Episode 3

Shane Mercer [00:00:10]:

Hello and welcome to Behind The Lines, the podcast that doesn't give you picks, predictions, parlays or talk about DFS in any way, shape or form. What we're here to do is talk about the sports books and we're going to talk about the ways that they try to fool, trick, manipulate you into losing your money over the long term. And by exposing their strategies and tactics, we hope to help you combat them and turn a losing wagering career into a winning wagering career.

Shane Mercer [00:00:43]:

I'm your host Shane Mercer, I'm a career journalist with a background in hard news but I love sports and I really enjoy sports wagering and I'm here with Andrew Pace, he is the professional sports bettor and the founder of inplayLIVE, a professional sports betting community. It's got about 1000 members and it is probably one of the most sophisticated sports betting communities there are out there. Andrew, how are you? Welcome.

Andrew Pace [00:01:11]:

Excellent. Shane, I just got back from Maui so no complaints over here. The stress levels are at rock bottom wow.

Shane Mercer [00:01:19]:

Beautiful Maui sounds like a lot of fun. Sounds like you probably paid for it with a lot of those winnings that you're making.

Andrew Pace [00:01:26]:

Yeah, my family gets to benefit from now from time to time with a few of the sports betting profits that come my way. But yeah, I'm happy to be home and happy to be back for episode three. Let's go baby.

Shane Mercer [00:01:39]:

Well I'm glad you brought up family because that is an important part of the topic we're going to be talking about today, which is responsible gambling. What is responsible gambling exactly? You might be asking as audience members out there, I know you hear the term all the time, responsible gambling, responsible wagering, gambling responsibly, wagering responsibly, but what does that all mean? And I think it means different things depending on who you are and what group you fall into. A recreational bett0r, a professional bettor like you Andrew, or maybe you work at a sports book or you are the big sports books and it means something totally different to you over there. And so this idea of responsible wagering almost sounds like a bit of an oxymoron I think for the general public out there. Can you gamble responsibly? Do the two go together in any way, shape or form? Where is gambling naturally an irresponsible thing to do? And I think that there's a lot of people out there who might feel that way. But we're going to dive deep into this topic of responsible gambling and all of the sports books out there, they all have these tools that they say are available to players and for people to use. But are they what you really need? I'm not sure. Andrew, what do you think, what does responsible gambling mean to you and how do you think it's interpreted by the different people and the different groups out there?

Andrew Pace [00:03:07]:

Totally, yeah, I think responsible gambling, I like that you said it was an oxymoron. I really like that you said that, because gambling, we call it the G word at inplayLIVE. We don't like the term gambling. We like sports investing. But since we are talking about gambling, yeah, I mean, it does seem like you can't do it responsibly because the term itself has this sort of negative connotation, like, oh, he's a gambler or he lost money gambling. But, yeah, I think responsible gambling from a really simple, high level sense is just making sure that whatever you're playing with is something that's well within your budget that you can afford. And I think a lot of people can be like, oh, I could afford to lose that. So then they then consider it responsible or then categorize themselves as not necessarily having a problem or losing an amount that they were comfortable with. But I think that if you really dive into that a little bit more, responsible gambling should mean that you're losing insignificant money that you actually did budget for. And to give you an example of that, perhaps you have some sort of budgeting exercise that you've done with your partner, your spouse, by yourself, whatever you're including things like rent, mortgage, groceries, cell phone, vehicle, all the major expenses. And then when everything shakes down and you have savings and hopefully some investments and you've done some planning for the future when it comes to your sort of overall financial well being, there's something called entertainment that can include everything from golf to skiing to going to see a show to movies, et cetera, that has a budget. And I think somewhere within that realm, there's an amount that if you do enjoy any type of recreational gambling or any gambling of any kind, that that's where that category would go. Now, in order for you to be responsible, you would have to stay within that budget. So if you're looking at, like a typical household income in North America, you're probably looking at something like $50 a month max to go to this category. If you're able to responsibly, put away more than that, where it isn't impacting your rent, your mortgage, your groceries, your savings, your investments, if you're not impacting any of that and it can be 400, $500 a month, well, now you look at that and you go, okay, if that is responsible gambling for you, that's fine. But add it up and you're looking at $6,000 or more a year that's going to this category that is designed for you to, of course, lose.

