Episode 8

Shane Mercer [00:00:11]:

Hello and welcome to Behind The Lines, the sports betting podcast that does not give you picks, predictions or peer into a crystal ball in any way. No. We are here to teach you a little bit about the industry, the sports betting industry, some of the tactics and strategies they use to take your money over the long term. And by exposing those tips and tactics and strategies, we hope to make you a better bettor over the long term and maybe you'll even win a little bit of money. And a big part of that too is knowing how to approach sports betting from a theoretical perspective. And we are going to be really diving into that whole idea of chaos theory. I'm your host, Shane Mercer. That is Andrew Pace, professional sports bettor and the founder of the greatest sports betting group on planet Earth, inplayLIVE. Pace, how are you, man?

Andrew Pace [00:01:04]:

Doing great, buddy. Long week of March Madness betting in the books and definitely some crazy stuff that went down. But all smiles over here.

Shane Mercer [00:01:16]:

Let's talk about it because our last episode was all about March Madness and we were really excited for it. And I mean, did the madness ever deliver? It was a chaotic four days. So many huge upsets. We saw 16 beta one, we saw 15 Beta two. It's just been wild. We've seen so many crazy finishes, including one that we're recording this on Monday. For all of you out there, a little peek behind the curtains. We're recording this on a Monday. And last night we saw an unbelievable shot at the end of a game that really meant nothing in the end in the Gonzaga game. Pace, just walk us through what happened.

Andrew Pace [00:01:59]:

Well, it meant nothing in the scheme of the game. Gonzaga won the game and they're shaking hands walking off the court. They're up six points with 0.7 seconds left on the clock. And athletes, thankfully in that spot, don't really care about our spreads. And the pregame line was Gonzaga minus four and a half. And with 0.7 seconds left on the clock, the TCU player inbounded the ball down six. And rather than catching the inbound, the person that was receiving the inbound, the player just let it go. And the reason why he did that is because the clock doesn't start until someone actually touches the ball off the inbound. And all the Gonzaga and TCU players were high five in and there was people actually physically hugging each other. And meanwhile the clock hasn't started running and the ball is rolling down the court. And finally someone from Gonzaga kind of looked at the ball as if to say, what's going on here? And when he looked at it, the player picked it up and dropped a three from the logo. And why that doesn't matter is because Gonzaga advances to the Suite 16. Sorry, I was going to say the Elite Eight. Gonzaga advances to the Suite 16 and it's meaningless. But for bettors, that line - you either won your TCU wager that was dead and dead in the water or you lost your Gonzaga minus four and a half, which looked like it had already paid out. In fact, a number of sports books did pay it out and then pulled the money back afterwards. Rightfully so, because they only ended up winning by 3.7 seconds when he inbounded that ball to get that shot off. To think that the ball rolled down the court, obviously the clock doesn't stop, but then this TCU player picked it up and got the shot off from the logo with 0.7 seconds and drains it. I mean, it was unbelievable.

Andrew Pace [00:04:01]:

It was unbelievable, but it wasn't.

Shane Mercer [00:04:08]:

And we're going to talk about why exactly because that's what we're talking about today. We are talking about chaos. Chaos theory, chaotic equations and how they manifest themselves in sports. And I mean, I think that was a very, very good example of how chaos can just insert itself. And that player did exactly what he's been trained to do, which is keep playing till the buzzer goes. And he just picked up that ball and shot it and boom, it went in. It's quite a remarkable thing, though, to think about all of the different factors that can weigh into any kind of sporting event and how complex a system can be. And so as part of this episode, I read this book, The Perfect Bet by a mathematician called Adam Kocharsky and how science and Math are taking the Luck Out of gambling. And it's really all about exactly that, how science and math have kind of developed over time to be able to predict things and kind of assign a certain level of order to all of the chaos that exists in our world. And of course, we see this in science and math, in the development of drugs and all sorts of things, right? But he goes through a number of ways in which people have taken those concepts and applied them to games of skill or chance and looks at sort of the differences of how they can be applied. And one of those examples that he uses is about insects and what he looks at is insect population growth. And it's interesting because if an insect reproduces at a very low rate, then it produces a very steady line of no variance. So think of it on a bar graph, right? The line stays flat. As soon as that insect starts producing at a medium growth rate, the variance starts to go like this in a very, very predictable order. But as soon as you have a high growth rate, that variance goes all over the place and it is completely unpredictable. And I think that applies here because we're talking about chaos and complex systems and sports can be extremely complex. There are many rules, ways in which the game is played, ways in which it could or could not be played, tactics and strategies that teams might use and employ, you never really quite know. Coaches, players, they're all humans and they all have faults, and they'll never perform perfectly. And there's so many different ways that a predicted outcome could be reached. But, I mean, what is your take on chaos and how it applies in sports?

