Sports gambling enthusiasts will argue that betting on sports makes the games themselves more exciting, especially games in which the viewer has little to no rooting interest. This may be true. However, gambling can also be addictive, and as a matter of reality, it’s next to impossible to win often enough on an ongoing-basis to make money gambling.
Yes, pro-bettors exist. However, the good ones, like Steve Fezzik, often have advanced degrees in a field like Statistics and often also have experience as bond traders in the financial markets, especially via international finance and currency trading. I’m talking about trading real currencies here, not Bitcoin. These guys are used to doing the grinding work of evaluating international corporate spreadsheets and macro-economic currency trends to find opportunities in international debt markets. There’s nothing sexy about any of this unless you happen to truly enjoy statistics and probability.
If you’re wondering, I myself have an MBA in International Finance from Fordham University plus a very long history playing the most statistics-driven game of all time, tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. Unsurprisingly, Statistics became my favorite course at Business School, and here we are.
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| Ross Tucker's "Even Money" podcast, starring Steve Fezzik, is my favorite betting podcast |
This article came about because of a discussion yesterday on Bluesky. This particular piece serves as a prototype for one that will eventually hit AsForFootball.Com. But this one will be geared more towards parents. In this one, we’ll attempt to highlight risks more than strategies for gambling success.
This whole thread is worth reading just so you can get a sense of parents’ desperation:
Per 15, my intrepid embedded frontline youth reporter, the youths are sports betting now, specifically it's the 14-15yo freshman boys across racial demographics are into sports betting, and why they like it is because of a) Super Bowl & b) all their favorite celebs are doing it. They prefer parlays.
— Erin Fogg (@criminalerin.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Fantasy Football
Fantasy Football started as a way for the NFL to expand its viewership, but it has since morphed to become America’s gateway drug into sports gambling.
fantasy football (noun): A competition in which participants select combinations of football players in a real league and score points according to their performance.
There are different ways to play Fantasy, but bottom line, you select real players participating in real games and get points based on their measurable performance metrics. How many yards did Saquon Barkley gain? How many touchdowns did he score? That sort of thing.
Playing Fantasy Football gets folks used to thinking about games in terms of performance metrics beyond just the final score. You don’t have to play for money, but many (most?) leagues have a buy-in with the winner pocketing the cash at the end of the season or something like that.
Gambling sites then expanded by introducing daily fantasy, where bettors create ad-hoc teams on a single-week basis to compete against large pools of competitive players. Conceptually, this is not much different than betting a bunch of single-player prop bets, but it creates a kind of “Leopards Ate My Face” moment in that total novices can -- and often do -- end up in truly massive leagues competing against professional bettors who have the kind of deep statistical background discussed above. Casual bettors lose badly in those cases.
Bettors noticed, and many gambling sites have tried various ways to keep this kind of thing from happening with various degrees of success. However, as a general rule, playing daily fantasy remains a good way to get your face ripped off.
In a macro sense, once you’re used to thinking about sports in terms of performance metrics, it’s hard to think about sports in any other way. This is not a bad thing. Understanding sports’ expectations provides a much deeper insight into why things happen. This really does deepen one’s understanding of the games. It is the raison d’etre of sites like Football Outsiders and my own As For Football, especially since football in particular has both tactical and strategic elements.
Unfortunately, this means that understanding and explaining sports stuff in gambling terms has become all too easy.
Betting on Teams
I hate fantasy football because it takes a team game and makes it about individual accomplishment. Individuals succeed because of team effort. This is not well-reflected in fantasy, however, and indeed, that reality creates the kind of information arbitrage that allows pro-bettors to rip the faces off of casual bettors.
All of sports gambling is about information arbitrage.
I don’t personally bet money. I hate to lose my money, for which I work very hard, and more to the point, I understand the probabilities well enough to know how things will play out over the long term. I don’t need to bet to understand statistics. With that said, I do enjoy making my weekly picks for the College Football Roundtable Show, and I think those picks provide a way to help us understand the college football season as a whole.
