Episode 24

Shane Mercer [00:00:11]:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Behind the Lines. I'm your host Shane Mercer and today we are joined by a very special guest. No, it's not Andrew Pace, he's away this week. Instead we have the one and only Colter Wood joining us. He is a certified sports value analyst, a professional sports bettor and he's a coach at inplayLIVE. Now before we get to him, I got to remind you all to like download and subscribe follow us on all the socials at inplayLIVE. We're on YouTube, apple spotify everywhere. You get your podcasts. And if you have a betting story or you want to be featured on the podcast, drop us a note in the comments below. We'd be happy to hear from you. And as I mentioned, Colter is a coach at inplayLIVE and if you want to connect with pros like him and you want to see what it's all about on the inside, well we have a promo code that you can use that's 'BEHINDTHELINES' all caps to join inplayLIVE. All right Colter, I told the audience a little bit about you, but tell us about yourself. For those of the audience out there who don't know you or aren't familiar with you.

Colter Wood [00:01:10]:

Sounds good. Thanks Shane. I don't know, I feel like I'm not the most exciting guy, but my really quick spiel myself. I'm a father of a couple kids who bets on sports for a living. It's never really a sports bettor prior to joining inplayLIVE. So I kind of fell into it and I'm going to say got lucky, that it really worked for me and have worked really hard to get there. But I've been with PlayLive since inception, pretty much two and a half years and just kind of love what I do, love the community. It's been life changing for me. I've seen how many people's lives it's changed and it's pretty fun.

Shane Mercer [00:01:45]:

Well, you said something there about it being lucky. I know firsthand and I know from talking to a lot of other people within PlayLive and a lot of other pro sports bettors, that really their luck has almost nothing to do with it. It's a lot of hard work, it's a grind, it takes time, dedication, training, all that sort of stuff. The same kind of stuff that goes into making any kind of great career, right?

Colter Wood [00:02:08]:

Yeah, no, for sure.

Shane Mercer [00:02:09]:

All right, well today we are going to talk about contrarian thinking and for all of you out there, listening and watching Colter in my mind fits the definition of contrarian thinker and we are going to dive into that in a few moments. But first we have a bit of news that we want to talk about. Here's the headline coming to us from the CBC which is the public broadcaster in Canada. For all of you listening outside of Canada, and the headline, this is all about the Ontario market. The headline here is ontarians wagering, far more on legal online casino games than on sports betting. So the market opened up a couple of years ago, and we thought that there would be this rush towards sports betting. It turns out that a big portion of this rush to online gaming is actually in those online casinos. And I'll just break the numbers down for everybody out there. $11.6 billion in casino related wagers. This is coming from Igaming, which is the regulator in Ontario. So that includes things like slots, live computer based table games, peer to peer bingo, things like that. Now, I'll say it again, $11.6 billion. Huge amount of money in perspective, only $2 billion on sports wage rate. So it's a vast discrepancy there. And then when we look at poker, it's 350,000,000 in poker games online. So we have this sort of huge discrepancy to give you an idea. All those wagers combined generated $545,000,000 in gaming revenues for the first quarter of this calendar year. That compares with 162,000,000 in the same quarter last year. So we're talking about almost a five fold increase there last year. In the entire year, the Ontario government received $260,000,000. That was their share of the gaming revenues. So if we look at that, that's what they collected for the whole year. If we look at a five fold jump, the province of Ontario could be looking at a billion dollars in revenue, with a significant portion of that coming from online casinos. Some of it from sports betting, but most of it from casinos. Colter when I hear that, I think to myself, man, this could be a problem. We have a lot of people out there who are gambling a word that we don't like to use a lot on this podcast, because that's not what we do as sports bettors and sports value analysts, but we're sort of grouped into that category. And now we have all these people out there gambling in online slots. I'm quite concerned, and a lot of the experts and advocates out there are pointing to this saying, look, we're going to have a serious gambling problem in the province of Ontario in the future. When you saw this and read this article, what went through your mind?