Andrew Pace [00:07:07]:

Yeah, before inplayLIVE was created, and actually in the process of inplayLIVE being created, I learned these principles without knowing what I was learning. So I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a scientist. For those of you listening that are a member of inplayLIVE, you certainly know that my math does not check out on the regular. Right. What I am good at is taking a simple concept and applying it to a lot of different scenarios that exist in any day to day life. And for me, that includes sports betting. And I was writing the curriculum for inplayLIVE, which is me basically vomiting on a page of all my information and getting it out on paper so that I can start to sort of categorize it and put it into chapters and figure out how I can make an impact on other people's lives by helping them make better and more informed sports betting decisions, but also ones that are profitable. And in order to do that, my mindset was everything that you do in a day of betting, and not just for one day, but for multiple days, keep just regurgitating that. Make a little note of what you did that day, film a little bit of it so that you can see what you did after the fact, and then try to put that into terms that can be relatable to other people that are in this industry that don't think the way that you think. And it was my brother, actually, who saw me doing some of the work for this stuff where he said, hey, have you ever heard of chaotic models? And again, chaos theory and all this kind of stuff. And at the time, I was kind of like, I hadn't heard, I hadn't heard of it. And he showed me a video on YouTube which was explaining this in the simplest sense imaginable, this chaos theory and chaotic models. We're going to talk about that in a second here. But it was like, I don't know. Who swims against the tide? Is it salmon? What do they do? They swim against the tide or salmon do to reproduce? Yes, they do. They swim against the current. They swim upstream.

Andrew Pace [00:09:23]:

So it was like when my brother sent me this video and started talking to me about this, it was like lessons I had already learned being explained in the simplest capacity ever. And it was like when everyone's walking down one way in New York and you're walking against them and you feel like you're doing the wrong thing. It was like being handed the handbook on why you're doing what you're doing. And it was like this almost like biblical experience of understanding that there is a method to the madness. And that's what really, I don't want to say it changed my life, it validated my life and what I was doing in such a big way. And really simply, the video and again, not a mathematician, so it has to be simple for me or I'm not going to really get behind the calculations and how it all works. But really simply, the video was the most introductory level of sort of chaos theory. And it was a pendulum, right? So a pendulum with one arm, right, that just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And not only does it go back and forth, it goes back and forth in a way that is completely and totally predictable, that never changes. So that's very not exciting and whatever. But then you add a second arm to the pendulum. So imagine a grandfather clock that now at the bottom of the grandfather clock, there's another arm. And the way that that arm swings now is what would be referred to as chaotic. And essentially what that means is it's unpredictable and it's something that's so simple. So you take that grandfather clock and that one pendulum that's just going back and forth. You put that next arm on the thing, and there isn't a person in the world that can tell you exactly where it's going to swing the next time it swings. You might be able to know what direction it's going to go in, but eventually the thing starts spinning in all these different ways. And I think we're going to bring up a video to explain that and to actually demonstrate that here pretty quickly. But for all of our people that are listening and not watching on YouTube, that for me, was a way of explaining the way I went about my life as it related to so many things, but in such unbelievable clarity for sports betting.

Shane Mercer [00:12:00]:

Yeah, no, it's really a cool video. I think let's bring it up and let's watch it so that everybody can kind of get a sense of what it looks like. Because you use the reference to a grandfather clock and you add a second pendulum there. Well, just think about how that would distort time, at least for that clock, right, and lead to complete chaos. So here it is. Right. This is sort of what it might look like if you had two pendulums going, right? Right.

Andrew Pace [00:12:31]:

So in this case, the green is the single grandfather clock. That's the single pendulum just going back and forth in the most consistent manner. And now you see here, that's the second arm, and it's going crazy all over the screen, so much so that the same line will not repeat itself every single line is its own unique entity with the way it's spinning. And you can see that in the pattern of this actual video if you're watching it, which I just again, it's so basic and I just get floored with this stuff. And when you take this a step further, I'm going to show when it switches to twelve, this is now twelve individual two armed pendulums. And you take the pendulums out of it and you just watch the dots. It almost looks like they're bouncing off the walls and stuff. But there are no walls, right? And this is chaos here. It is in reality in the simplest model that you could possibly look at with respect to this two arm pendulum just bouncing around like crazy. And this is where I look at this and I go, okay, how can we use this to make money, to describe day to day life and to apply to sports?