When I make my picks, I always make them for team accomplishments, not individual accomplishments. We can bet on teams in a few ways.
Bet the Spread
Team A is favored against Team B by a certain amount of points. This betting line sets the mathematical expectation for the game. We then bet on one team or the other to exceed expectations. In gambling-speak, exceeding expectations means “covering the spread”.
Let’s say Team A is favored by a touchdown, and we want to bet on Team A to win by more than that. We say, “Team A is giving a touchdown. Team A will cover.” In writing, we express this as, “Team A (-7) vs. Team B”. Mathematically, Team A’s score - 7 > Team B’s score.
If we bet Team B, they’re “getting” a touchdown. Expressed in writing as “Team A vs. Team B (+7)”. Mathematically, Team B’s score + 7 > Team A’s score.
This is my favorite way to make picks.
First, because it’s a single, binary probability. Teams either exceed expectations, or they don’t. Second, betting lines provide an extremely useful and convenient shorthand for discussing sports probability overall. Sports probability is very complicated! But if I know that Team A is favored by 7, then absent any other information, I have at least some context for the game. When I’m deciding which games to put on my television on any given Saturday, I’ll usually start by seeing which we expect to be close based on their betting lines.
Bet the Moneyline
Moneyline bets ignore the lines but pay out more than the initial bet when the underdog wins and less than the initial bet when the favorite wins. The math behind moneyline bets is exactly the same as the math behind betting the spread, but the “House” or “Book,” i.e. the casino facilitating the bets, balances those bets, i.e. the “action,” by changing the sizes of the payouts rather than by offering lines against the spread.
Moneyline betting seems like it should be easier than betting the spread, but again, the math is exactly the same. Thus, betting the moneyline is actually a very good way to get your face ripped off. It only looks easy.
Bet the Over/Under
When we bet the Over/Under, i.e. the “Total,” we’re betting on the total number of points that will be scored in a game. If we bet Over 50, for example, we’re betting Team A + Team B > 50. Under 50 would be Team A + Team B < 50.
This is another one of those things that seems simple but is actually complicated. Because we don’t know what the various coaching staffs will try to accomplish in any given game.
For example, take Stoney Brook at Ohio State Over 55. Seems simple. We know Ohio State just won the National Championship while Stoney Brook is a tiny school on Long Island with a middling football team. OSU *can* win by 55 easily… if they want to. However, there are no coaching staffs anywhere that care about final scores. OSU’s staff could -- and probably should! -- pull their starters early, put in the back-ups, third string, and eventually fourth string, and wind up winning by *just* 35-3.
In this case, the staff is happy, but the bettors have lost on information arbitrage. They had no way of knowing when the back-ups would go in, or how hard or well those back-ups would play.
Prop Bets
Proposition Bets (Prop Bets) are tied to events inside a game outside the final result. For example, “Saquon Barkley will run for 150+ yards in the Super Bowl.” That can happen regardless of how the Eagles play as a whole.
Prop bets are good in the sense that they turn on single-instance binary outcomes, but they’re bad in the sense that they generally turn on individual accomplishments in a world in which we don’t necessarily know what coaching staffs are trying to accomplish from week-to-week.
Teasers
In a teaser, we bet two games at the same time, and because we’re taking on more risk by betting two (or more!) games at the same time, we get to “tease” the line to a more favorable position.
Let’s say we bet a standard 6-point teaser on the following games:
Team A (-7) vs. Team B
Team C (+1) vs. Team D
The teaser allows us to move the line 6 points, making each individual bet much more likely.
Team A (-1) vs. Team B
Team C (+7) vs. Team D
But we now have to hit both in order for this to pay off!
Let’s assume that each initial line had a 50% probability of hitting, and that after we teased the bet, each subsequent line now has a 75% probability of hitting. Did we help ourselves?
If we make both of the initial bets, we have a 50% chance of hitting at least one, a 25% chance of hitting both, and a 25% chance of hitting neither. If we play the teaser, it works out like this:
Win Probability = 0.75 * 0.75 = .50.
