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The Degenerates Thread

If anyone cares to put up South Carolina primary odds, 1-8 Biden, 8-1 Bernie and 100-1 field seems like consensus.
 
@dukeberto @ZackM Can we get odds on the GA Senate elections? The bet that I think would interest the most people is whether the Democrats will win both seats. Yes at 3-2 odds and No at 2-3 odds seems to be the consensus.
 
dukeberto said:
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
@dukeberto @ZackM Can we get odds on the GA Senate elections? The bet that I think would interest the most people is whether the Democrats will win both seats. Yes at 3-2 odds and No at 2-3 odds seems to be the consensus.
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This bet better not be settled until there has been a full investigation of voter fraud in Georgia. Dead people were voting. The Sportsbook is rigged.
 
Join Shog and I in occupying the Women's Basketball thread (with San Diego Padres discussion) until the powers that be listen to our demands.
 
FanDuel is running a promo for 55-1 odds on the Super Bowl moneyline, either team. New users, $10 deposit, $5 max bet for 55-1, app only.

I put $5 on the Chiefs to win and then $5 on Bucs +3 (even). I think the only catch is you have to rollover/bet the promo winnings 1x before withdrawing, but even that isn’t specified anywhere by FanDuel, so maybe not. FanDuel might simply be choosing to pay out about $200 expected value per new user because they believe it will be worth the investment to get a lot of them hooked.

I haven’t bet on sports since the days of needing to use Caribbean websites and losing about $1k as a poor student while getting so addicted that I was anxiously watching random D-III college basketball over/unders on Yahoo box scores. I’m impressed by how smooth the apps are now and how easy they make it to lose your money.
 
FanDuel is doing everything they can to get me to lose money, by giving me money to start. They're running a promo where you simply get $25 to play with if you make a $25+ deposit. And then a promo where you can bet $50 max on the Wizards to cover a spread against the Celtics this weekend, where the spread grows based on how many people bet on the Wizards. Currently, the spread is +60.5. I expect this to grow to around +100 by Sunday. I also expect the Wizards to fail to cover the 100-point spread, losing by a score of 168-67.
 
Whenever online gambling becomes fully accessible in North Carolina, the several of you who live there should get in early, as long as you trust yourself not to get addicted. It sounds like NC will be open for business within a few months. I was a month or two late to the grand opening in my state, and it probably cost me a few hundred bucks in promo value. Every day or week, depending on the app, there are new promos that virtually ensure profits.
 
For example, I wake up this morning to a “Super Boost” on William Hill giving even odds on the Jazz to beat the Lakers straight up today (max bet $100). I can go over go FanDuel and get +290 on the Lakers moneyline if I want to hedge (slightly better than DraftKings +280), so this is literally free money, around $50 either way if I hedge evenly.

There’s another promo where you get a free bet equal in dollars to the points your team scores in Jazz/Lakers, as long as you bet at least $100 on the spread. I’ll probably just bet $100 on the Lakers +8.5 to hedge against the Jazz moneyline super boost. Ideally I win both bets when the Jazz win by 1-8 points, but no big deal if I lose either bet, and I can’t possibly lose both. Either way, I come out with a free bet equal to the points the Lakers score, which hopefully is not some trash like $75 due to an epic Quin Snyder defensive game plan. Free bets have guaranteed, risk-free value of around 45% since you can bet them directly against each other.

For the first few months when the apps are all starting in your state, it’s more like a free money iOS game than gambling.
 
About 2 months into multiple gambling apps being available in my state, I’ve made about $2,500. This is almost all risk-free; I rarely expose my cash without an opposite bet to ensure profit on the wager. Sucks that these apps are only available in a few states still. I would like to compare notes on how best to profit from the daily promos. It’s about $50 a day for doing some math.

I’ve made many, many costly mistakes that have been learned from. I didn’t understand the economics/math of free bets until recently, which probably cost me a good $300-500 of profits. I am going to post about that now.

This is the ideal way to use them:

Say you have a $100 free bet, earned from a promo. This happens a lot on William Hill’s app. You find a +200 to +250 underdog line on the app with this free bet on it, and find an opposite bet that’s just a little mismatched on another app. This is readily available in NHL lines. Tonight, the Ducks are +245 to win outright on an app with a $100 free bet I earned, and the Avs are -270 to win on another app. I placed the $100 free bet on the Ducks to make $245 and I bet $180 cash on the Avs to make $65. It’s $65 profit if the Ducks win (245 minus 180), and it’s also $65 profit if the Avs win (65 minus 0), in each case using up the $100 free bet. The end result is converting a $100 free bet into $65.