Shane Mercer [00:13:56]:

It's crazy to think you see that was twelve, right? Now just imagine a 32 team league use the NFL, for example, with a 52 man roster and you've got a whole number of different coaches on offense and defense and they're all coming at it from their own individual point of view. Yes, they are working as a team, but then you throw two of these teams on a field or you're trying to predict something like the outcome of a season, right? I mean, just think of all of the chaos that ensues throughout that course of time. How are you ever going to make any kind of accurate prediction, right?

Andrew Pace [00:14:41]:

And that's the thing where if you are a sports bettor and you were right, meaning you predicted an outcome of a game before it occurred, where maybe you didn't say there's good value on this, maybe you said they are going to win, maybe you said they are a lock and you were right. That model isn't to tell you whether you're right or wrong. It's to tell you that you had no clue. There was only value, theoretical value or lack thereof in that specific event. But then if you really peel the curtains back, I mean, we can peel them for a long time here and I think we'll get into this to a certain extent, but how they won is completely unpredictable. So you might have said this team's a lock, they're going to win. Whatever the case may be, and you happen to be right that time, I guarantee you there will be a time that comes where you say they will win or it's a lock where they lose. I guarantee that's already happened. Or it certainly will happen if this is new to you. But if you peel it back a little bit further and you go, okay, are they going to win all four quarters in the NFL or in the NBA? Are they going to win all three periods? And then you go, who's going to score first and how and who's going to get a penalty and who isn't, when are the flags going to be thrown, all that kind of stuff. And then you really start to realize that the way in which they came to win or lose that game has absolutely zero level of predictability whatsoever. Who got injured, who didn't, who scored, who didn't, when it happened, why it happened, how it happened, how many goals were scored, or how many touchdowns were scored, the total points in the game. Every single little element of the game is pure chaos and completely unpredictable. There's value or lack thereof. And that's it. When you go into things with that approach, nothing surprises you anymore.

Shane Mercer [00:16:36]:

Now, one of the things that came out of this book for me, as we sort of looked at these elements of chaos and he was specifically looking at different types of games, all common ones, blackjack, horse racing, poker, chess, roulette, and the strategies that people came up with. All of it though most oftentimes the people who came up with the most successful strategies were scientists and mathematicians. Now, Paisley, you've already stated that you're not a scientist or mathematician. And I am certainly no scientist or mathematician. I'm a journalist. I write and talk for a living and I don't always do that very well. But when you look at it though, there is a way to tame the chaos to an extent by using data, by doing lots of research and coming up with theories and then testing those theories, coming up with new theories, retesting those theories. And that is the scientific process. And after going through it, it was really interesting to see that they all followed this similar format of well, how does roulette exactly work and what are the initial conditions of the ball before it's thrown onto the wheel? And is there a likelihood of it landing on a particular number or a particular color at a certain point in time? Or blackjack, for example? And card counting is sort of well known now, but at the time, going back 150 years, it wasn't and casinos weren't wise to that. And it took somebody to come up with these sorts of theories. And the other thing I noticed that was also really interesting one, it was coming up with the experiments, right, collecting the data and then applying it and testing the theories. But also almost all of these mathematicians and scientists, they worked with other mathematicians and scientists as a group. Almost nobody ever did anything alone. And not only did they do it in groups, it could have be a small group of a handful of people, but more often than not, it was many more dozens or even hundreds of people. There was one lottery example of a lottery in Europe where they had over 100 people involved in their process. And so what I thought was really interesting about it is how if you want to tackle something like this and apply or collect data, come up with theories and apply it and learn to see if it works. Man you need a group. It works way better in a group than you trying to do it alone.

Andrew Pace [00:19:31]:

Right, yeah, I think that's a really good point, and I think on the perfect Bed is a bit of a what would you call that? An oxymoron or something like that, because it doesn't exist.

Shane Mercer [00:19:42]:

Right.

