weeks and essentially just broke even after that. I hypothesized this year that maybe all we needed to do to make a killing was to start our "mass-bet the unders" strategy earlier in the season. What a fortuitous hypothesis; unders went 10-6 last week, bringing them to 21-11 since we started betting them.

If you put $10 on the under in every game (and you saw the exact same lines I saw and got all action at -110), you'd have made $30.91 last week, bringing your profit to $80.91 for the year. (Briefly consider quitting while you're ahead.)

I said we'd be tracking two different betting strategies-- placing $10 on every game vs. starting with $160, rolling over our winnings from week to week, and placing an equal amount of our remaining bankroll on every game. Because of the strong start, the "snowball strategy" is picking up steam. Our bankroll is up to $250.57, which is about $10 more than the "$10 on every game" approach.

More impactfully, we're now betting $15.67 per game, so that bankroll will continue to grow at an even faster rate. Unless we have a bad week. Iin which case, it'll shrink at a much faster rate. Such is the nature of compounding gains and losses.

Lines I'm Seeing