Odds and Ends: Week 1

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 touch on various other Odds and Ends along the way.

Reasons Why I Won't Help You Win More Money (And Neither Will Anyone Else)

There are three main reasons why I'm confident a weekly column isn't going to improve the quality of your picks.

Reason #1: Beating Vegas is Hard

This is the first and most obvious factor. Sports betting is a massive-- and massively profitable-- business for sportsbooks. It's profitable because they spend a lot of time and money ensuring that the lines they set will maximize their profit.

Crucially, this isn't because bettors lose more than they win. Quite the opposite-- if a bettor was winning only 40% of their bets, they could just reverse every pick and make a killing. Vegas maximizes its profit by ensuring everyone wins about as many bets as they lose and then skimming the vigorish (or "vig") off the top. (The vig is the fee bookmakers charge for accepting a gambler's bet, usually by changing the amount paid out if the bet is successful.)

I don't mean to suggest that no one has ever been a profitable bettor. Only that if it were easy to do, as they say, Vegas wouldn't keep building more casinos.

Reason #2: If You Can Beat Vegas, You Don't Talk About It

Imagine for a second that I was one of those sharp bettors who could beat Vegas often enough to overcome the vig. (I am not, though improbably enough, I've at least managed to keep up with the vig over the first two years of this column.)

But if I was, Vegas would figure it out fairly quickly and simply stop taking my bets. If I were a profitable bettor, the absolute last thing I would want to do is talk about being a profitable bettor. Instead, I'd want to shut my mouth, keep working whatever edge I found, make as much money as I could before Vegas caught on, and retire young.

Reason #3: Even If You Did Talk About It, Vegas is Listening

This is by far the most important point. Vegas is not a passive observer in this game between bettor and bookmaker. I have spoken to people who really are sharp betting analysts and who publish some of their information, and you know what they've told me? Within five minutes of publishing a new piece, Vegas has moved the betting line so the "good bets" aren't available anymore.

If you take nothing else away, let it be this: the best bettors don't "like" the Colts or the Jaguars this week. Instead, at one price, they like the Colts. At another price, they like the Jaguars. And in between those two prices, they don't like either. Top bettors are exquisitely price-sensitive, and Vegas has a ton of tools at its disposal to manipulate those prices to eat away at any edges someone may have found.

The biggest tool is changing the payouts. Typical lines will look something like "Jaguars +4.5 (-105)". This means that if the Jaguars finish within 4 points of their opponent, you win, and if the Jaguars lose by 5 or more, you lose. But pay attention to the tricky bit in parentheses.

When that number is negative, it means "you need to bet this much to win $100". If that number is positive, it means "if you bet $100, you'll win this much". (Yes, it's confusing that the number means different things depending on whether it's positive or negative-- that confusion is by design.)

Those odds are typically where the vig likes to hide. Let's consider a bet that's a coin flip-- a literal coin flip. You can bet on whether the coin flip in the Super Bowl comes up heads or tails. But most sports books offer that bet at -110 odds, meaning you need to bet $110 to win $100 (or alternately, if you only bet $100, you stand to win $90.90).

If you bet $100 on heads and I bet $100 on tails, then no matter what happens, Vegas will take in $200 and pay out $190.90; that $9.10 it pockets is the vig.

Those odds are the source of all manner of mischief. In a column like this, it's very easy to say, "I like the Colts this week +5 points". But there's a big difference between the Colts +5 (+105) and the Colts +5 (-105). At (-105) odds, you need to be right 51.2% of the time to break even. At (+105), you only need to be right 48.8%. For a profitable sports bettor, that 2.4% gap is huge.

So let us pretend for a moment that I had some secret edge over the sportsbooks, and I was willing to share that edge with anyone who read my column. The simple fact of the matter is once Vegas figures that out (and they will, sooner or later), the lines I see when I'm betting will not be the lines you see when you're betting. Because Vegas can so easily shade the odds, you and I could both pick the same teams in the same games, and I could turn a profit while you lost money.

In short, the game is rigged.

If It's Almost Certainly Negative Expected Value, Why Bet?

Because betting can be fun. I've had a Netflix account for hundreds of months, and there hasn't been a single one of those months where that account has turned a profit. I lose money every single time I go to the movies. I've seen a negative return on investment on every instrument, video game console, and book I've ever purchased. And that's perfectly okay because I've enjoyed using those things.

Similarly, betting money on NFL games can be a good way to add interest or excitement to a contest you might not otherwise care about. Sweating out the end of a contest with money on the line can be a huge thrill. If you don't enjoy it, certainly don't do it, but if you do enjoy it and you are honest and responsible about the costs, betting on sports can be a fun way to increase your enjoyment.

So that's what we're going to focus on. I can't make you more profitable (though I do have one surefire tip to make you less unprofitable: wager less money). But hopefully, we can examine what it is about gambling on football games that makes it fun and emphasize that so we're getting maximum returns on minimum losses.

Lines I'm Seeing