Andrew Pace [00:19:42]:

And I think that when you're talking about data and using that to predict things, I still think that that's the wrong term. I believe that when you sort of combine a whole series of different data points for whatever it is that you're trying to predict when it comes to chaotic events, you're really not able to predict it. And that's not the way to look at it correctly. Rather, what you're looking at is likelihood and value relative to that likelihood, provided that the motivation is there. So I talked about the weather last week, and I want to bring up the weather again right now because I think that that's such a good analogy for people in their day to day lives. So have you ever been on your phone where the weather is actually currently wrong? It says it's raining and it's not. The one that I get now, too, is I'll order food off Uber Eats, and it'll be like, Josiah is delivering your food in the snow tonight so that you can stay warm. And I look outside and it's raining. Or Josiah is delivering food in the rain today so that you can stay dry. And I look outside and the street isn't even wet. Like, it's not raining and the street is not even wet.

Shane Mercer [00:21:05]:

Wait, it's not raining in Vancouver? I don't believe.

Andrew Pace [00:21:10]:

It's been gorgeous here the last couple of days, but yes, it is raining right now. So that is like the picking a winner or a loser, in my opinion. You have to pick who is going to win this game for the weather. And you can make all this data and models and things like that, put it all together, compile it, and then end up at a result that is most likely to occur. And that's what weather forecasters do, with the Doppler forecasts and the time of year and the moons and tides and solar systems and all this crazy shit that I don't understand because, again, I'm not a mathematician, but to ultimately make the best prediction. But if you open up the weather app, they don't tell you it's going to be 20 degrees today and it's going to be sunny. They give you a range, and also they'll give you a probability of precipitation.

Shane Mercer [00:22:03]:

Right

Andrew Pace [00:22:03]:

So if you actually uncover it a little bit more, they're not giving you something necessarily with certainty. But it always makes me smile when I see that it says it's raining and it's not. Or they say, it's not sunny and it is and all that kind of stuff because that's what's actually occurred or is occurring in real time, where you see how off the prediction is relative to the exact time that's happening. But if you take that and use that as a metaphor and apply it to sports, think about predicting the exact temperature. Think about predicting exactly where a cloud is in the sky and its elevation relative to the sea levels. Think about predicting the exact wind gusts where it's exactly 20, exactly this 2nd, 20 exactly this second. And then you realize it is truly impossible to do that. All you can do is make a prediction of what you believe will or will not be a storm will or will not be a hurricane where it may or may not arrive and prepare people based on that as best as possible. So switch that over to sports and all of those models, like you said, scientific equations and testing and back testing and all that kind of stuff, where a game is so heavily reliant upon Kevin Durant and Kevin Durant gets sick before the game starts and Kevin Durant hurts his ankle. And Kevin Durant had a bad day shooting even though his shooting percentage is X. And that's one player on one team in one game. What about all the other players? What about the coaches? What about the fans? What about a call from an official that you can't control that the official is having a bad day or has some sort of vengeance against that player that we know absolutely nothing about? So there are no locks, there are no true predictions. There's only, again, that value or lack.

Shane Mercer [00:24:00]:

Thereof, as you as a professional, sports bettor and the people you work with at inplayLIVE try to find value and look for value, I would imagine that you are using data in a very serious and heavy way. A lot of data collection taking place and then analyzing it and applying it. And one of the things that the author of this book talks about is data that matters versus data that doesn't. And one of the interesting things that he looked at was horse racing in particular. And this one researcher who realized that there's a whole lot of data you can look at, but I'll just give you a couple of quick key ones. One thing that he looked at was how many times has this particular horse ran this particular track? And then he also looked at breeding and what's this horse's lineage? Well, it turned out lineage didn't matter at all. And the number of times that the horse ran the track, that really, really mattered and for a whole host of reasons. But as you look at sports and the team at inplayLIVE looks at sports and searching for value, how do you differentiate between data that matters versus data that doesn't?

Andrew Pace [00:25:28]:

Yeah.

Shane Mercer [00:25:30]:

Is all data equal?

Andrew Pace [00:25:31]:

