there is one thing that i learned back in third grade that i use to beat sports betting markets
today and i'm going to tell you exactly what that is but first hi i'm jack from unabated.com
and i make sports betting educational content both here on youtube as well as at unabated the goal is
to help you understand this exciting world of sports betting and to help you help yourself
whether you are a professional sports bettor or you are just aspiring to be one your method of
finding angles is a never-ending pursuit oddly the best advice i ever picked up on finding
angles came from renowned video poker expert bob dancer in his book million dollar video poker bob
talks about a former partner who would just walk around casinos endlessly looking for new angles
it is the needle in the haystack type of method that seems too tedious to most
bettors however it's also a trait that many successful professional sports bettors have
i'm a big fan of the scientific method it is a concept you were probably taught in grade
school but you've rarely thought about since perhaps this illustration will jog your memory
that chart takes me back to third grade where a
similar diagram was crudely constructed with construction paper and stencils
on a bulletin board in our classroom the first step in the scientific method is to
observe as an aspirational sharp better the best thing you can do to kick-start your career
is to constantly be observing have you ever looked at every bet available at the sportsbook
every single bet dig down into each sport and into each game some of these books have hundreds
of available bets on each game now that is a lot of surface area for a sports book to defend
it is in these nooks and crannies that you can sometimes find something they don't realize is
beatable sometimes it's a mispriced line and yes that's always nice to find however more valuable
is when they have a systematic misunderstanding of what they're offering and how it should be priced
usually this occurs when a sportsbook is the only one to offer a certain wager there is not a market
price to help guard rail their pricing those are the situations that can be extremely lucrative
i'm often reluctant to go into specifics about various angles the world of advantage play is
pretty cyclical and while it's rare for a casino or sportsbook to make the same mistake twice
it is commonplace for other casinos and sportsbooks to fail to learn from another's error
often i can reuse an angle at a different operator later so best not to tip my hand however i'll make
an exception here because it is a good example of what it takes to exploit a mistake at the
beginning of this nfl season i was poking around fanduel i decided to see if they had any changes
to their teaser pricing and they made that easy to spot with this new flag on their teasers button
now their teaser pricing wasn't great they used to offer a two-team six-point teaser for -120 which
was average and a three-team plus 160 which was decent however i noticed i could adjust the number
of points in the teaser up or down up to plus 14 points and down to what's this minus six points
fanduel was trying out the old reverse teaser or pleaser as it's sometimes known the reverse
teaser is almost always a sucker bet instead of getting six points on each leg of your
parlay you give up six points on each leg in exchange for that you get some long odds
i first became familiar with the reverse teaser in delaware when they had their nfl parlay cards
fortunately it didn't take long to realize that they were a bad bet in delaware
you're just giving up too much value in exchange for the odds they offered
i decided to compare the odds though i still had some old reverse teaser cards from delaware
and it appeared they pay plus two thousand or twenty to one on a three team reverse teaser in
delaware but now here on fanduel they paid plus twenty eight hundred or twenty eight to one hmm
that seems like a pretty big discrepancy this is going to be worth a closer look
as a professional sports bettor my method for analyzing any wager is to first figure
out what i was up against i needed to know what the break-even point was on the fanduel wager
now i outlined this technique in an article i wrote on unabated.com about building profitable
teaser bets i'll link that article below now since this was a three team wager
and it paid 28 to 1 we take the cube root of the implied probability of the payout you convert
the odds to implied probability and then well here's what the excel formula would look like
so now what this is saying is we would need a 32.55 implied probability or plus 207 odds or
better on each leg to make these bets a positive expected value now this compared well versus what
i was up against in delaware back in the day that was 36.24 as a break-even point
however i still wasn't optimistic it's tough to subtract six points from either side of any nfl
line and not pass through at least one key number we would definitely want to avoid situations where
we'd be giving up too much value instead of just focusing on three team wagers i also ran
the numbers on the two team wagers they had a six point wager which paid nine to one a six
and a half point wager which paid ten to one and a seven point wager which paid eleven to one and
here's how those numbers looked suddenly it's starting to become a little bit more
interesting these odds felt beatable to me the same factors that make a teaser bet profitable
would make a reverse teaser bet unprofitable likewise the same things that make teaser bets
bad would make reverse teaser bets good and in that pro building profitable teaser bets article
that i referenced i outlined some teaser traps to avoid these include teasing through the zero
teasing totals and teasing other sports all of the things that would make a regular teaser a bad bet
are the things i would be looking to do in a reverse teaser so i started poking around now
what's this i could play these reverse teasers on college football well now things are really
looking good but i kept poking and that's when i discovered i could play these reverse teasers
on totals mind officially blown there's got to be an edge here now i just need to quantify my edge
using the alt line calculator at unabated i was quickly able to get an accurate price on every
game on the board with regards to subtracting six six and a half or seven points i found that
totals were by far preferable how good was it well consider these two week one nfl match-ups
pittsburgh buffalo over under 48.5 points and cleveland kansas city over under 54.5 points
now when i enter the pittsburgh buffalo game in the alt line calculator and look for a total