Colter Wood [00:05:16]:

Man well, I messaged you after I read it, and I was like, my mind has gone into a million places reading this article. I think the first thing I thought of, I'm going to talk about the massive discrepancy first. My very first thought was like, man, that just seems like crazy that sports betting is so much lower. I'm not somebody who bets on anything else. I don't gamble, I don't go to the casino. So to me, it was kind of shocking to hear that. Then I sort of sat back, reflected, chatted a little bit with a few people. I was like, but if I go to a casino there's ten times, at least ten times as many people on the different slot machines and different tables compared to what's inside of the sports books there. So I don't know, I guess maybe I shouldn't have been surprised in hindsight that the discrepancy would be that big. Also the barrier for entry, like anybody can walk into an online casino or a casino or whatever and pick up any sort of table game without much behind them. They don't really have to know how it works. You can figure it out pretty quickly for the most part where with the sports betting stuff, I think if you don't know about sports or know much about sports, you're not going to have an interest. And even if you do, I think a lot of people are confused by terminology. And when I started, I didn't know what a spread was. I did not know how that worked. And I think a lot of people feel that way. So I think the barriers for entry also kind of make it add up. So in terms of the discrepancy, I was less surprised when I saw the numbers at first too. You're like, that's staggering. I know. I'm in Saskatchewan and we have one regulated book here and that's it. And obviously way smaller province than like I think our whole province is probably like half of Ottawa. So I've seen the numbers of what we've done and they're not even close. So it does seem a little bit scary in terms of where it could go. The one piece of data though that I was really curious about is what's happened to the in person numbers? Where are they in comparison? Have they gone way down? Are they still the same?

Shane Mercer [00:07:36]:

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, that wasn't included in the data set, but that's a great question.

Colter Wood [00:07:41]:

I was wondering if maybe that data just wasn't quite as easy to get because obviously when it's all online and they have agreements with the books to get paid based on the dollars, they're getting the reports constantly. Where the casinos? It might not quite be the same, I don't know. And then the other one is we have no idea how many of these people are already using online casinos through the offshore methods. Like most sports bettors I know were using at least bet 365 prior to any of this coming. But I would guess that the online casino thing has really gone up. So it's definitely pretty scary. And sorry, I got one more thing. It's a 900,000 active accounts and at $14 billion, I think I calculated that at like $1,500 loss per person on average. So for every winner, that makes the losers heavier. I don't know, that's not an insignificant amount of money. If you're making like 55, $60,000 a year, that's a one paycheck that you're not getting anymore, right?

Shane Mercer [00:08:52]:

And the cost of living is just going up, especially here in Ontario. The GTA makes up a huge portion of the population. It is not cheap and yeah, that's a great point. It's not an insignificant amount of money, it's a lot of money that people are losing. Now, you also zeroed in on something else that I thought, wow, I'm really glad he's coming on the show because this is super interesting. But you actually notice that the sports books are actually making less money in terms of their profit margin off of the casino wagering than they are sports betting, which is kind of strange. Typically we think that they're going to have a smaller margin on sports betting and a higher margin on the casino games, but that's not the case, right?

Colter Wood [00:09:37]:

Yeah, I was surprised. I think it was just a little over 6% was the profit margin on sports betting and then it was like three to three and a half, like 3.25 ish on the casino side and I didn't expect the difference to be as hefty as it was. I thought they would both fall right around the four to five mark. So to see that discrepancy really threw me off. They talk a lot about the advertising side as well in here and starts to maybe make sense why they're fighting so hard for these advertising dollars around the sports betting and not around the online casino side. I think it's maybe a double edged sword there. But when you see that the profit margin is higher on the sports betting, are they assuming that they can maintain that margin and then if they bring in more people, that's going to be their bread and butter.

Shane Mercer [00:10:35]:

It also is quite indicative that for most of our audience out there listening, a lot of them are recreational sports bettors, right? A lot of you out there are typical losing bettors. Maybe you're having some fun while you're doing it, but you're not really turning a profit. And that's the whole impetus of our podcast to sort of help all of you out there learn how to win long term, learn how to navigate the sports books and maybe turn your losing betting ways into winning ways and maybe even that turns into big wins down the line or consistent winning. But right now, clearly there's not a lot of people who are winning consistently at sports betting and that's really concerning. I think.

