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What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gambling on Sports — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gambling on Sports

Extranet Shaquille · 2,774 words · 14 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gambling on Sports by Extranet Shaquille on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

Alright, here’s something that’s sure to change your perception of me. I haven’t posted on my main channel since well before Christmas in part because I’ve spent a considerable amount of time placing advantaged sports bets. This has been a weird development to people close to me because 1: I don’t watch sports, 2: I’m super risk averse, and 3: I’m very vocally opposed to

sports betting apps. So let me back up a little and address something not everybody understands: Can you be “good at gambling”? Yes, as evident by pro poker players, pro card counters, and pro sports bettors. The reason why those are the only real examples is all in in the concept of calculating Expected Value or EV. There’s no such thing as a pro craps player because

you can’t get a positive EV in craps. The closest you can come to a professional slots player is to become a slots influencer, but that money comes from sponsorships and adsense and undisclosed freeroll money from casinos who are happy to pay for your normalization of high risk activities. I know that “gambling is inherently evil” is a pretty popular take right now,

but my specific stance is a little looser: If you can’t calculate EV, you should not gamble more than you’re happy to lose. If you don’t know what EV is, you shouldn’t gamble a single dollar on anything. I also want to quickly state that if you feel like listening to me talking about gambling might influence you to gamble in any way to any degree, you should skip this video. The

purpose of posting this is strictly to illustrate some real paradigm-shifting discoveries I made during the last month. Plus, a lot of this won’t make any sense to someone who can’t, for example, read odds anyway. The target audience of this monologue is someone who runs the risk of falling into the mobile sports betting trap. Unfortunately right now, that’s a large audience.

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Okay, to any viewer who still remains, let this be the big bombshell. Good sports betting is not a measure of sports knowledge. It is a measure of pricing knowledge. Whenever I heard urban myths about successful sports bettors, it was always a story like “yeah I saw this guy tracked the menstrual cycle of all the WNBA players and bet the under according to which team was likely on

their period.” That is how we imagine someone with an edge, but a real edge is made by understanding the disparity in odds across different books. Here are 10 sportsbooks showing their odds for which team is gonna win the game. The teams are made up. The sport is made up. This is for an imaginary

sport called gumball. Your total and complete lack of knowledge about the rules, players, and trends has zero impact on the fact that there is one good bet to be made here. If you’re playing poker against 1 other player and you have pocket aces pre-flop, you should be willing to bet all your chips on those cards. That’s because you have a roughly 80 percent chance of winning,

regardless of what the other guy has. 20% of the time, you will lose. But you need to understand that going all in is a positive EV move, even if you don’t win. Placing a bet on this gumball team is going to yield positive expected value by the nature of the fact that no matter how long of a

long shot it is, if you could place the bet ten billion times, you will win more than all these algorithms determined you should. The best bet I ever placed was on some random illinois college basketball game that was so inconsequential that it wasn’t aired on any sports network. MGM offered a bet on UIC winning the game at +3400 odds. That means a $100 bet would win $3,400. That

was a mistake. Seconds later, they adjusted those odds to something like +150, but I had already effectively bought the bet at a discount. Imagine someone said “gimme a hundred dollars and I’ll roll a D20 then give you three hundred dollars if it lands on anything but a 1”. That is a positive EV bet. You might lose. But the thing about having a positive EV is that

you can do nothing but place hundreds of positive EV bets every day and thus operate like a casino: winning some, losing some, but statistically making like 5% profit over millions of bets. But that still involves risk and you’d have to maintain a bankroll healthy enough to withstand long periods of big losses. And so, alternatively, you can hedge the bet for a guaranteed win no

matter the outcome. The payout will be less, since you have to use a portion of it to fund the hedge, but it’s a win-win scenario. In the Illinois example, I had a choice between letting the game play out to either lose a hundred or win 3400, or place a bet on that team losing and get like $900

no matter what. When you place a bet on both sides for a guaranteed win, that’s called Arbitrage. I’m gonna call arbitrage bets “arbs” as shorthand. A funny thing about arbs is that they work wonders on new customer promos. Any time you see a sportsbook ad it’s like “join now for $1500 in FREE bonus bets, and if you know how to place both sides of an outcome, you can reliably turn those