Shane Mercer [00:05:49]:

So in order for it to be.

Andrew Pace [00:05:51]:

Responsible, I think it has to fully kind of check all those boxes, and then you get into the responsible side of it, going where, okay, I hit my responsible budget for the month, but I did it in one day, and now I can't do this for another 29 or 30 days. Right. So in order for it to be responsible, then you get into, okay, let's say it is $50 a month. How much are you actually deploying of that? $50. And how often are you doing it as? Twelve point 50 a week are you doing it as one dollars per bet? All those types of things. And I think that what all of this points to is actually having a plan. And when you have a plan and you stick to it, not only are you more likely to be much more responsible, but you're actually more likely to do a lot more effective things like wager tracking and seeing where the money and the losses went to seeing where you've actually had some success and then obviously being able to springboard off of that to hopefully lose less, make more informed and responsible decisions. And I think that now getting from that high level of going, okay, I can afford it, and then getting into this nitty gritty stuff, that's where you can actually really look at truly being responsible and how you're managing that budget over the course of time. And once all those things are done, that's when you are truly responsible. And you kind of mentioned the other sort of stakeholders and how they would define responsible gambling. Well, once you get into that category of truly being responsible, that's where the sports books actually can start to throw some red flags towards your account and actually not like what you're doing despite preaching the necessity of being a responsible gambler.

Shane Mercer [00:07:37]:

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because the sports books, what they think is responsible gambling is to me and I don't know, I think maybe a lot of people out there feel this way, is that for them, responsible gambling is a play in their PR playbook. It's not a tool to help players and to help their customers. It's a tool to help their image more than it is anything else. And a lot of the sports books out there are always promoting their responsible gambling tools. I know the one really popular ad from FanDuel is out there and I think we can take a quick look at that, right?

Shane Mercer [00:09:06]:

Time limits. Time limits. I mean, do you know any sports bettor out there that has set their time limit on their fan dual account?

Andrew Pace [00:09:16]:

Do I know someone? Probably. Did they do it intentionally? That's another story. I really like that ad because every time I've ever seen it, it really gets me because as a professional bettor, I'm like, oh, they're kind of hinting at having a system that works, which is definitely a part of being a successful Bettor is kind of looking for very specific situations, motivations, opportunities in each given sport where, you know, the books are vulnerable. So they kind of hint at that a little bit which I don't know how many of their target market, I don't know if that perks their ears or not, but it definitely perks mine when I hear it. And then what they actually get into for what quote unquote works is hilarious because they're implying that setting limits is then leading to success and kind of building off of what I just spoke about. With respect to all the different avenues of responsible gambling, I think there are elements of what I touched on that can be benefited by those tools that were talked about. If you are spending too much time gambling, right, maybe it is good to have a time check. If you are spending too much money gambling, maybe it is good to have a deposit limit. And I think that those tools can benefit people. But I'm going to take this way further right now. I believe that I don't want to say the majority, but many of the responsible gaming tools that are provided to players are actually designed to cause sharp players to become frustrated and to lose. And the reason why I say that is because if you are looking at lines for a certain period of time and you're logged out or a notification pops up saying that you have passed the responsible gambling time limit, associated with your account, which oftentimes can be set generically where the maximum time is a certain amount of hours but you can't have unlimited as an option when you're logged out or a pop up comes up in the middle of making a wager or looking at their lines. What they've actually done is they've taken the players that have the time, the patience and the wherewithal to sort of be scanning over a period of time on their book and said, you can still do that, but you now have to take this break or you now have to log in again, which actually benefits the book. Not only that, if you aren't a pro and that moment comes up at a specific time that can actually lead to frustrated gambling. And when it comes to gambling, the more that you're not in the right headspace, the more the potential is for poor decisions where you could chase or bet on a bad line. Let me give you an example. So let's say that I am on FanDuel right now and I believe that there is value on an NFL team to cover a spread and I'm getting plus seven and a half. I get logged out or a responsible gambling check then appears in my window and I have to then bypass that and I come back and it's now plus six and a half. Well, to the untrained eye, you might not think that that's a big deal, but to a pro or to anyone that really knows what they're doing in the space in the NFL, six and a half and seven and a half are statistically very different numbers. That's the difference of a touchdown versus two field goals. It's extremely significant. And seven is one of the key numbers that NFL games have a very high percentage of landing on. So if you didn't get in the seven and a half, you come back to it frustrated. And when you come back to it frustrated and you're not a pro, what you can then do is take the six and a half and not think that that's a big deal. But in reality the difference was massive and can be all the difference over time in whether or not you actually profited or lost money. So I believe that a number of these tools are actually in place to benefit the books and not the player.