No, I don't think so at all and I think that's an amazing question and again I say this all the time, there's so many different ways to make money betting on sports. There's a guy that I ran into through the journey of inplayLIVE. He never actually joined our group, but he's a multimillion dollar sports bettor. And one of his most key strategies for success was betting baseball innings to end when the pitcher was up. So a strategy that the door has. Closed on for him. These are like -2000 -1000 type odds that they apply to a generic batter Being Up where you're capitalizing on now a Pitcher, being up and risking a lot of money for a very small Return, but still having an Edge and still being profitable. Now when it comes to big minus odds like that, that's typically not what my personal taste for value is and that doesn't mean that value does not exist in that particular example, I would argue that it does exist and I think I'd be right. But that isn't how my journey has personally gone right. The flip side to that is you look at pregame betting, right? So you put together all this pregame data, pregame analysis and you have so much more time to build that analysis and data because you have up until the time that they last played up until the time they next play. So in some cases in the NFL, you might have two weeks to prepare for a game if it's the Super Bowl or a team coming off of by week to get all the data, all the information that you need. Now, I don't want to say that data is not relevant. I believe it's extremely relevant, but I would also think that there would be someone that would speak out about what I'm going to say next. That data to me is mostly noise to me. And that doesn't mean you can't make money off of that data and that doesn't mean that you can't not predict but generate theoretical value with that data. But for me the data that I like best relates to motivations in game live and when it comes to live betting itself, that's data on the fly that you don't necessarily have as much time to generate and I'm wrong all the time. I can give you an example. Jeff Brahm was the coach of Purdue in the last NCAA football season. He's up in the end of a college football game with four to five minutes left and he passed the ball on every single down of one particular series. When he did that, he stopped the clock multiple times, gave his opponent the chance and the time to then get the ball back and score. And he ultimately ended up losing the game because he didn't use end of game proper motivations to run the clock. He still could have ended up losing the game, but he gave his opponent a much better chance to beat him because he didn't use what I would consider to be basic end of game football logic for a winning team. Because of that, we lost our bet in that particular game and he lost the game. He got absolutely ripped on social media after and in fact ended up losing his job with the school. So I look at that and I go, do I have data about the way someone should act and ought to act in the scenario that we were deploying at that particular time in that particular game? Yes. But I was still wrong because it still is a chaotic system. So I can look at motivations and logic and then data relating to that to predict potential value, but not to necessarily predict the outcome. And we can go back to the Gonzaga game, right? We started this podcast with that particular episode. Do you know how many factors are in that one play that meant nothing to the two teams, but meant everything to Bettors? You have 0.7 seconds left where Gonzaga got fouled to make two free throws to cover the spread. So they make the two free throws to get ahead of the spread before that even happened. There was a chance that the ref didn't even call the foul because there's no time left on the clock. But the ref calls the foul to hack them and any Gonzaga bettor will say they got so screwed out of their money and things like that. I say, Well, I love the line of we'll see. Like oh, you got so unlucky. We'll see. Oh, you got so lucky. We'll see. Oh, you're a good sports bettor. We'll see. I love to have that mindset and approach, short term memory, long term outlook. But you could look at that game and say you minus four and a half. Bettors were lucky that the ref on the previous call even called the foul in the first place that got Gonzaga to the line. But then once they made both free throws, which needed to happen for the COVID in the first place, they inbound the ball and the guy starts to go to catch it and then he stops because he's like, oh, maybe I can hit an easy three here, or whatever. The fact that no Gonzaga player walks towards the ball at all or even recognizes it and they're all hugging when there's still time on the clock is uncommon in college basketball. The fact that he picked the ball up and then, due to human error, the clock didn't start at the time the ball was touched. And then he picked the ball up off the ground and then shot it, which I don't want to say you can't do in 0.7 seconds, but I would argue there's a very good chance that if the clock had started the second that he touched the ball, it would have been a lot closer to zero point, the point second, which he touched the ball.

Andrew Pace [00:31:28]:

And then he made the shot from half court. Right. And that is one play in one game with one player amidst thousands of games everywhere and all the time. So if you bet Gonzaga minus four and a half, you could say, well, in theory, there was value on that bet. And then a TCU backer might say, well, you were lucky to get the foul in the first place. So in theory, there was value on TCU, and that ignores the entire rest of the game. Right. So this is the sort of approach that when you have this mindset and this information that, again, is not scientific and mathematician level, it's very simple that can be applied to so many different things. You look at it and you go, did that suck? Did I lose or win or shouldn't have or should have, or whatever the hell you want to do. Whatever. Sure. But you're not surprised anymore. And that's why you said, I can't remember what your line was. You're like, were you surprised? I'm like, no, I wasn't surprised. It was surprising, but I wasn't surprised.