bonus bets into real withdrawable cash. Hopefully you get how this all works now. In total, I joined like ten sportsbooks, churned their promo offers, and placed like 6 arbs a day. If that’s all that happened, I’d probably have just cashed out and gone on my merry way without making a video. But through talking about it with friends and people like my wife’s coworkers,

some really interesting conversations took place. Here are some popular reactions: 1: That must be really hard. Actually it’s disconcertingly easy. I thought you’d need to be a pretty smart person or at least be prepared to live the lifestyle of a day trader, but no. You can pay like 75 bucks a month for access to automated software that tells you

what you bet on, and if you’re at your desk, you can have your bets for the day placed in like 90 seconds. That’s crazy. Someone this bad at math shouldn’t be able to serve quant. Think about how hard it is to be a card counter in blackjack. That’s a lot of work and studying for a 2% edge.

Compared to signing up for an app that gives you a 10-15% edge instantly. It’s like being able to download karate into your brain. 2: Ok can you just tell me what to bet on then? No. You do have to act very quickly. I can’t take a screenshot of a bet and share it with all my friends, because it’s usually a matter of getting an alert of a pricing error,

placing the bet as quickly as possible before it gets corrected, and hopefully being able to do it in a matter of seconds. 3: That sounds like a lot of work. No way. Paying attention to a hundred games to place a stupid longshot parlay sounds like hard work. When I did this, I didn’t have to think, analyze, and I almost never even watched the games.

4: Well okay at least admit that it takes all the excitement out of it. Absolutely not. My excitement came from seeing a good deal pop up, not from spending 2 hours wringing my hands over the number of rebounds a player might get. 5: Okay then why not just take all your money out

of your retirement accounts and do this at scale? Even though arbitrage enabling website like to make this claim, it’s not a risk free activity. You can make a human error. You can have one bet voided for any reason, and suddenly your arb that nets 50 bucks could turn into a $500 loss. 6: This one always frustrated me. People would say “okay but you have to bet a lot to win a

little” like bro you bet $20k on fanduel last year and LOST two thousand wouldn’t you rather win a little than lose? If you asked me how much I’d put into an investment that yields 5% daily compounding ROI guaranteed, I’d say hot dog that’s too good to be true. (As we’ve already discussed, it is too good to be true, but I bring this up to illustrate a mismatch in expectations)

All these conversations were so interesting to me because they make apparent that when people gamble, winning isn’t really what they’re after. They want the rush, the risk, the rare chance to win life-changing money, or the validation that they know the most about sports. But I really hope more people can get this: you win with pricing knowledge, not sports knowledge.

I’ve explained this whole thing to certain friends and they still don’t get it. They’ll text me on the weekends like “hey bro what does ur AI thingie say about the Suns chances of beating the spread tonight”. So much predatory advertising relies on this misunderstanding. This Eric Andre ad where he literally embodies the nagging addictive itch

to place a bet based on a hunch. This social sidebar right on the homepage where people share their expert analysis with spreadsheets and past game data. None of it matters if you don’t consider pricing. Look at this clip where two people are speculating on the NCAA Championship. Jamie Vernon says “my team will win the championship.” Shane Gillis says “nuh

uh mine will” and Joe Rogan says “both of you should place a bet on it at 1:1 odds. That’s an unbelievably stupid bet. If you know how pricing works and understand EV, you know it makes zero sense outside of posturing how confident someone might be in their underdog. I don’t know anything about Dana White save for the facts that he owns the UFC and is heralded

as a famously good blackjack player. But I looked up his playstyle and it’s deranged. Embarassing. Childish. based in superstition. These examples suggest to me that obscuring the one way to get an edge is how you get young men to place stupid bets. Draftkings is testing out a monthly subscription model where you can buy better odds, but just on the bet types that are

most profitable for Draftkings. There is no shame levied at those who are truly stupid gamblers. Why does draftkings serve its users with hot tips from experts right on the homepage? Isn’t that gonna cut into their profits? But sportsbooks want to serve you “smart info” from smart guys with detailed spreadsheets and verifiable data because it ignores pricing. It doesn’t

matter if you have a supercomputer that proves beyond a doubt that the Chiefs have a 90% chance of winning if the bets are priced as if the Chiefs have a 91% chance at winning. The bet could be “will the coin at the start of the game land on heads or tails”, and each outcome will be priced as if they each have a 65% chance of hitting.