Shane Mercer [00:13:34]:

Yeah, I think you're right. They're throwing up roadblocks, right, especially for those bettors that they've kind of identified as somebody who may be a sharp bettor, who may be able to win over time, who may be paying more attention than they would like. Because I think they want most of their customers to be recreational bettors. And they talk about that, they say that openly, that they want the recreational bettors to not make money or at least not plan to make a lot of money off of it. They want them to just have fun, which means just spend your money and let enjoy losing. And I know that, I know for myself, and I think for you too, Andrew, losing is not fun in any way, in any competition, at any time. Losing is just never fun. You want to win, you want to play to win. And with that so I want to bring up someone else who has experienced a roadblock from the sports books. And at the same time he's also going through something very serious in life. He's going through a very difficult health challenge in his own personal life and he's looking at sports betting as a way of kind of escaping a little bit. But he also wants to win and he wants to do well. His name is Chris Garby, he's from the London, Ontario area and I had the pleasure of catching up with him and speaking to him a little bit earlier and we had a really interesting conversation. And so I'm going to play that interview for you and we'll talk about it on the other side.

Shane Mercer [00:15:08]:

Chris Garby. Welcome to behind the Lines. Thanks for joining me. How are you?

Chris Garby [00:15:12]:

I'm good.

Shane Mercer [00:15:12]:

Yourself?

Chris Garby [00:15:13]:

Thanks for having me.

Shane Mercer [00:15:14]:

Hey, we're really happy to have you on and for you to come on and share some of your story here. So Chris, you joined inplayLIVE last summer and around the same time you were diagnosed with a brain tumor. Give us a sense of your mindset.

Chris Garby [00:15:29]:

At that time, obviously I was a little bit scared. This is unknown territory for me. My family didn't have a history of cancer, so I wasn't very comfortable with the situation. But luckily I have an amazing girlfriend who kind of kept me in line and just kind of went along with everything. She kept me level headed also with this in prayer lab, distracted with everything. So good thing to kind of go out as well.

Shane Mercer [00:16:02]:

So talk to me a little bit about how you got started with betting and kind of what you were doing after you joined and Play.

Chris Garby [00:16:09]:

So I started betting back when I was living in England. The betting situation in England is really different than it is here. They have betting shops and all that. So it was crazy for me as a foreigner just going in. That's where I really started doing it. But when I came back to Ontario, I tried some of the things here and there to go online. It was just do a big bet, it hold for the best, and then Play actually on a Instagram and decided to go. Ever since then, I've been seeing my winning go up. So it's working.

Shane Mercer [00:16:49]:

When did you open your first bet? Three six five account.

Chris Garby [00:16:52]:

I opened it first in England, stopped for a while, then came back and I opened it here in August.

Shane Mercer [00:16:59]:

Here in Ontario in August?

Chris Garby [00:17:01]:

Here in Ontario in August.

Shane Mercer [00:17:03]:

And so then you joined inplayLIVE towards the end of the summer. At the same time you got this, this, you know, diagnosis and and sort of found out that you were literally in the fight of your life. Talk to me about how things went through the fall.

Chris Garby [00:17:19]:

It was a lot of lot of negativity at first, I'll be completely honest with you. I just felt down a lot, you know what I mean? I just felt like everything was kind of collapsing on me. But luckily I have such a good board be with my girlfriend and then started in Playlock. I felt that community right away where people were just being really nice and it was a lot of fun and kind of brought my morals up and everything. And everything. I just felt good about everything. It just happened to go along with everything I was doing. The doctor was saying, no, it's going to be a slow process. And this is how they said it, it's going to be a slow process and I just kind of went along with that. It worked out well.