Colter Wood [00:11:19]:

Yeah, I agree. Basically if the books pushing -110 on both sides and they're just breaking even with the public that's roughly 6% is what they're taking home is their profit margin at the end of the day there. So they're basically maximizing their pregame profit margin, which is not good for the better for the masses. And then I was also kind of thinking about it and feels like maybe the sports betting to the sports books is like the gateway drug where it's like, okay, well, we'll promote the sports betting because it's glamorous. It feels like you're not just out there gambling like you could be smarter than the books and make money on these donkey parlays that everybody's talking about the lottery tickets. And then once we get you in, we know that we can convert enough of you to the casino. So you might go on a nice winning run, sports betting, but you're going to come back and you're going to go to the casino and lose your money back or you're going to have a tough day in the sports betting and you're going to go to the casino and chase your losses. And I think it's their gateway drug a little bit.

Shane Mercer [00:12:31]:

I'm glad you brought that up. That I think was noted in the article, too, with another expert saying the same thing, that the sports betting. You might have a tough day sports betting and so exactly that you end up chasing your losses by going to the casino, thinking you're going to make some quick cash on slots or blackjack or roulette or something like that. And that's not how it works. It's just a recipe for disaster. All right, we've covered off that. I'm glad we were able to cover that important story. I do think it's very important for our audience, so I'm glad we got to it, but let's move on. And we're talking about contrarian thinking today. And Colter, I like to think that this podcast is contrarian in a lot of ways. One of the lines that I like to use as often is we don't give out any picks, no picks, no predictions, no crystal balls, which is very different than all other sports betting podcasts out there, which is exactly what they are doing. They want to predict the future and tell you what's going to happen. That's not what we're here to do. We are here to teach you how to approach sports betting in a sort of holistic, responsible way that can potentially make you money over the long term. So I like to think of this podcast as being contrarian. But Colter, when you think about the term contrarian, what goes through your mind? And do you consider yourself a contrarian.

Colter Wood [00:13:53]:

Thinker, okay, well, what goes through my mind, I think ultimately what I think of when I think of contrarian is it's like when everyone else zigs, you zag the masses are going one way, the public's betting one way, or sees the bets one way. Maybe they're not even betting you're. You're willing, you're able, and you're open to seeing the other. Know, if I see that the Braves and the Athletics are playing, generally speaking, people are going to say the Braves are going to win. They're the best, the Athletics are the worst. And you've got to be willing to look at it and understand there's other factors at play. And sometimes it doesn't even matter who's winning and losing. What you're really looking at is what are the numbers that they're giving for us for the Braves to win or the Athletics to win? Because even if the Athletics are getting three to one, they don't lose three times as many games as they win. And the Braves don't certainly don't win that often. It's kind of like an any given Sunday type of thing. So I think that's kind of my quick spiel on.

Shane Mercer [00:15:02]:

That your quick explanation. So you kind of dodged the other question there, though. Do you consider yourself a contrarian?

Colter Wood [00:15:08]:

Thinker I was going to get to it. I promise I'm going to say yes and no. I think ultimately when I go and I'm a very good live sports bettor, I'm a very bad pregame sports bettor.

Shane Mercer [00:15:23]:

As bad as it gets, join the club.

Colter Wood [00:15:25]:

Yes. But I'm fine with that. I'm not trying to be a pregame bettor, so other people can do that. Yeah, I think when it comes to pregame betting, I think I'm probably as public as anyone. Part of it is I don't put the time and energy into knowing the pregame situation as well. But I do think, and you kind of coaxed me into this earlier, that I do think an opportunity I have is that I'm willing to look at opportunities to not bet. Like while everyone else is trying to find places to bet, I'm kind of looking for reasons not to bet something which I think prevents me from getting into too many situations that lose, but also it just allows me to look at the games differently. I think maybe I'm just like a contrarian at heart. I'm sure my partner would agree with that, where every time she says something, I got to argue it. That's who I am.

Shane Mercer [00:16:18]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to dig into that a little bit more, though, because here we are. Here I am on this podcast, sports betting podcast, talking to a professional sports bettor and sports betting coach who says he tries to limit how much he bets on sports. Let's try to square this a little bit because it just sort of seems counterintuitive, right, that, hey, you bet on sports but you actually look to not place wagers. Talk to me about that process. How do you go through this?

