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The Degenerates Thread

Fuckkkkkkkkk. DK and Fanduel both just now started offering $5k risk-free first bets, which I am of course no longer eligible for. There goes thousands and thousands of free dollars.
 
I am fucking irate about this. What an asshole move, to only reveal that deal AFTER it's too late for people who actually pre-registered and got their day one bets in reasonably promptly.

What an infuriatingly arbitrary reason for probably $4k after tax to just disappear from my pocket.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Time to convince random women to let you create accounts for them and give them a 20% cut of your profits.
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I assume linking a bank account in my name to someone not me is risky in some not trivial way, or else I would fully be doing this. I can probably get some family members to do it, at least.
 
So uh, for the procrastinators out there who didn't sign up, how and how long do we have to get these thousands of dollars?
 
One thing I can't seem to wrap my brain around is how to best hedge the Fanatics welcome promo.

For anyone non-Sean who actually reads this - lots of initial promos are in the form of "bonus bets". This is credit that can be used, like dollars, to place bets - however, if you win the bet, you only get the bet winnings, not the original stake amount back.

This means that to convert these bonus bets to cash, it is most efficient to use them on heavy underdogs (where a higher % of the total payout is winnings, relative to the stake), which you can then hedge by betting the favorite on another site so that either outcome gives you the same return. It also means $1 of bonus bet credit is worth roughly $0.70 of real money, once you consider the steps needed to convert it to withdrawable cash.

Anyway - on Fanatics, each day for 10 days, if you bet $100 in actual money, you get $100 in bonus bet credit, even if the bet wins. The minimum bet odds to qualify are -200.

So, you'd first want to find -200 odds for this daily bet, to avoid losing your real money. Then, say your hedge bet on another site is the other side for +170, which would mean you'd hedge about $54 for a combined EV of -$5ish for the initial two bets (before considering the bonus $100).

Am I right that it is slightly better to use real money for this $54 hedge, rather than bonus bet credit, due to the loss of the bonus bet on non-optimal-odds bet in the event it wins?
 
I think that actually does make sense now that I've typed it out. The difference is small enough either way that it's not actually worth worrying about, but I don't like not understanding things.
 
It sounds like your conclusion holds true in that scenario so long as the negative EV on the $54 real money bet is less than the difference between $54 bonus bet credit on the optimal case versus the hedging case. In other words, you need to gain more EV from using the bonus credit on optimal instead of hedging than you lose on the real money hedge.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
The reason live betting is so much better than pregame betting is you won’t get limited nearly as quickly. I’m massively limited on every book after 3 years of betting on promos, and most books will limit you after only a few months now. I can’t get down more than $8 on many bets, though I can still get good amounts down on mainline bets like UNC +5.5 or UNC +190 at Duke. The limiting is largely based on closing line value, or CLV. If you get in at a good price, which later moves in your favor as expected, you’re getting CLV, and the books can easily track players who consistently get CLV. With live lines, the books can’t track anything.

Bet365 is an absolute goldmine for live odds that are +EV. MGM as well. You definitely don’t want to burn your Bet365 or MGM account with anything other than live bets if they come to NC. But really, beyond these initial promos, you don’t want to hedge at all, because finding the best lines to hedge with is almost always going to entail getting CLV, which is counterintuitively terrible in the long run for making as much money as possible.
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This is interesting, because I would've assumed it's easiest for them to just track an account's overall net winnings and limit based on that.
 
My god, Fanduel is amazing. Like every other day recently I'm getting a push notification that they're giving me the equivalent of $300-500. I just do the fun little math problem later that night and then wait for the free money.

Fanatics has probably been the second-best book so far, interestingly. Supposedly they're making a push to join the top tier. Other than the initial welcome offer, DK has had very little and ESPN zero.
 
Also, @SeanMayTriedToEatMe, did you ever manage to execute on the $5k "no sweat" bets? It seems next to impossible to get $20k+ deposited at once, unless you want to wait for a wire to clear or something.
 
No, I never had anything more than $1,000 promos when I started. I wouldn’t end up hedging more than like $3,000 on the other side. The best promo was from MGM - they matched an initial deposit of $1,000, with the only catch being you had to play through the $1,000 1x within 30 days. That’s awesome for the book, too, as it should develop some gambling addicts. I was betting about $50 a night on random games I was interested in, losing about 5% to juice, so a profit of $950. An actual fun promo.

On the question of limiting people just for winning, yes, that definitely happens. It’s a matter of how long you can consistently win from one book before they enforce draconian limits on your account. You slow that process down dramatically by not placing lots of bets with CLV.

If you’re hedging against FanDuel free bets, definitely do not hedge on that same FanDuel account - this should be obvious for account health. But also try to avoid hedging too often on other books with outlier lines that will inevitably bring CLV. Once you have enough of a bankroll built up and you’re playing solely with house money, I would strongly recommend not hedging at all. The sooner you move to +EV betting and away from hedging, the better. Hedging is almost always -EV.

For example, the “boosts” on FanDuel each night are usually good bets that return anywhere from 5-25%. If you simply max bet those boosts every night, you’ll make like $1,000 a year with very little risk since the sample size will be fairly large. Confirm with a basic promo Twitter account that they’re good before betting them, and you’ll do even better.

Also, there was a WSJ podcast last week about an otherwise normal woman who lost $400k to gambling (casino app stuff, not sports). Don’t do this. Call the state gambling commission and have yourself banned from gambling if you lose even 1% of that.
 
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SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
No, I never had anything more than $1,000 promos when I started. I wouldn’t end up hedging more than like $3,000 on the other side. The best promo was from MGM - they matched an initial deposit of $1,000, with the only catch being you had to play through the $1,000 1x within 30 days. That’s awesome for the book, too, as it should develop some gambling addicts. I was betting about $50 a night on random games I was interested in, losing about 5% to juice, so a profit of $950. An actual fun promo.