Shane Mercer [00:18:03]:

Right, but then I guess you were sort of forced to take a little bit of a break.

Chris Garby [00:18:08]:

Yes, I was. I was forced to take time off work, go through some treatment. The first round, I'm still not done. I'm still working on that. Luckily, they caught it early, which is always a bone when it comes to these things. And when after they caught it, my first thing of treatment and everything seemed to be on the upwards. Now I'm hoping for the best, but obviously my betting wasn't going in the eye direction as well because I was just trying to relax, be on, do.

Shane Mercer [00:18:39]:

My best and go learn and putting your health first.

Shane Mercer [00:18:43]:

I mean, obviously that's the priority no matter what. But you did decide to sort of get back in the bedding saddle recently, just a couple of weeks ago, right?

Chris Garby [00:18:53]:

Yes, a couple of weeks ago. I felt good. I had some more energy back and I said, I'm going to sit down on a Saturday with the guys and just kind of GBNC Saturday, try my best to learn and do as many bets as I can. And I thought what a good day Saturday would last. And that's when I decided to do these betting of 65 because I was always older than the best and that's what I got limited.

Shane Mercer [00:19:21]:

So you got limited on bet three six five. And how much were you betting?

Chris Garby [00:19:26]:

One dollars each bet.

Shane Mercer [00:19:29]:

You got limited on $1 bets?

Chris Garby [00:19:33]:

Yes, I did. I did. 16 one dollars bets. No, sorry, 15. And they gave me a free $5 bet during my lifetime and I used that and I lost it. But I did basically 15 one dollars bet.

Shane Mercer [00:19:55]:

How did you feel when you got that email from bet three six five letting you know that you were being limited?

Chris Garby [00:20:03]:

I was angry and I was a bit confused. That's why I kind of emailed Andrew right away and said, what is this all about? And I almost felt like I did something wrong, I was doing something illegal. Or they're just like, we're going to limit you off these really small beds because we feel like you're just going to take advantage of us. And that wasn't the case, but I was pretty angry for a short period of time. Nothing have a lot going on, but I didn't understand it. I could not understand what.

Shane Mercer [00:20:39]:

Bet three six five and many other sports books out there promote responsible gambling. Based on your experience and, and sort of what you've just gone through, what do you think bet three six five means when they promote responsible gambling?

Chris Garby [00:20:58]:

I think they mean don't win too much money. You know what I mean? They don't want me to win too much. They see a pattern where in the future I'm going to start winning a lot of money and they want to prevent that, which really is not responsible gambling. I was doing ever responsible on my part, but doing very low wagers.

Chris Garby [00:21:19]:

Which they promote on their commercials all the time. I don't understand what their point is of me or of them just limiting me off one dollars bet. It was very confusing. I'm still confused right now.

Shane Mercer [00:21:37]:

Yeah, I can't understand that either. I think a lot of people out there would be shocked to learn that people are getting limited on one dollars bets. I mean, it's really quite unbelievable. Where do you go from here? What's next?

Chris Garby [00:21:51]:

I'm going to be using a lot more accounts like I suggested, a lot of the offshore accounts, the Pinnacles Swords, just opening as many as I can because from your last podcast, the offshore ones, you doing better than Ontario where I'm situated. So I'll be opening more of those. Just listening to the guide, listening play, just taking their advice. Look at which one. Just opening as many, going from there. Not really relying, just on the Bet365.

Shane Mercer [00:22:27]:

Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining us on behind the Lines. We wish you all the best in your health fight and in your sports wagering career as well. And the inplayLIVE community is always here to support you in both.

Chris Garby [00:22:45]:

Thank you so much. You guys have been great. You've been great and I appreciate your time and anytime you want to do anyone, please feel free.

Shane Mercer [00:22:53]:

Absolutely. Thanks again. Chris Garby joining us. Thank you.