Colter Wood [00:16:49]:

Yeah, so I heard from a very wise man one time that everybody's journey through this is not the same. What works for some is not going to work for others. And for some people, trying to take value wagers as frequently as they can over time is the best situation for them. And you got a six sided dice and they're paying you three to one for a certain number to hit, like, yeah, you want to take that bet as many times as you can. That's not ultimately as simple as it is for what we do. So for me, I really try to just focus in on those really prime opportunities and bet them a little bit harder and gamble a little bit less. I'm a very emotional person so if I start to lose some money and more than I'm comfortable with, I start to bet emotionally, and then I start to make decisions that I wouldn't normally make. I'll overexpose. I'll take bets that I wouldn't normally take. And that's just like a bad spiral to shrink your bankroll. So I find that if I just focus in on those really strong opportunities that I can bet, I take less losses, ultimately win more, and then I can manage my emotions a little bit better throughout the whole process. Yeah. And time is really important to me. I have two young kids. I know you also you have three kids. And my time is really important, and I just don't want to be on the clock all day every day. I don't need to be nine to nine watching everything or, man, nine to nine. What am I talking about? What is it? 24 hours. Really? Right.

Shane Mercer [00:18:30]:

There's something out there. 24 hours of the day. Absolutely right.

Colter Wood [00:18:33]:

And there's guys finding reasons to bet on ping pong and all sorts of overseas basketball right now, but for me, it's like, I just want to focus in on the opportunities I know really well. I'll leave the rest up to everybody else and then make sure that I'm managing my time with my family, and then I'll make my money on what I know and just not try to get in deeper than I need to be.

Shane Mercer [00:18:59]:

You touched on something there that I think is pretty interesting, and it was something I was thinking about before we came into this episode, and it's this idea that can you be a contrarian thinker and separate that from emotional betting? So an idea. Right. The favorite is the team that you're against. We'll rewind the clock, and let's go back seven, eight years to the New England Patriots and the Tom Brady. And if you weren't a Patriots fan, you hated the Know. But it would be contrarian to bet against the Patriots in that time because they were so dominant. But sometimes you just hate bet. Right. Or you're sort of betting against the public just because you have that emotional attachment. Do you find that the two go together, or are you able to separate them? And how do you go about separating?

Colter Wood [00:19:58]:

I'm actually pretty good at separating that I care more about my family's well being than I do about my favorite sports teams, which is crazy because I care a lot about my favorite sports teams. So if the Blue Jays are playing, I don't feel the need to support them with my money just because I love the Blue Jays. That emotion doesn't really get to me. I'm a really big 49 Ers fan, too, and that actually is maybe harder because I feel like I bet better on football. But even still, it's like and if it's clear that the 49 Ers can't score right now and they're playing, I don't know the Browns who were definitely dogs against them. I have no problem taking bets that support the Browns or support the 49 ers not to score if that's what I'm seeing in the game. Regardless of what the pregame total is, what the pregame spread is. All of that's out the window once the game starts. Which is why, again, I find it a lot easier to be a contrarian once the game started than before it started because I can talk myself into anything pregame.

Shane Mercer [00:21:04]:

Right? Yeah, it's a lot harder to talk yourself into taking a side that you can see with your eyes isn't delivering. Right. Or it's easy to go against that side.

Colter Wood [00:21:13]:

Yeah, I am a data nerd, but I'm not like I don't know if you know, the bet the process guys, but these are like very serious level data guys. I'm not that smart. I will not beat the books with data. Every data person that works for the sports books is 1000 times better with the data than I am. The problem is all the data is gone once the game starts. It doesn't matter anymore.

Shane Mercer [00:21:40]:

Data goes out the window. I love that. I think that's probably true for a vast majority of our audience. They're probably sitting there going, yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I'm the same way. I'm not a math guy. I don't know a whole lot when it comes to data analytics and that kind of thing. I enjoy talking to people about it and learning from them. But do I know much about it? Absolutely not. And do the guys at the sports books probably know way more about it than I do? Absolutely. And I think that's probably true for a lot of our audience out there. That's a really good point. So when we talk about the sports books, and we're not necessarily just talking about the in the moment live wagers we're placing, but we're talking about an approach to the sports books and navigating them, how would you describe contrarian thinking when sort of looking at a sports book as a whole? And so I'm thinking about the bonuses that they're going to offer you that seem amazing right off the bat, or those boosts on a specific side of a wager that seem like, wow, this might be a no brainer, how do you kind of approach those sort of situations with a contrarian mindset?

