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 finished out a miserable season with a whimper, going 7-9 to bring the final post-prediction performance to 109-126-5. Factoring in the vig, mass-betting the unders would have cost you 11.1% of your total amount wagered, which is about twice as bad as you'd expect from just flipping a coin.

With $10 wagered on each game (and assuming you saw the same lines I saw and got all action at -110), that's a $269.09 loss for the season. I also tracked the "snowball strategy"-- starting with $160 and betting an equal amount of your remaining bankroll on all games-- just to show how betting more than the Kelly number resulted in larger losses. But our performance was so woeful that the snowball strategy wound up being optimal-- we burned 93.9% of our original bankroll, but since our losses were capped, that "only" left us down $150.24.

(For the record, if we'd chosen to mass-bet the overs instead, we'd have gone 126-109-5 and the straight bets strategy would be up $55.45 on the year. The snowball strategy, on the other hand, would be down $19.71.)

A Look Back at How We Did

I started Odds and Ends this season knowing I couldn't make you better gamblers but hoping I could make you better-educated gamblers. We talked about how Vegas makes its money (and most gamblers lose theirs), how to outperform other recreational bettors in casual game-picking pools, how much of your bankroll to bet on individual games, and different kinds of bets you can make that may or may not be more entertaining.

I can't evaluate whether we're all better-educated at the end of the season, but I can test the hypothesis that I wouldn't make you better gamblers. I know I said earlier in the year that you can't really trust touts when they tell you what their record is on picks. But I'm not trying to sell you anything or convince you how good I am, so you can trust me. (Or you can go back through the archives and verify for yourself if you're the skeptical type. When it comes to sports betting, I'm never going to discourage skepticism.)

Final Results Against the Spread

I started the year picking games based on football cliches such as "who wants it more" or "who had that dawg in them". Around midseason, I transitioned to a few favorite stories and decided to ride them as far as they'd take me-- "Brian Flores' defense makes quarterbacks miserable", "Mike Tomlin is going to overperform expectations until he gets to 9 wins and underperform them after", "the Kansas City Chiefs will win every game by 1-2 points", and so on.

These picks are obviously meant as a joke, but the hypothesis is that since none of us have an edge over Vegas anyway, my joke picks are no worse than the next tout's serious picks. In hindsight, not only were they not worse, but they were likely significantly better-- in my 36 picks, I went 21-14-1. Additionally, I twice suggested taking the moneyline on Pittsburgh (at +130 and +140), and the Steelers won both games. If you put $10 on each of my suggestions for the year, you'd be up $77.91-- a 20.5% return on investment!

Last year, I jokingly picked games that were championship rematches (often from 40+ years ago). My narrative picks went 18-15-2; if you'd put $10 on each game, you'd have been up $13.64, a 3.9% return. Two years ago, I jokingly picked based on silly "revenge game" narratives, positing that a team's backup quarterback or #3 receiver would be extra motivated to face one of his former teams. Those picks went 15-12, a 6.1% return (or a $16.36 profit with $10 on each game at -110 odds).

Does this mean I have an edge after all? No, dear lord, no, please don't let that be your takeaway. Your takeaway should be: sports betting is random enough that even fools with no edge will sometimes find themselves in the black over small samples.

After all, this year, picks made by a literal (pseudo)random number generator went 10-7. Last year, they went 8-9, but the year before, they went 8-6. If you bet on all of those picks, you'd be up 3.4%-- $16.36 at $10 per game. Literal random number generators don't have an edge on Vegas, but one still happened to turn a profit.

This is why I only pick a couple of games a week. After a million picks, I guarantee you my record would be within a few tenths of a percent of 50%, and my average return would be around -4.5%-- the cost of the vigorish at -110 odds. But over 30 picks? There's a lot more variance. Through dumb luck alone I might find myself up 20%.

Of course, I just as easily might find myself down 20%, too. But as a tout, the game is rigged in my favor-- I can just point people to my good stretches and disappear my bad stretches as if they never happened. (In much the same way that I can ignore my "lock of the week" starting the season 2-5 and instead claim that it ended the year at 8-2 because I changed the name of the pick after seven weeks.)

I love the idea that anyone betting along at home would have turned a modest profit in all three seasons and find themselves up $124.27 to date. (Provided they... didn't try mass-betting the unders.) Happy accidents are, after all, happy.

We got to ride through three years' worth of sweats and ended it with enough for a nice dinner at Applebee's. That's about the best we can hope for in this hobby. At the end of the day, all I want is for you to have as much fun reading this column as I had writing it and not come out too much poorer in the process. I'll count this as a win.

Also, despite the "season recap", Odds and Ends will continue through the playoffs and end with a Super Bowl Prop Bet Extravaganza.

Lines I'm Seeing