Shane Mercer [00:22:59]:

So, Andrew, that was Chris Garby. What an incredible story. Here's a guy who is really, like we said in the fight of his life, he's battling brain cancer, he has a tumor, he's looking for a way to escape and he's wagering and enjoying some entertainment and doing it by betting $1. Then he gets this email from Bet three six five, saying he's been limited. And I can't even imagine what more he could be limited on since he's already only betting a dollar, but he's been limited even further. And you heard him say it. He was angry, he was confused, he didn't know why this was happening to him. And he's already got a lot going on emotionally. What do you think?

Andrew Pace [00:23:47]:

Yeah, I wish this was an isolated story, Shane. That's really how I feel. There's so much passion that I feel when I hear this story. The first is, obviously our prayers are with Chris. We want him to recover and recover as soon as possible. And we're super happy that he's found inplayLIVE and obviously has been able to get a bit of release with joining that community, take his mind off things and the whole community is behind him sending prayers and thoughts. Then when we get into the brass tax of this thing, that's where it's why we exist. It's why inplayLIVE exists. It's why this podcast exists. If you go back into the days of the hunter gatherer survivalist mode, I compare a lot of what we're doing to that because here we are walking into a store and merely buying the products that are on the shelf, well within the limits one dollars bets, well within the limits of what they're offering. And he's being told he can't play there anymore from 15 bets. And, you know, firsthand, Shane, those 15 bets were probably over the course of maybe 1 hour, maybe 2 hours. So they shut them down pretty much instantly. And basically what they're doing is they've got these traps set where if you just wager on a couple of these markets and I just look at it and I go take the markets away, take them away, change them, make a change. Like if you don't let your players play when they're doing the definition of what they're supposed to be doing on your site, getting a release, having fun, playing responsibly, it's just disgusting. It's precisely why we exist and we are here to fight back in every way possible. And one of the things going back to the hunter gatherer example that I love about inplayLIVE is that because we have a community, because we have the ability to talk to each other that are in the same or similar positions, not referencing health. But what we're all trying to accomplish, the long term goals that we all have of being able to succeed. Betting. Because we're in that environment, we get the opportunity to lean on each other. When you are in that spot as a gambler or a sports bettor and you don't have anyone to lean on, you don't have any support system, you feel helpless. And the world of sports betting and gambling is isolating because it's not something you're supposed to talk about publicly. It's not something you're supposed to be proud of. Well, that's the difference with our group, is we have that ability for everyone to lean on each other, to get each other's backs, to give them the next step because we walked down that same path ourselves. And when we give someone the next step, they are no longer frustrated and upset. They have hope and they have the power to continue down this very fun and entertaining path as a result of the support that's available to them. And the power of that is incredible. But yeah, I mean, hearing that story, it just makes me that much more motivated to continue down this journey and to hopefully lead us all into a better future with respect to the regulations associated with how books are allowed to treat people this way.

Shane Mercer [00:27:16]:

Yeah. Chris, having joined inplayLIVE, he has this community as a support. He also mentioned his girlfriend, so he has family support and people who love him and that kind of thing. But just think of how many people are out there that don't have that, that, as you said, are betting in isolation. And on top of doing it in isolation, they're doing it with a whole bunch of other problems in their lives and baggage and things they're carrying and things that they're trying to cope with in life, and they're doing it all alone. And then maybe they do find a little bit of success in something that they're having fun with, like sports betting, and maybe they're doing it responsibly, just like Chris, and then they get something like that, a limitation. You also mentioned, though, that there are sort of other tools and systems and sort of things that can be used to actually gamble responsibly. Let's talk a little bit about those. And I know that one of the big things for me as a Sports Bettor that kind of changed my life completely in terms of understanding what it means to be a responsible sports wagerer is tracking. I think that I would say 90%, if not 99% of sports wagers out there, especially the rec sports Bettors, are not tracking their wagers. They don't even think about the idea of tracking their wagers. I know I didn't for many years, longer than I'd like to admit, but it completely changed the game for me and really kind of helped me hold myself accountable to what I was doing.

