So Gambling. A couple of months ago I happened to read a profile of some dude, a struggling musician, who made a half million dollars in the world series of poker. He invested all of his winnings in his music career. I had my doubts about the wisdom of that decision, but had no doubts about my intense jealousy. Perhaps I could learn to play poker. I’m smart. Shit, I learned to read and write Arabic at an age when, well, I learned as an adult. Surely I could master a card game? That thought lasted for a second or two. I don’t need to be undertaking any major overhauls, and if I’d been interested in poker I would have learned it already. But perhaps I already had some skills, or some sort of knowledge that I could use to my advantage?
I believe it was a Sunday, and some football game or other that I had correctly predicted to myself had just ended, and it occurred to me that I had been watching football for more than thirty years. So I decided to undertake a little experiment. I researched online sportsbooks, started looking at the point spreads for the NFL, and began picking games. Not betting mind you, just picking. Every week for four weeks, I picked every game on the schedule. It did not take long to realize that this was not the way to go. Simply finishing over five hundred (more wins than losses) against the spread was an accomplishment. I would need a different strategy.
There is a misconception about point spreads. The folks who set point spreads for sportsbooks are not evaluating the game and its potential outcome. They are trying to eliminate the risk for the bookie. The idea is to set the line so that you get roughly the same number of people betting on each side of the line. Because everyone who bets has to bet slighly more than he/she stands to win, this ensures that the bookie makes a profit no matter who wins the game. For instance, if the Falcons are four point favorites over the Saints, and ten people bet eleven dollars to win ten on the Falcons, and ten people bet eleven to win ten on the Saints plus the points, then regardless of who wins the bookie makes ten bucks after paying out the winners. Multiply that by much larger bets and a much greater volume and soon you’re talking about a whole lot of money with minimal risk for the bookie. It’s like any other kind of gambling: the system is rigged so the house never loses.
So the point spread is in no way an objective evaluation of the potential outcome of a football game. It is about the perception of a particular football game. Who do the betting public think will win and by how much? Now this does require an awful lot of knowledge of, and evaluation of, football because there are lots of smart bettors out there who know the game very well. Hence the lines often seem to be right on. And anyone trying to pick every single NFL game in a given week is going to have a really tough time. But I figured that out of a weekly schedule of fifteen or sixteen games I might be able to evaluate the games and the lines and find three or four lines that I believed to be not quite right. So I set out to pick four games a week for four weeks that I thought could be winners. If at the end of that period I came out far enough ahead that it could not simply be explained by chance, then I would risk some actual money.
Well, I extended the experiment to six weeks just to be sure that I wasn’t fooling myself. I went 18-5-1, the one being a push, or a tie, wherein neither the bettor nor the bookie wins or loses. Pretty damn good and more than good enough to risk some small bets. I felt I had been demonstrably conservative and if I had been betting those games it would have been a very merry Christmas indeed. So I took the plunge. I bet four games, relatively small bets that I could afford to lose. I went two and two. A bad week for me, after six weeks of success, though it did not really cost me much--just the small extra percentage of the bet that the bookie takes to ensure his profit. I was a bit discouraged and wondered if I had in fact just been fooling myself. But I knew as well that one week is just one week and I needed to stick with the plan. I then proceeded to roll off five straight wins in a row and have made enough to satiate Sallie Mae for a couple of months.
I’m not so sure about this week though. Nothing jumps out at me in the lines so I may have to take a pass for a week and see what comes up next week. But I haven’t done the homework yet, so we’ll see how my initial look accords with the reality. Thus far my new ventures are treating me well.