Statistically, this teaser changes nothing. It has a 50% probability of hitting. That’s the same probability of hitting one but not both of the initial bets. So far, so good. However, we’ve cost ourselves the 25% of hitting both bets while discounting the probability of hitting neither. Since those outcomes were equal anyway, the math cancels out all the way around.
This is why the books offer teasers. They don’t care how you bet; the math works out the same for them in aggregate in every case.
You Can’t Win
The reason you can’t win is because the books charge a 10% vigorish or “vig” as the cost of placing a bet. Thus, we have to hit 55% of our bets just to break even. Since the books are very good at ensuring that each side of a binary wager has something very close to a 50% chance of occuring, you’re gonna lose money on the vig over time. You might break even -- I usually break even in my picks league -- but the vig will eat into your profits over time every time.
This is mathematically unavoidable.
Professional bettors make money by having better information than the books, repeatedly over time. To be clear, these people are professional statisticians who truly enjoy pouring over the tiniest details of sports probability. If you’re reading this, that’s not you. Which is fine. Just understand that over time, it is statistically impossible to beat the odds by definition.
The books *usually* don’t try to take sides on the games they offer. They just want to balance the action and take the vig as their profit. If they can make the vig bigger, then that’s good for them.
“Needle In a Haystack” Bets Make Things Worse
This is because the books charge the same 10% vigorish to place unlikely wagers that they charge to play standard, binary wagers. So you’re paying 10% to try to pick the Super Bowl MVP when there are maybe 10 guys with a reasonable chance of winning it.
Ideally, that 10% vigorish should be spread evenly across all the different potential choices. Since it’s not, the bet itself is much more expensive than a standard binary bet would be. This, in turn, means that you need to hit these “needle in a haystack” bets way more often when, in fact, your odds of winning them are way smaller than they would be on standard binary bets.
Parlays Also Make It Worse
A parlay bet takes two or more bets, usually binary bets, and combines them into a single wager. This makes things worse in the same way that teaser bets don’t change odds overall. You’re taking a series of things that have, at best, a 50% chance of happening and combining them into one massive bet. Your odds go down with each leg you add to the parlay, and unlike the teasers, you can’t move the lines (or whatever) in your favor.
This essentially creates a “needle in a haystack” bet out of a series of binary bets. The books offer these bets because the bets themselves don’t pay very often.
Bet Win% = 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5…
With just two legs, you’ve reduced your odds to 25%. Add a third, and you’re down to 12.5%. Keep going, and you’re all but destroying your chances of actually winning. Then take out the vig, and on aggregate, you’re really just giving the books your money.
Betting Strategies
1. Don’t.
2. Cut out the books. Establish a picks league with your friends, either against the spread or just with moneyline winners and losers. Pay money into the pot, and have the winner get the pot at the end of the year. Or do what we did at As For Football and have a title belt made, so that the winner gets to hold the belt over the offseason.
This is still fun, and we still compete, but no one loses money. Because we all have families. Instead, we just talk shit to each other as part of a community. This is actually good.
3. Place single-outcome binary bets. You’re still going to lose 10% over the course of the season on average, but this is better -- and much cheaper -- than most of the alternatives.
Yours truly with the AFF Cruiserweight Title Belt. I've won it twice.
4. Bet on games that fewer folks will watch. To put that another way, don’t bet on the NFL or Alabama.
LOTS of people bet the NFL, so the books have no choice but to put TONS of work into the odds they offer on NFL games. The same is true with SEC and Big 10 football and with Power 4 football generally.
On the As For Football College Football Roundtable show, I almost always pick games from the American Athletic Conference. This is because 1) Army is in that conference, so I pay a lot of attention to that conference, and 2) the books spend astronomically less time setting those lines than they do with P4 college games or especially NFL games. Thus, the information arbitrage is much less -- for me -- in the AAC than it would be for the NFL or Power 4.
Theoretically, we’d do even better to bet FCS games, but I’m not actually a fan of, say, Stoney Brook or the Patriot or Ivy Leagues. But those games will have even less information arbitrage.
Thanks for your time with this. If you have questions, either leave them below or drop them on social media.
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