Andrew Pace [00:29:05]:

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And we touched on this at the beginning. Responsible gaming tools, the ones that exist and the ones that don't exist. Well, when it comes to ones that don't exist, there's a very specific reason why this isn't just done by the sports book for you. And that's because they don't want you looking at the data of your bets. They don't want you to start to figure out when you've lost and how, where and when you've won. They want you to obviously continue down the path of losses. So what you do find from a tracking standpoint from sports books is deposits, withdraws, and then day to day, week to week, or month to month losses. But even then, they'll only let you go back a certain period of time. They won't want you to see how much you lost over two years or five years or ten years. They do not want you to have that information. Now, wager to wager information is obviously available. You can go into your betting history, but what you can't do is export it in a way that arrives in a CSV or a spreadsheet in an effective matter. And again, there's a reason for it. So the unfortunate part about this type of thing is that it does tend to have a manual aspect to it. And again, responsible wager tracking. I'm sharing a screen right now, so if you're not watching on YouTube and you're joining us for Audio only, you can go to Nplaylive.com and you just can click on the Responsible Wager Tracking. Tool link and it's free. It's available to the public for free. And this is a resource that is as professional of a betting resource as it gets. And even if you are a recreational bettor just making parlays, I think it's really good to look at what you've done and to track it in any business, in any sport, in any situation in life. As Tony Horton says, how are you going to know what to do if you didn't know what you did? That's a P 90 X quote from the good old Tony Horton Beach Body Days. But anyways, yeah, tracking is so important. And we give you just a remarkable resource here that allows you to look at individual bets and then it's going to plot it in any way, shape or form to show you your trends and all the information that you need. And you can do that for all of your books. So if you're just using one sports book, or whether you're using five or six, all that information is available. And like I said, it is free. Just go to inplaylive.com and click on the tracking tool. Now with that said is when we touched on responsible gambling and we talked about budgets and things like that, even if you didn't use this specific tool, I think the process of budgeting and tracking is all correlated. It's all related. And it might not be wager by wager, but at least track your balances at a minimum. Track your balances so that you know whether or not you're losing and how much you're losing over time. And that way you can turn to your spouse and you can say, yeah, I lost $500 this week, but man, I had a hell of a time doing it. And that's what we budgeted for. And she's like, okay. And it's like, hey, you went to the spa and we went to these movies and skiing. For me, it's the same thing. I'm spending $100 a week on betting on sports with whomever, and I absolutely love it. It's so entertaining and I've never gone over budget. That's the kind of thing that you can at least have transparent and honest conversations with people about. I do want to touch on one thing still. There Shane from Chris's interview, if you don't mind.

Shane Mercer [00:32:38]:

Absolutely.

Andrew Pace [00:32:41]:

So one thing he touched on which we really haven't gotten into. We could do an entirely other episode on this, which would probably be very worthwhile, but you said, so what's next for you, Chris? And he said, I'm going to get some more offshore books.

Andrew Pace [00:32:56]:

So here we are, right? It's 2023. We've got the regulated sports betting world. And what is the number one thing that the regulated sports betting world preaches?

Shane Mercer [00:33:07]:

Right? Use those books that are regulated.

Andrew Pace [00:33:11]:

It's safe. You don't have to use the offshore books anymore. You don't have to use illegal bookies. It's all through our infrastructure and ecosystem. And not only that, I get ads here, where one of the ads I've seen is you have supported such and such community home through your tax dollars that have come through X Casino and X Sports betting site. We've been able to provide this and this service to these people in this home to try to make it seem as gambling is now this good thing, almost as if it's a charitable donation if you go and sports bet. So they're really pulling on the heartstrings from that angle, but also the safety side of things. And then here is this guy who's in Ontario, where you have 90 some odd regulated and legalized providers who's betting a dollar and is now talking about going and betting offshore. So if there's anyone watching this that is a part of the inside of all this, the regulation, the legislation, all that kind of thing, you failed. You failed. And he's not alone. Right? Shane and I can speak firsthand to our experiences as well. And I would hate to tell you that Chris's story was isolated, but since I got the email from Chris, I've gotten three more emails, which are the people that are actually reaching out to me to tell me that they got limited from $1 bets as well. Three people that have emailed me. So how many hundreds of people has it happened to that didn't email me? Right. And it's got to change.

Shane Mercer [00:34:50]:

It's crazy to think that if they even get a whiff or think even a little bit, that you could potentially win even a little bit of amount of money over a defined amount of time. Goodbye, see you later. We don't want your business. Go to the offshore. They might as well just say that, go take your business to an offshore.