Colter Wood [00:22:56]:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've heard you guys kind of talk a little bit about the bonus side, but there's not a bonus out there that the books have created that does not benefit the books. And I think there's a bunch of different ways this works is one, they want you to trust them so they'll give you free money so that you think they're on their side, which they aren't. Two, they use it to flag sharp bettors. So if you go in and they give you a bonus and you don't lose your bonus within a short amount of time, your account is going to get flagged as a Sharp bettor and they will have their eyes on you like a hawk immediately. So it's a really quick way for them to shut you down. And then this is not going to happen in the regulated markets, but in the offshore markets, it's also a trap for them to not pay you. So you come in. You're a sharp. Bettor or sharper bettor. You take the bonus, you win a couple of bets early but haven't rolled your bonus. They've got their eyes on you, they're going to shut your account down to a point that the only way you can now roll your bonus is to go into the casino. It's the only way that you can get through it. So they're going to recoup their money. And I just think I'll be honest, more often than not, I do not take the bonuses. There's a few sports books where I trust them in terms that I know I can get enough leash to roll over my bonus. But for the most part, I'm not a Kenny type. I don't want to grind out and grind through my bonuses and get creative with them. It's not really for me. So there's a lot of sports books where I don't take the bonuses because I know or I believe at least, that they are using this as an additional way to kind of trap me.

Shane Mercer [00:24:43]:

And Trick think, you know? I appreciate what you're getting at there and I just want know for all of our audience out there who are listening and maybe they missed the last week's episode or two weeks ago I think it was two weeks AGO's episode where we had Kenny on talking about rewards programs and bonuses and Kenny Huber, the golden. You know, one of the things that both Pace and I said during that episode is that there's only one of him who know take those massive bonuses and roll them over and he knows the math right away of what he's got to do to do it because he's done it. So many know it's not an easy thing to do, especially if you've never done it before, right?

Colter Wood [00:25:21]:

Totally. It's not like I would say, I agree there's only one Kenny. People's brains don't work like that guys does. But if you take the time and you do the work and you're good enough with numbers and you've got the bankroll going into like you can absolutely do what Kenny does. But you have to understand how hard Kenny works, how patient he is. Either way, everyone who hasn't listened to that episode should go back and listen to it. It's a totally different way of thinking about everything. And then regard to the boosts.

Shane Mercer [00:25:53]:

A.

Colter Wood [00:25:54]:

Lot of the boosts are kind of similar. They have a feeling they're going to get a certain amount of action elsewhere in a game. So they utilize boosts, and usually they're hometown boosts because that's how they can trick a Leafs fan or Phillies fan or whatever into betting. Some of these bets is they're utilizing those boosts to hedge the action that they either think they're going to get or have already gotten on another side. You don't see a lot of these boosts. Baseball is a tricky one because lines kind of open day of. But like football boosts, they don't usually come out until Saturday or maybe Sunday. And the reason they don't do that is because they want to see what kind of money they got coming in before they put this boost out there.

Shane Mercer [00:26:37]:

That's an interesting point. Yeah, they come in late and oftentimes it can be based on geography. Right. I think I just got one for the Women's World Cup right before it started to take Team Canada. And I think they boosted it from like plus 200 to plus 300. I'll be honest, I was the kind of thing where I was, oh, it's a max $10 wager on it. So I said, all right, I'll throw my $10 on it, and you got another reason to cheer for Team Canada. But I guess in that case, they pulled me in, right? They sucked me in, they got my $10, and now I've got it on Team Canada for plus 300. Yeah, it's an interesting sort of thing, though. So when you sign up, you just ignore the bonuses completely and you just sort of put them aside and say, I'm not bothering with any of that.

Colter Wood [00:27:25]:

In a lot of instances, I do like, keep in mind, I'm in Saskatchewan. I have one regulated book here. Whatever, I'll take their bonus. But they're also like, provincial government owned. A lot of my books are offshore and I don't trust them. I don't trust a lot of them to begin with, bonus or not, I need to know that they're reliable from a source before I want to get into the bonus and just risk my account that way.