Shane Mercer [00:32:32]:

Yeah, these things happen all the time. And, you know, it's funny looking back at it. You know, a week ago, I built a bracket on this podcast, right? Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. And, I mean, you look back at it and it's like everybody out there, the millions and millions of people who all built brackets, there was no none of us ever had a real shot at getting a perfect bracket. And the likelihood of you even predicting the winner of the tournament is extremely low. Given all of everything we've just talked about the fact that, hey, we're starting a tournament of 64 teams, and they're all college level players that have never played each other. Never played each other. Right. There are just so many different things that could happen and ways in which it won't go your way. There are millions of variables that are going to work against you and have it not go your way, which is why we look at things like bracket building or future betting and that kind of thing. It's just something that's just fun to do. Right. It's not something to take serious or to, as we talked about in the last episode, is have a bracket bias, right. Or let it inform your future decisions. It's something that has to be put to the side.

Andrew Pace [00:33:57]:

And I think, Shane, on that same note, people are shocked that brackets were busted by game seven.

Shane Mercer [00:34:05]:

Right.

Andrew Pace [00:34:07]:

You should be shocked if it didn't happen.

Shane Mercer [00:34:10]:

Yeah, exactly. Right. Every year we get some big upsets.

Andrew Pace [00:34:14]:

And we've talked about that last week, obviously, with respect to what the potential is for upsets. And we basically said, it's inevitable. Like, it's truly inevitable. And when you go into things with that mindset, it's almost like at game seven when all the brackets are busted, it's almost like you think, I told you so, even though I didn't even tell you so because you didn't predict anything yourself. You just know that that chaos is going to ensue. It's not surprising. And on that note, I had a blast betting against Purdue in that game once, and I didn't predict that pre game. I saw how well they were playing, and in the first half, they played great. In the second half, they were playing just as good, if not better. I saw that in real time. If I got it pregame, I would have got way better numbers than what I got live. But there was tremendous value still live based on how I saw them playing.

Shane Mercer [00:35:21]:

Yeah, and you had the benefit of watching them play. You had that opportunity to be like, oh, wait a minute, this team might actually do this. It went from being a long shot, I don't know what they were going into that game, I don't know, 20 to one odds or something. I'm probably making that up, I don't really know. But somewhere in that area, it went from being this huge long shot to essentially looking like a coin flip kind of game.

Andrew Pace [00:35:49]:

Totally.

Shane Mercer [00:35:50]:

We're still presenting ten to one odds.

Andrew Pace [00:35:52]:

And you said it really nicely. Right. Coin flip and coin flip. You could call something that's predictable. You go it's 50 50, flip it a million times, and you're going to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails. Right. People will probably say something like that to you that have a little bit of knowledge in that arena. But on those million coin flips, do you think you're going to get a few runs of just heads or just tails?

Shane Mercer [00:36:16]:

Of course. Right.

Andrew Pace [00:36:17]:

So imagine being a sports bettor where you had that fairly dickinson, was that who beat Purdue? I don't even know.

Shane Mercer [00:36:24]:

We came up with some other more creative nicknames, but yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:36:28]:

So fairlay Dickinson beat Purdue. They were, what, the second ever one seed to be upset, but a bunch of records got set in that game, right. Like, biggest spread ever of a one seed that was beat. And then obviously they didn't win their tournament, but they got in because the team that won their tournament wasn't eligible for the March madness tournament. So they got in based on that, like, crazy, crazy series of events for them to come through and win that game. But like you just said, you said it was starting to look more like a coin flip. Were we getting more than 2.0 or plus 100? So, again, I might argue that there was theoretical value there, but it won. And then that can justify my argument. Winning or losing should never justify the argument. It should be the time of the decision that you made being the right or the wrong decision, not what then happened afterwards, because you can't control that.

Shane Mercer [00:37:24]:

Yeah, well, that's exactly it. Now, I got to ask you, though, Pace, because we were talking a lot about data, data collection, testing, applying. And I'm not giving anything away here, but at inplayLIVE: The team has done this extensively in a lot of different sports and developed some very successful strategies. And you've applied those strategies live during games, and it works. But in the world of chaos, things change. And that, I assume, means that the strategies have to change, the tactics have to change. The way you approach it has to, I guess, evolve in some way. Right. How do you go about doing that? On the fly?