Andrew Pace [00:35:12]:

They'll let you in some money over there.

Shane Mercer [00:35:14]:

Exactly, right. No, it's unbelievable. And by the way, too, for everyone out there who hasn't listened to the episode on limiting that Chris was referencing in the interview and that Pace kind of just mentioned, now I encourage you to go back and listen to that episode where we do a deep dive into the practice of limiting and restricting players. Great episode there. So I definitely encourage all of you to go back and have a watch, have a listen to that one, because a lot of great valuable information in there, including one of those tips to go to offshore books if you need to after you get limited, which is what Chris was taking his advice from. Yeah, definitely go back and have a listen to that. We talked about tracking, and during that you kind of talked a little bit about money management, but I want to dive into that just a little bit more. And that's both these topics, tracking, money management, offshores, these are all topics that we could really dive into in another episode down the line, because there's so much to be said on all of these topics. But let's just briefly touch on money management because I think it's important and I want to give the audience a little bit of an idea of what that means. I know for myself personally, not only was I not tracking, but I had heard the term thrown around. And as somebody who pays a lot of attention to sports betting for a long time, I know that people talk about unit sizes and what a unit is and that they bet in terms of units, but did I actually understand what a unit was? No, I definitely did not. And now I've got a very good, thorough, clear understanding of what a unit means and how it can be different for everybody. And it should be different for everybody. And not only should it be different for everybody, but it should be different for yourself based on where your bankroll is at. So tell me or give us a sense of how to effectively create a unit, what a unit means, and how it should change over time, right?

Andrew Pace [00:37:11]:

So going back to that tracking document that I talked about and shared, what's really great about that document is there's money management built into that. So when you put all your balances from your books in there, it's going to give you recommended unit sizes of quarter percent, 1%, 2%, et cetera. But then going back to what we talked about at the start of the show, we're talking about $100 budget in a month. And then I said, well, what if you go and you bet that $100 on the first day and you go, I can't bet again for 29 days. So that's where you really want to make your $100 count. And in order to do that, you don't need to move the needle all at once, right? We're being trained every single day to try to move the needle all at once. Lottery tickets. And now you see these lottery ticket parlays. And obviously those lottery ticket parlays are the book's favorite thing in the world because they get all this free advertising, they go viral across social media platforms, and we never see the ones that they don't pay out because of all the losers. You see one of those 100 and 5255 hundred thousand dollars parlays. The books are like, we will gladly pay for that because that is way cheaper than our ads we pay for on TV, and it's going to reach way more people, and it also shows people that they can do it too. And one of the things about sports betting that's really interesting is if you see a lottery ticket, right, and that lottery ticket is let's call it 649. So you got to hit six numbers from one to 49. Can't repeat the same number twice. When you hit one of those, no one goes, oh, my God. Those were the numbers. Oh my God. But after a sporting event, you go, oh my god, of course the Eagles won.

Shane Mercer [00:38:43]:

Yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:38:44]:

Oh, my God. Of course. Of course. Devonte Smith. Caught 40. 40 yards. Why didn't I know that? I should have known that. No, I knew that. I knew that. That's what they said. I should have known that. It's like, I can do that. I knew that. Of course I can pin these all together and make it all work, but that's not how it works. And obviously, the majority of viewers in here haven't hit a multi five figure parlay, but they've lost a lot of them, probably. And that's kind of how that whole advertising and how that whole system sort of sort of trains you with those big tickets. They love paying those out. Now, back to the responsible gambling and the unit sizes and the money management. We're going to use that $100, and we go, okay, let's not go for that big score where we do this $100 parlay that pays $100,000. That is going to kill our budget in one shot. I like 1% personally, but everyone's different if you do one dollars bets. If you want to make $101 bets in a day, go nuts. But the odds of you losing all 100 of those are extremely low. But in theory, if you hit at the rate that you're supposed to lose at, and you bet $101 bets in a day, the next day you'd have $51 bets. Roughly. The next day you'd have maybe 45. The next day you'd have 20 or 25. And even that $100 is going to last you a lot longer. It might last you a week instead of just one day. But true money management comes from making those 1% bets as your unit size. So your $100 is one dollars bets. Maybe you get a premium opportunity where you like it a lot more, and it's not ten or $50. It's $2, right? Or maybe a dollar 50. And that is really the simplicity of money management. When you talk about money management, you're like, oh, okay. Some people talk about $1 bets. They're like, oh, my God, that's so boring. I've never bet just one dollars. Well, if you can afford it, then make your bankroll a little bit bigger, right? If you can afford it. Right? But money management to talk about is as simple as it gets. People might be watching this and go, oh, my God, I'm going to do that now. That sounds so simple. And then what happens is Sunday rolls around, and by the time the night game hits, you've lost maybe six or seven of those one dollars bets, and then you bet $7 or ten or 50. And that's the reality of betting, is that there's a demon on the other side of that screen or inside of your phone, and you get a dopamine rush. Every time you click that button where you place that bet, it's like, oh, this is looking good. Dopamine rush. Give me another one. Give me another one.