Shane Mercer [00:27:54]:

Right, okay. So people out there are probably thinking, well, how do I actually train myself over time to adopt this kind of contrarian mindset when it comes to sports betting? What advice would you have for people out there?

Colter Wood [00:28:13]:

I think like anything, it's just practice. You have to understand the basics of it, which you can read a couple of articles, listen to a couple of podcasts. Here's some contrarian.

Shane Mercer [00:28:27]:

This podcast about it.

Colter Wood [00:28:28]:

Yeah, exactly. I would say a lot of I learned a lot of my contrarian mindset from Pace, or at least the understanding of it. Well, that's not true because I argued with my partner way before Pace was around. But when it comes to sports betting, a lot of it was from listening to Pace and other guys in the group, like Zenus, like really sharp guys. And then you just sort of think like, well, what. Would they do? And going into a game, it's like, okay, the Chiefs are playing I don't know, the Chiefs are playing the Seahawks this week. What's the public think is going to happen? What's the other side of it? And then just kind of put yourself through that process. Yeah, I think that's kind of it. And then going into live betting, where, again, I find it a lot easier to execute. It's just trusting your eyes. A big part of the contrarian mindset in live betting is just having an open mind to what you're seeing. It's like, okay, well, the pre game line for this football game was 55, but they've got like, 13 points in the first half and they still want, like, 28 points. Okay, well, let's see how they come out in the second half. Are they still slow? Are they still grinding the clock? Is there a reason that this is happening? It's trust what you're seeing and don't get caught up in what the public thinks or thought was going to happen.

Shane Mercer [00:29:57]:

Right. Drowning out the noise conversation we've had a few times on this podcast, which is much easier said than done. Right?

Colter Wood [00:30:03]:

100%.

Shane Mercer [00:30:04]:

Yeah.

Colter Wood [00:30:06]:

Sorry.

Shane Mercer [00:30:07]:

No, go ahead.

Colter Wood [00:30:08]:

I was just going to say, when it comes to the pregame betting side, I am a pretty firm believer that just being a contrarian as a pregame bettor is actually not profitable over time. I think the books have that built into the vig. And if you are strictly going the public money is coming in here, I'm going to put my money on the other side because I'm going to be on the book side. Unless you're doing that for literally every event of every day, I don't think it's going to pay off. And I'm not talking every baseball game. I am talking literally every single thing that bet 365 is putting out there. I just don't think you're going to have that edge. And I've failed to see an example of somebody doing that. Like anybody who is a successful pregame bettor is not just a contrarian. They are a contrarian with data, with knowledge, with more to it. So I don't think people should go out there and just believe that if I'm just contrarian, I'm going to win. It's not true. It is not that simple.

Shane Mercer [00:31:06]:

Yeah, not that simple. And I want to get at something else you touched on there because you brought up a couple of people who are also in implay live. I think you mentioned Azan's name. I think you mentioned Zanus's name and Pace. Of course, you had to learn from other people and from a group of people, and it might sound, again, kind of counterintuitive. Well, if you're contrarian, how can you be part of a betting group or a group of people? But they're like minded people and they are also trying to think in a similar way and get others to think in that way, which is what the public is not doing or the general average recreational sports bettor is not doing. They're betting alone, right? By themselves.

Colter Wood [00:31:52]:

Yeah, there's strength in numbers, 100%. And I'm annoyingly kind of obsessed with growth and just getting better and not being stagnant. And I love to just watch what the group is saying and not even just like, the top guys in the group, but literally every guy in the group and look for an opportunity to learn from what they're saying. It's like, is so and so. Who talks too much in the group? Are they saying really sharp things and maybe they're just like, it needs a little tweaking? Or are they the public and I should consider the things they're saying the other side of the bet, and it's kind of the nice thing about having a really large community is you can find value in literally every voice in there if you look at it through the right lens. And it's hard when there's a group of five to 700 people to determine right away who's sharp and who's not.

Shane Mercer [00:32:45]:

Yeah, that's definitely a challenge. How do you go about that?