If I were to put the $100 free bet on something with very close to even odds, and then bet $50 cash on the opposite thing with very close to even odds, I would convert the $100 free bet into only $50. Usually this is less, because it’s hard to find opposite bets with odds that completely neutralize each other.

I could look for even better underdog odds to use the free bet on, but the gaps in opposite odds become too large at higher levels (like +500 for the underdog and -700 for the favorite, even when hunting for the best odds available across different apps). This is almost always fruitless and less profitable than the +200 to +250 sweet spot.

It was hard to wrap my head around why free bets have such higher expected value when used on underdog moneylines, and I still don’t quite get it, but this appears to be the final step in understanding how to maximize free bets in a risk-free way. Proper valuation is also necessary for calculating how much to bet opposite promo bets where you potentially win a free bet. At first, I was so clueless that I wasted a $250 free bet converting it into $0 profit. I was opposite betting free bets against the same amount in cash before realizing how stupid this was.
 



Before anyone jumps in, you need to understand how taxes work on sports betting. It’s atrocious, and America is the only country that disincentivizes it so strongly. I’m going to make out really well this year due to the new user promotions, but I’m done on December 31.

There are certain states that don’t allow you to factor in lost wagers at all, such as IL, so you can realistically end up being net positive by a large amount for the year and still lose money overall after taxes. For example, win $10,000 on bets, lose $9,500 on bets, come out net +$500, but owe 5% of all $10,000 to IL in state taxes, on top of the federal taxes on the net $1,000.

And that’s only if you itemize deductions. If you wouldn’t otherwise itemize because the standard deduction is much, much better for you, then you have close to zero chance of profiting even with the new user promos. You’re essentially burning your winnings up to the gap between standardized and itemized deductions.

The vast majority of sports gamblers won’t pay taxes the correct way - I believe the 1099s sent to you and the IRS give the net winnings, not the amount won and the amount lost separately, so this should generally be fine for the consumer. To do things totally legally, though, you screw yourself.
 
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That’s a strong stand by the sportsbooks. I’m skeptical it’ll pay off for them but the computers did say the line should only be 4-6 points. Even money on both sides doesn’t apply when they think the public is this far off.
 
With promos drying up, I’ve moved on to the next phase of sports betting: following successful prop bettors on Twitter and doing whatever they do.

The prop bet culture on Twitter is hilarious to follow. This is the bet of the day among the degenerates, with everyone tailing it:




So the whole community will be intently watching a Pistons box score for Luka Garza’s point total for 2.5 hours tonight. The juice has since moved from +105 to -135, so it’s probably not a good bet anymore. With a lot of these Twitter guys who have tens of thousands of followers, as soon as they post a bet, every book moves in unison the other way. I witnessed a Saddiq Bey point total bet move one full point everywhere within a minute of some guy posting his bet today.
 



This actually hit. 22-1 odds, max bet $50. It was such high expected value that everyone in the promo abusing world had some cash on it.
 
So one of the most well known exploits in gambling these days is Same Game Parlays on DraftKings where you identify some mediocre big man and plug in [over 9.5 points] and [over 9.5 rebounds], and DraftKings will spit out something like +400 to +600 odds, then you bet [no double double] for that same mediocre big man on another sportsbook for something like -400 to -600 odds. Often you’ll profit from this (arbitrage) or you’ll lose a minimal amount while converting a free bet to cash, or churning through a promo, such as DraftKings giving you a $100 free bet for placing a $15 same game parlay with +300 odds or higher on 6 consecutive days (this is the current promo people are abusing).

The reason I bring this up is because the short list of mediocre big men this exploit works with makes me laugh whenever I use them for this. They can’t be too good, or else DraftKings won’t let you plug in a number as low as 9.5 for points. They can’t be too bad, for the opposite reason, usually on the rebounds side. They have to be in the perfect Goldilocks zone of mediocre big men. There’s not many of them, and when you identify them, you keep riding them.

Here is the list so far:

Mo Bamba
Richaun Holmes
Mason Plumlee
Jarred Vanderbilt
Ivica Zubac

People are making millions in the aggregate every other day off of Mason Plumlee’s endless mediocrity.
 
I have roughly $1,000 on the Super Bowl, spread among various promos, with a weighted average expected return of around 15%, and probably a range of -90% to +200%.

I won't watch a minute of this game.
 
I bet a whooping $10 on the opening kickoff being returned.
 
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