Andrew Pace [00:41:14]:

So that whole process is the demon of money management that you have to fight every single day. And I think where the difference and the transition happens from being a recreational bettor to actually being a pro bettor is that the dopamine rush actually comes from the success, not winning one bet. The success, it comes from at the end of the month or at the end of being limited by an account going, holy smokes, I'm pulling up $50,000 right now. I'm pulling at $100,000 right now. I'm pulling up $10,000 right now. It's the success side of it, the performance. When you lose, you don't get those dopamine rushes. You really get them from knowing that you made the right decision and that you made something that's going to be profitable long term when you make that transition. It's crazy. I walk through a casino floor. I used to love going to the casino. I used to love it. I walk through a casino floor and I don't see anything anymore. I see the bar at the end of the casino. I just see a whole bunch of ways to lose money. Right?

Shane Mercer [00:42:14]:

It's incredible how those two things, tracking and money management, really kind of when you get your head around them, it completely changes your perspective on sports betting and how you look at it. Because I know for myself in the past, a lot of it was, well, how much do I know about the league? How much do I know about the teams? What do I know about the players on those teams? Are they injured? Are they not? Who's in, who's out? Who's coaching? All those things. And at the end of the day, none of it really matters over the long term if you're tracking and if you're managing your money correctly.

Andrew Pace [00:42:53]:

Absolutely.

Shane Mercer [00:42:54]:

Well, with that, Andrew, just to recap, so responsible gambling means different things to different people, and it certainly isn't what the sports books want you to think it is or it's not. Responsible gambling isn't it isn't the way they portray it. And they are not giving you the tools to gamble responsibly, to wager responsibly, invest responsibly, if you will, but those tools are out there. And if you are committed to being a better bettor, I encourage you to go and explore those tools, explore these concepts, learn them for yourself, try to understand them on your own and see where it takes you. Because I can tell you that the sports books aren't providing, and that's the main message to take away here. And on top of that, too, if you are having some success and you're doing well, but you get limited, well, like I said earlier, go back, listen to that other episode we had, and there's other tips and strategies for ways to kind of navigate that whole element. I know that our friend Chris is sort of working on that now, and I just want to say thank you to him for joining us and participating in our podcast and sharing his story. We really appreciate having him. Any final thoughts Pace?

Andrew Pace [00:44:24]:

Man, this was fun. There's so much to dive into from this. I just thank everyone for watching, and then, as always, you can head over to Inplaylive.com if you want to join. You get a nice little discount for grinding out this podcast with us today so you can enter in promo code ‘BEHINDTHELINES’, and you can join the inplayLIVE community and learn a little bit more about how to actually make a little bit of money doing this thing.

Shane Mercer [00:44:47]:

Awesome. Till next week, guys. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, yes, remember to, like, download subscribe. You can find us everywhere. You get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, YouTube, all those great places. And if you have a betting story that you want to share, you want to be featured on our podcast, reach out to us. Drop a note in the comments below. And as Pace mentioned, if you want to join inplayLIVE, check it out. Look at some of the free tools that are on there first. Take a look at those and see if it's right for you. And, yes, use that promo code ‘BEHINDTHELINES’, and you'll get a great pricing on it. So, once again, thanks again. Thank you, Andrew. And till next week, guys. Keep fighting those books.