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.

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.

Unders went 6-10 last week, continuing a terrible showing for the season (which makes sense as scoring is up significantly across the league compared to last year). If you put $10 on every under (and saw the same lines I saw, and got all action at -110), you would have lost $45.45 last week and would be down $242.73 for the season. (If all results were reversed, you'd only be up $43.64 instead-- that's the vig for you.)

If you had instead started with a $160 bankroll and carried over all wins and losses each week, you'd be down 93% with just $11.68 still to wager-- not even enough to put a buck down on each game.

Am I now willing to concede defeat on the "mass-bet the unders" strategy? No. I told you not to do it in the first place, and I advised you to quit after each of the first two weeks while we were still up. I conceded defeat before we even started-- we're only doing this to show what happens when you try to follow one of those "one weird trick to beat Vegas" strategies you sometimes stumble across.

Vegas is much too good for us to beat with one simple trick.

The Hardest Weeks of the Season to Pick Games

Picking games is never easy, but the last few weeks of the regular season are the hardest of all. In addition to accurately judging team strengths, you must also play armchair psychologist and guess who will still be motivated and which teams will be mailing it in. Plus, teams will start their fourth-string running backs or third-string quarterbacks, and you'll have to make educated guesses about just how much worse those teams are as a result.

Or at least, that would be the case if we were profitable bettors. Fortunately for us, we're not! One of the greatest and most freeing parts of realizing that we're not sharp enough to beat the market is that this also means any strategies we're using to pick games don't perform any worse once the picking gets tougher. Because Vegas is setting relatively efficient lines, we should expect to go 50/50 (and lose the vig) whether we're picking between two equally-motivated teams at full strength or two differently-motivated teams starting a fistful of players who've never taken meaningful snaps before.

This also means there's not really any benefit to waiting for more information or better lines. Lines are sharp, which means they've baked in all publicly available information (and potentially quite a bit of information that's not publicly available, too) and are about as likely to move in one direction as another. This isn't to say that you can't still benefit from a bit of line shopping-- at a particular moment in time, there might exist some lines that are more favorable to the side you want to bet than others. But in terms of predicting what things will look like tomorrow (or even just three hours from now), there's no real point.

This is good because who knows what these lines will look like in two days. I'd venture that more than any other week of the season, there'll probably be major discrepancies between the lines I'm seeing and the lines you're seeing.

Whatever system you've been using to choose your bets so far, if it's been working for you, stick with it. Whether that's betting based on your rooting interests as a fan (or betting against your rooting interests in a "fan hedge") or picking whichever team has the better quarterback or betting based on who your mom has heard of or picking whichever coach you think would win in an arm-wrestling contest or even using a pseudorandom number generator. (Not that anyone would ever use a pseudorandom number generator to pick NFL games, right?)

And if it hasn't been working for you, feel free to change it up. As I keep saying, being a profitable bettor is a ton of effort with a lot at stake. But betting recreationally? It's a pretty sweet gig where virtually anything goes (provided you aren't wagering anything you can't afford to lose).

Lines I'm Seeing