It’s this total lack of pricing knowledge that lets these companies keep cranking the vig up, where a 50/50 coin flip isn’t sold at +100 odds, not even -105 or -110, but -115. That’s a 15% haircut off the top of millions and millions of bets per day, and it keeps getting higher. Unless we can societally get to a point where losing players are easily identified and labeled

as such, it’s gonna be hard to stop this sports betting epidemic we’re living through right now. And let me be explicit here, I think what we are witnessing in real time right now is like sackler-family level harm done to our country’s population, the effects of which will be felt for generations to come. Young men aren’t doing well. We’re lonely, our anxiety is high,

our literacy is low, and falling into a gambling addiction is a strong indicator for financial ruin and early death. If you are not playing with an advantage, you are going to lose. And since the vast majority of bettors don’t understand what an advantage really looks like, I’m deeply pessimistic about the trends. - So this is my new job, right? Or at least

my side hustle. Why do any work when I could ramp up my bankroll to $10,000 dollars a day, earn 5% compounding daily, and have a $200k annual income? Here’s the big kicker that makes sure that would never work. You will get banned very quickly from any sportsbook for advantaged gambling. “Banned” is shorthand. What they really do is limit your maximum bet size. My max bet size on bet365.com is

$2. My max bet size at MGM is $8. It was limited the day after that +3400 bet I mentioned earlier. (UIC won, by the way…) When I started all this, I was mostly excited to earn a bunch of MGM rewards points so I’d be a big baller on Vegas trips, but no. I will never earn meaningful points because

I’d have to bet $8 a billion times this year to move up by one rewards tier. You don’t even have to win to get limited. I got limited to $10 on Fanatics in just 6 bets, and all 6 of them lost. Sports bets have a closing line value or CLV. If I got a “good deal” placing a bet at +150

and the CLV was -300, that means I “beat the CLV” I bought the wager at a price that was better than a normal guy. And if you beat the CLV like 80% of the time, alarm bells are gonna go off like “kick this guy out he’s doing something to get an edge. - Another downside to advantaged sports betting is

that you will learn nothing applicable to real life. One reason why I spent 2 years studying poker was for the transferable skills. Decision making with incomplete information. Emotional regulation. Quick EV calculations. And… making friends! You will not make any friends sitting at your PC 2 hours a day making bets. I didn’t learn a single thing about sports either,

so even if I put a $500 arb on Tyrese Maxey’s rebound over/under ten times this season, I still couldn’t tell you what team the fella’s even on. My favorite bets were on Chinese sports because I could make one before bed and wake up to twenty bucks. This era is over for me… forever.

Even if a buddy was like “hey do that thing for me using my identity and give me 50% of the winnings, I’d decline. Not only is it against the terms of service, but think of the tax implications. If I won a thousand bucks, you’d get five hundred, and then next april come tax time, your identity is

gonna owe half of that in taxes for the winnings, leaving you with just $260. It doesn’t make sense. The only time this skill might come back up is when my son turns 18. I’d consider doing this for him since he could make enough money for his first car or something and I’d get to rest easy knowing

he’s banned from every sports book for life. Then again there’s an argument to be made for this act of limiting advantaged bettors being likely to push them into unregulated offshore gambling, but that’s a whole other can of worms. I hope you see why this has all been such a fascinating experience. But if I could single out one finding and pass it on to a big audience it would be this:

If you have a sports betting account that’s more than a month old and still in good standing, you are a loser. This idea that most of the guys betting on sports every weekend are “pretty much breaking even” is wrong. Anyone can get lucky on a long shot, but as soon as you demonstrate

the ability to get the real edge-- the one that understands that odds pricing is the only thing that matters, you are kicked out for life. And now that my money’s no good at any sports book with legal action in my state of residence, it’s back to the kitchen for me.