seven points worse than the market line it tells me that the correct price would be plus 234 now
remember i already figured out that anything with odds shorter than plus 247 was going to be good
now entering the cleveland kansas city game in was even better over 61 and a half which is seven
points from the posted 54 and a half total well that was plus 204 to find out what that two team
teasers true price would be we convert the implied probability and then multiply them together and
then convert it back so plus 234 is equal to 29.94 percent and plus 204 is equal to 32.89
by the way if you aren't sure how to convert from odds to implied probability
i have a video on that from last year that i'll link above but you can use various tools around
the web to get this done for you as well now let's multiply those two numbers together and we get
9.85 percent so we're getting paid 11 to 1 on a wager that will win about 9.85 percent of the time
that's a very healthy 18.17 edge in our favor this is going to be fun
i repeated the same exercise for every other game on the schedule
and then took the top 10 best candidates ranked by ev or expected value and i set out to round
robin all of them together i would be betting each two team permutation of these 10 teams
well that created 45 wagers now the nice thing about round robin would be that while
my expectation was to win only about 10 percent of the time on each bet by making more bets i
was more likely to come close to that expectation i even got a bit frisky and i tossed in this gem
now this bet would have returned nine hundred ninety nine thousand and sixty dollars on a 9.99
wager had it won and in case you're wondering my odds of winning were point zero zero two percent
or fifty thousand to one however that bet paid a hundred thousand to one which makes it decidedly
plus ev now i'm not going to lie i had dreams of darren rovell tweeting about how a better
turn ten dollars into one million and he'd track me down and interview me and i could turn the
whole thing into a commercial for unabated sort of like what some of you are probably
think this video is doing but stick with me there is still a lesson to be learned here
well as you can see the results in week one were abysmal to say the least
just two of the teams won so out of those 45 two team permutations my lone winning wager paid 11
to one but the week was obviously a pretty big loss however i was actually ecstatic about this
not as happy as had i won but if fanduel cleaned up on these bets in week one they're likely to
get a false sense of security in how they perform going forward i'm not sure how they didn't catch
their own math mistake here but at this point i was focused on getting down as much as possible
as long as i could undeterred by the previous results and bolstered by the edge that the
alt line calculator said i had i pressed on in week two now the week two card was even better
than week one in terms of value as there were 12 candidates that were just too good to ignore that
created 66 permutations five of the 12 games won well that meant that 10 out of the 66 wagers won
this made up for week one losses and the project was officially in the black however the walls were
beginning to close in fanduel started to institute aggregate limits on teams so your total exposure
on a single team couldn't surpass a certain figure this would hamper round robin in weeks
with more candidates and also made me suspicious that they would look deeper into the betting
now week 3 had 11 candidates and 4 of them won that meant a profitable 6 out
of 55 permutation wagers i actually had to pass on a couple permutations because
the aggregate limit but fortunately for me they were all losing combinations so my profit on week
three was actually a little stronger than expected i started to think of ways that i could try to get
around the aggregate limit however i'd soon find out that those efforts weren't going to matter
when i began checking for bets in week four i quickly realized that fanduel had finally
spotted the error of their ways they drastically changed the pricing for their reverse teasers
and the new pricing for two team wagers were not good this change was enough to eliminate almost
all candidates from contention they also modified the payout on college football
even more drastically it went from a fifteen to twenty percent edge on most combinations
to a minus five percent or lower expectation now of course just with regular teasers there
are still a couple scenarios where even with these reduced odds you'd have a small edge
and hey if you want a data mine for profitable scenarios be my guest but just be aware that
you won't be making as many wagers and so you have to be prepared for the variance
in the end the entire profit making process was largely all thanks to that scientific method that
i learned in grade school you see i observed what was available on the sportsbook site
this led to questioning whether this could be a positive ev situation based on what i
had seen years before on those parley cards in delaware i researched what the profitable
break-even point would be for the wager and then i hypothesized that what made standard teasers bad
could make reverse teasers good experimentation with the unabated alt line calculator pointed
me to value in the market i concluded that fanduel was offering a great wager and now
i'm reporting it to you taking a few minutes to look into every bet available at your sportsbook
can be a very profitable experience a good professional sports bettor uses this method to
look at every scenario and tries to envision a way that this could be a profitable situation for them
then they go about trying to find when those profitable situations might arise if i had one
regret from the above example it would be that i didn't maximize my profitability i could have
pushed it harder i could have applied more art to the situation instead of just the science
but that post-mortem thinking is actually improving my approach the next time
a similar situation might present itself you see it's all part of that final step of the scientific
method the reporting perhaps you spotted ways you could have improved on my process as well
and if you have well then congratulations you are on your way to using the scientific method
to improve your betting well that's it for this video if you enjoyed this give it a
thumbs up that lets youtube know that this is the type of content you like to see and
subscribe because that lets me know that people would like to see more from me there's plenty
more to find over at unabated.com and until next time go out there and win some wagers
you