Andrew Pace [00:38:15]:

Yeah, so that's like the pendulum. We can't tell where it's the two arm pendulum. We can't tell where it's going to swing. But consistently speaking, the way that it was swinging that was providing value to us is now no longer doing that. And that could be for a number of reasons, that could be a rule change. Like, I just touched on the pitcher no longer batting in baseball. So for that particular bettor, you'd hope that that wasn't his only strategy, his or her only strategy. But that revenue stream for that sports bettor is now gone. Right. So did the books close that down as a loophole that they were being exploited on? No, the rules changed. Okay, so change in rules, change in the books and how they're reacting to what you're doing. To a certain extent, change in motivations, the way a league is going about the way they're playing. And you look at moneyball. Right. Moneyball. Brad Pitt, Billy Bean, Oakland Athletics. Right. And the analytics that they were applying to baseball. And I love the scene where they're all the scouts in the room, and one of the scouts is referring to the player's jawline. He's like, oh, he's got a great jawline, as a reason to draft him. And you kind of see the public perception of wanting and needing that player build up and build up and build up and almost become overinflated to the point that he kind of has to be a Yankee or a Dodger, but he can't be on the Oakland Athletics anymore. And then, of course, the moneyball system, where you don't let the jawline of the player impact your decisions. And more so the typical line does, he get on base. Right. And then that was an edge that the Athletics had. The edge is gone. It's gone. Right. So the whole league has to adapt. The Athletics have to adapt in order to have a chance because the system that they were using that was benefiting them is now gone. Right. So in the case of sports betting specifically, and you're like, how do you deal with that? Well, a good example is I'll go back to Fairlay Dickinson. They were minus twelve and a half when they who did they play yesterday? FAU.

Shane Mercer [00:40:47]:

FAU.

Andrew Pace [00:40:47]:

Yeah. So FAU is minus twelve and a half. That line opened at minus twelve and a half it closed at -15 and a half. A lot of the public action was on Fairlay Dickinson because we talked about this last week. They love the cinderella story. They already busted up all their brackets, and now they want to see them do it again. And the value on them, in theory, from the standpoint of hey, they just need to win. This game is massive. They pay huge to beat FAU. So FAU didn't end up covering the minus twelve and a half or the -15 and a half. Not that that matters. That's after the result has occurred, but are you telling me that a -15 favorite that ends up winning by eight or nine or whatever it is that they won by doesn't have value to bet against at some point in that game, if the other team is even remotely keeping up. So in order to remove theoretical value, you have to remove betting as a whole. Because as soon as you have a heavy favorite and a heavy underdog, you've made a prediction on the way that that outcome should transpire. But what if it doesn't transpire? The way the predictions have been set? That value will never not exist. We have had to adapt so much in the last few years. I've had to adapt so much in the last decade. But when you have underdogs outperforming the favorite, how you bet on it might need to change, but that value will always be there.

Shane Mercer [00:42:23]:

How you bet on it, but also perhaps where you bet on it and in which way. Right. Because as you evolve as a sports bettor and collectively sports bettors get better. Well, the books still need to become profitable or maintain their profit margins and they'll look for ways they will change and evolve too. Right. And there has to be a certain level of as they change. Well, now you've got to change. Right. And as they react to you, you've got to react back.

Andrew Pace [00:42:56]:

Right, totally. And I think that that's a really good point. So to my same example there, let's say that you did do some sort of adaptation to the underdog, outperforming the expectations that the underdog had. Well, the flip side of that is go ahead and react to the underdog and then the favorite is going to now potentially have theoretical value. So that's like the Kevin Hart ad.

Shane Mercer [00:43:22]:

What is it?

Andrew Pace [00:43:23]:

Team overdog at Underdog Price DraftKings Ad

Andrew Pace [00:43:26]:

Right. So the value isn't all based on a team being an underdog. There can be huge value on favorites in a lot of different ways.

Shane Mercer [00:43:35]:

Yeah. And always, never getting caught into any particular one way of trying to be successful. Right. Always sort of being open to change because chaos is going to happen. And I think one of the things is we keep calling it chaos, but a lot of people would say, oh, well, it's either you're lucky or you're unlucky. But there's a certain element of taking the luck out of it. And in fact that is the exact premise right. How science and math are taking luck out of gambling. And you can use data collection and you can use strategies to take that luck out or to tame that chaos to an extent where you can look at things and say, well, this isn't going to happen. But there is a likelihood that it could happen. And the books are either over handicapping it or under handicapping it and that theoretical value presents itself.

Andrew Pace [00:44:42]:

Exactly. Well said.

Shane Mercer [00:44:45]:

So with that, as we kind of recap here, chaos happens. Be ready for it. Right. It's always going to happen. It's not going away. In fact, you need to embrace it and enjoy it for all that it is. Because a lot of times right pace, that Gonzaga garbage, three pointer with 0.7 seconds left where none of the player where players are already high fiving and the human error of not starting the clock in this case it went against us. But how many times has it gone for us? Right?