Colter Wood [00:32:52]:

I think I've got friends that are kind of sounding boards for me. So if somebody says something that piques my interest, I like to pass it by. Some other guys that I know are super sharp. A lot of the names you kind of mentioned already and just get kind of a group think on that and look for opportunities. Again, look for opportunities to tweak it like, how can you make it better? Just because the strategy is good doesn't mean it can't be better. And if I come up with a really good strategy, or at least one that's working really well for me, like, I've got, like, 50 to 60 samples and it's got a ten ish percent ROI or better. I want to immediately take it to somebody like Zenus or Zon or Pacer, whoever, and just get opinions. Like, what makes this better? How do we take this from being a 10% ROI to, like, 15, 20% ROI over time? And how do we keep it so that the books don't just sharpen the lines to phase it out?

Shane Mercer [00:33:48]:

So much great advice there for everybody who's listening. The power of working with a group, how to kind of work together on strategies, develop them over time, poke holes in them with that contrarian mindset to benefit the group collectively. Right? Now, I got to ask you, though, because you brought this up a couple of times now. How does your contrarian, your inner contrarian, come out or manifest itself in the non sports betting world? So you mentioned your partner, your wife. I hope that they're friendly arguments.

Colter Wood [00:34:26]:

I think they are. No, they are for sure. I would say. Well, the big thing is I think I'm like the eternal devil's advocate and not because I necessarily always disagree. But I want to talk about the other side to make sure that we are seeing whatever we're talking about from all sides and whether or not it's planning a vacation or talking about our kids education or whatever it is. It's like, hey, well, let's talk about all sides and make sure that we're not making biased choices. It's like I have this internal belief, you have this internal belief we are not the same person. So let's talk it through and try to get to a strong point of agreement. Definitely a lot of that with, I would say with all my friends and family. I don't want to just say devil's advocate, to be devil's advocate, but again, looking for opportunities to just make whatever a little bit better. And I think to make it better, you have to look at the opposing side to what you believe. And I do that to my partner way too much. I hope she never watches this because I don't want to admit this to the world and then she sees it. But yeah, it's like she's got a belief system. And I think the best way to help her grow, which she doesn't want help growing, for me at least, but I'm still going to force it out there is to try to oppose that side and help her see the other side. And one out of ten times she might be like, do you know what? I actually think maybe I wasn't looking at that properly. And the other nine out of ten she'd be like, no, what you're saying is actually reaffirming what I believe and leaning into it. Honestly, I like when people do that to me. I really like being challenged. I love being wrong. As much as I often come across as a know it all to people because of that devil's advocate, I love to be wrong because when you're wrong, you grow, when you fail, you get better.

Shane Mercer [00:36:24]:

It's true, it's true. You learn from your mistakes. You learn when you're wrong. Absolutely. 100%. Well, Colter, I've got to say I'm glad you didn't play devil's advocate when I invited you to come on the podcast and it was a very quick and easy agreement there. So I just want to say thank you so much for joining. I'd love to have you back sometime if you're down.

Colter Wood [00:36:43]:

Of course, man, anytime. Whatever you need.

Shane Mercer [00:36:46]:

Awesome. Really appreciate it. And for all of you out there listening, Colter is the kind of guy you get to connect with when you join inplayLIVE and you sort of see it from the inside. He's one of the coaches. He's active in the discord group, which is the inplayLIVE pro membership, which is, I would say, tremendous value for Dollar. So again, for all of you out there listening and thinking about it, maybe you're on the edge. Colter is the kind of guy you get to connect with and really get to pick his brain and sort of learn from him over time. And guys like many, many guys like him with that same kind of mindset. And it's a super powerful group. Again. The promo code behind the lines. Colter anything you want to add before we say goodbye?

Colter Wood [00:37:31]:

No, man. Thanks for having me. Don't sell yourself short, though. You're also the kind of guy that people get to connect with. So a lot of value out there.

Shane Mercer [00:37:39]:

Yeah, well, happy to happy to bring all kinds of people on the show over time, as long as we are all aligned on our mission, which is purifying the sports betting industry, helping losing sports bettors become winning sports bettors over time. Colter thanks again, bud. Till next week. All of you keep eating those books. Thanks for tuning to another episode of behind the Lines. Remember to like, download and subscribe. We are on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and everywhere you get your podcasts, have a betting story or want to be featured on our podcast, drop a note in the comments below. And if you want to join inplayLIVE. Use promo code 'BEHINDTHELINES'.