On the question of limiting people just for winning, yes, that definitely happens. It’s a matter of how long you can consistently win from one book before they enforce draconian limits on your account. You slow that process down dramatically by not placing lots of bets with CLV.

If you’re hedging against FanDuel free bets, definitely do not hedge on that same FanDuel account - this should be obvious for account health. But also try to avoid hedging too often on other books with outlier lines that will inevitably bring CLV. Once you have enough of a bankroll built up and you’re playing solely with house money, I would strongly recommend not hedging at all. The sooner you move to +EV betting and away from hedging, the better. Hedging is almost always -EV.

For example, the “boosts” on FanDuel each night are usually good bets that return anywhere from 5-25%. If you simply max bet those boosts every night, you’ll make like $1,000 a year with very little risk since the sample size will be fairly large. Confirm with a basic promo Twitter account that they’re good before betting them, and you’ll do even better.

Also, there was a WSJ podcast last week about an otherwise normal woman who lost $400k to gambling (casino app stuff, not sports). Don’t do this. Call the state gambling commission and have yourself banned from gambling if you lose even 1% of that.
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The second chance bets (like Draftkings 5k) can be used on live lines, right? I've only just started looking at those, but like you've mentioned it seems like there can be significant differences between books, which could definitely make hedging the 5ks feel a lot better. Do you have any suggestions for where to check live lines? Right now I'm swiping back and forth between apps which feels clunky.

For anyone who is interested, this guide touches on a lot of aspects of taking advantage of these promos and has very clear explanations & graphics: https://about.darkhorseodds.com/guides/getting-started-walkthrough. Also, this reddit post has a NC specific table for amounts you can expect to win from different promos and the deposits needed (although I think the deposit values are not inclusive of hedge amounts): .
 
I think I'll probably wind down after the crazy promos start to dwindle. I don't think I'm at risk of becoming an addict, as I actually hate the random chance part of gambling. But I get too invested in sports as it is, and probably shouldn't permanently add another incentive to compulsively check my phone.

As an aside, I wonder how Fanduel decides who gets what pop-up promos, as not everyone seems to be getting the crazy ones I have. In the past week, they've given me a new $300 bet match, a $500 deposit match, and a 300% profit boost for up to $250 wager, plus a bunch of smaller boosts and such.

I'm curious if it's possibly because I "lost" a few thousand on one of my first bets with them (hedged on another site), yet have remained very active since - so maybe I profile as a super-profitable customer who will lose hundreds of thousands if they keep me in the loop or something? Fascinating business models.
 
You can pay for services that feed you line comparisons and notify you of the best outliers, both live and prematch/pregame. Those can be pretty expensive, but are well worth it from what I’ve heard if you’re really going to invest a lot of time into this. CrazyNinjaMike, who is kind of a legend for his coding/scraping abilities, was trying to start a free version, and I think it’s decent but have never even looked at it. His other site is what everyone uses to “devig” bets (calculate expected value/fair value):


Otherwise, it’s just flipping through apps to compare lines. There are some free aggregators like actionnetwork.com, which I use to quickly pick something to use stuff like 25% boosts on, but they are not all-inclusive and I don’t think they do live lines.
 
www.espn.com

Ohtani's interpreter fired, 'massive theft' alleged

The interpreter for the Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani was fired Wednesday after questions surrounding at least $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani's bank account to a bookmaking operation set off a series of events.
www.espn.com www.espn.com

Towards the bottom of the story, they mention the illegal betting ring that was going on in Las Vegas at MGM and Resorts World. The investigation has been publicly known for 2 years now so it's shocking that Ohtani's interpreter (and by extension, him) are implicated in it now. Holy hell.
 
Wow, just saw the new Fanatics promo. $100 bet and get for a $100 free bet every day for 10 days. That’s not normal for them; I would register now before it’s taken away. I’m churning through it starting today. Texas Tech ML -190 hedged against +180 on MGM, loss of about $2 for a $100 free bet.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Wow, just saw the new Fanatics promo. $100 bet and get for a $100 free bet every day for 10 days. That’s not normal for them; I would register now before it’s taken away. I’m churning through it starting today. Texas Tech ML -190 hedged against +180 on MGM, loss of about $2 for a $100 free bet.
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Yeah, just finished that one today. Just have to remember to use each bonus bet within 24 hours of it arriving, as they do expire after a day.

Did you get the Fanduel 300% profit boost with a $500 max today? Absolutely insane.
 
First basket seems like a decent way of converting bonus bets. Just basing this off Fanduel odds for New Orleans against Detroit today, it looks like you can spend $131 across bonus bets on all 10 starters to win $100*. That's about 76% conversion, which is higher than most top examples at https://darkhorseodds.com/bonus-bet (that site is pretty impressive with the extent of the hedge and bonus options calculated and how easy it is to view and navigate).

Betting on live lines I've found to be tough. Between my TV being 30+ seconds behind and the difficulty of price shopping lines, the few opportunities I've convinced myself were good were usually gone before I placed any money. I should probably do the math to figure out what the tradeoff looks like for higher vig versus more bonus (e.g. +2000 moneyline during the game with 1.06 implied probability versus +800 pre-game moneyline with 1.03 implied probability).

*Not guaranteed. If a starter is changed I believe that bet is voided although EV should more or less hold. If a bench player scores first, well, that just sucks. I don't know how often that happens, but I doubt it's very frequent. If it happened even 10% of the time though you'd still be expecting to convert about 69% of your bonus bets to real money, which currently I think is acceptable as a floor.
 
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