Andrew Pace [00:45:23]:

Yeah. It's all about volume.

Shane Mercer [00:45:25]:

Right.

Andrew Pace [00:45:25]:

Flip that coin a million times. If it lands heads ten times in a row, you shouldn't be surprised. But if you were on tails for those ten times and you had tails at plus 110 or 2.1, you made a winning wager regardless of the outcome. Right. So on that same note, Shane, I know because you're kind of recapping, I think there's a really good message to anyone watching this. They will win. Take it out of your verbiage, your arsenal, this will happen. Take it out. Replace those with if they play this way, they should beat this team if this happens. I think that it's most likely that this will occur. Those types of statements are the ones that you want to make the locks and all that crap in this industry is everything wrong with it. You see it on BR betting all the time, all this garbage about who their locks are. And I think a lot of it encourages irresponsible gambling. So get all that out of your repertoire. I know there was a statement from Portnoy. This is when the Bucks played the Chiefs in the Super Bowl and he said, take the keys, the mortgage, the kids, put it all on the Chiefs. They're a total lock. And the Bucks just washed them in that game. And I'm not saying that I knew that that was going to happen. I'm saying you should never tell someone that the outcome is known before it occurs. If you approach things with that mindset, you won't be surprised. And that way too, people won't be able to look back on a statement that you made about something that will happen and make you look like an idiot.

Shane Mercer [00:47:02]:

Yeah. It's funny because a lot of people might say, oh, well, pace. I was just saying it. It's just a saying. Come on, man. I'm allowed to say that something's a lock or this or that and yeah, of course you're allowed to. Nobody's saying you can't say it. But when you repeat those words and you repeat things like that, over time, your thinking ends up or could end up falling in line with those phrases, with those terms, because you're repeating them, and they end up sort of embedded in your psyche, and before long, you actually believe that, oh, this is a lock. It's got to be a lock.

Andrew Pace [00:47:41]:

Exactly.

Shane Mercer [00:47:42]:

Yeah. And so I think in that sense, getting those words out of your repertoire, out of your verbiage, really will only benefit you in the long run, because even if you are just saying it for fun or you don't really mean it or whatever, it reinforces that kind of thinking. And that is the kind of thinking that the books want you to be engaging in. They want you to think that way. Right?

Andrew Pace [00:48:08]:

Yes, sir.

Shane Mercer [00:48:10]:

Well, with that, I want to say one thing, too, that came from this book, and it's a quote that I really, really like that I'd like to leave all of you with. And it comes from a 19th century chemist, Louis Pasteur. And again, remember all of the people who have come up with all of these different betting strategies for different games, they're almost all scientists and mathematicians because they were interested in this. And so this comes from this 19th century chemist, Louis Pasteur, and the quote is, chance favors the prepared mind. And I thought that that was quite apt for what we do.

Shane Mercer [00:48:50]:

I just think it's a great quote, given what we do, because that's exactly it, right? There's a lot of chaos out there. You can call it luck, call it a bad beat or being unlucky, but at the end of the day, if you're prepared and actually what the quote stems from is this whole concept of other scientists who came up with a lot of inventions or a lot of discoveries, stumbled across new theorems. Some scientists and mathematicians are more profound than others, right? Think newton or Leonardo. DA Vinci or Einstein? Right. For example, they didn't just stumble across all of their discoveries. They were prepared for them for when they presented. And so that's where this quote comes from. Chance favors the prepared mark mike drop.

Andrew Pace [00:49:49]:

Yeah, I don't know who this one's from, but I've said this dozens of times on streams, but the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Shane Mercer [00:49:57]:

There you go. Right. Love it. That one's a little more simpler for the blue. I'm a liver out there.

Andrew Pace [00:50:03]:

I'm a little bit more simple.

Shane Mercer [00:50:07]:

Well, there we go. You know what, too, guys? Everybody out there in all of the chaos of this podcast episode, I completely forgot to say to, like, download and subscribe and follow us on all The Socials we are @inplaylive. And if you are interested in joining the community, you want to become a member and sort of see what's happening on the other side and get to know Pace and myself and the whole team a little bit better. You can sign up using a promo code 'BEHINDTHELINES', all caps. You will get the very best price out there. So again, like download, subscribe, follow us on all the Socials and use that promo code 'BEHINDTHELINES' with that Pace till next week. Keep beating the books, buddy.