Episode 90

Welcome [00:00:00]:

You're listening to Behind the Lines, a podcast presented by inplayLIVE and powered by Pinnacle, the number one sports book where winners play and never get limited. Go to pinnacle.com/inplaylive to sign up and get in the game.

Andrew Pace [00:00:16]:

And you are gonna take all the action that you took and then punish the player, your customer, for playing on your site. If you have an argument against that, I wanna hear it. Drop it below because, Tom, I gotta say, like, I've seen a lot. Those are some insane stories.

Shane Mercer [00:00:32]:

Ya thats nuts.

Tom Brownlee [00:00:32]:

I mean, it's a it's a good point Pace because, yeah, I've never gone and tried to cash a bettor than they've gone. You know what? It was 40 to 1. We're gonna give you 60 to 1 because this other player was the wrong price. You know? If you're always cutting the odds, at some point, you've got to increase the odds as well, haven't you? But that never happened. Yeah.

Shane Mercer [00:01:02]:

Hello. Welcome in behind the lines powered by Pinnacle and purifying the sports betting industry. I'm your host, Shane Mercer, Andrew Pace, founder of inplayLIVE, a community of like minded sports bettors dedicated to long term success. And on today's show, I'll have an advent calendar update for you. We'll learn about what that is in a little bit. If you're part of the community, you already know what it is, but stay tuned for that. It's coming down the pipe later. We'll do the grid iron grind and talk a little college football playoffs.

Shane Mercer [00:01:30]:

But first, Tom Brownlee is the founder of Bookie Bashing, a betting service based in the UK. Welcome to the show, Tom. Glad to have you.

Tom Brownlee [00:01:38]:

Yeah. Thanks, guys. Good to be on.

Shane Mercer [00:01:40]:

There are many similarities between Bookie, Bashing, and Imply Live. At least when it comes to betting theory and ideology, I think we're gonna find that there are a lot of differences too. But tell us more about what Bookie Bashing is, why you created it, and sort of where it fits into the, sports betting ecosystem at least in the UK.

Tom Brownlee [00:02:01]:

Sure. Yeah. So I think we are we're quite similar because we're coming out this from, a background of theory, of mathematics as opposed to traditional throwing darts at a dartboard and tips and pickums and things like that. So, bookie bashing has been around as a online service since 2015. So next year, we come into our 10th year. But Bookiebashing as a group of, syndicated gamblers goes back nearly a decade before that. That was, a group of a group of guys from my university, Birmingham University in the UK, and we formed the syndicate, 1 Aussie, 4 British guys. And it was really to pull our well, it's not just pulling the bets.

Tom Brownlee [00:02:49]:

It's to pull the knowledge. It's to pull the camaraderie. It's to pull together the mental strength when you go through losing runs, and there's always a guy, who will get through that losing run when you're not willing to get up and place bets that particular day, and all of that combines into 1. So, yeah, Bucky Bashing founded as just spied Birmingham University Mapes back in, you know, in the late 2000. So back in those days, I was a I was a member of a few different gambling syndicates, mostly retail based. By this, I mean, we would literally visit shops in the UK High Street and place our bets there. But because I was a member of a few of them, I could see overlap of effort. I could see that we were putting some effort in to work some stuff out here.

Tom Brownlee [00:03:38]:

So were these guys. So were these guys. And to begin with, we thought, why don't we just bring everybody together into the same place, and we can at least share certain bits of strategy and information? And we put an initial barrier of entry into joining the community, which was a tenor that just stopped any freeloaders or people that would just come and view, if you like, the forum as it was back then. And, back in 2015, that's essentially all we were. We were sort of low barrier for entry, come in, share a bit of information, and it will all be the better as a result of that. And in the last decade, it seems to have taken off quite substantially from that very sort of humble beginning into, the largest advantage value betting community in the UK, I think in Europe, although there's some people over in Greece that I don't really understand how big they are. So that's the background number.

Shane Mercer [00:04:41]:

Wow. That's that's fascinating. So it just started with 4 guys and then in person, everybody betting in person to another to to a larger group of of people, but still all betting in person together. How many people would you say it was at that time and now how many is it now?

Tom Brownlee [00:05:01]:

So back at the beginning, it was, you know, the 5 of us, we got together in my local pub for our annual general meeting, which mostly involved drinking and apologizing for not getting on bets that won and apologizing for getting on bets that lost. And I remembered my business partner, Duncan, standing in my kitchen, and he said, why don't we just start a site? Why don't we open a site? And I said, well, who's gonna join it? And he said, well, the 5 of us will be the first five members. And I I I remember saying, you know, I don't know anything about IT. My background, I'm a chartered civil engineer. I was a chartered civil engineer until I went full time professional gambling. And, I just thought I don't know. I the people that I know will come and join, but I can't imagine anybody, you know, outside of my circles will want to come and join that. By maybe 2017, 2018, we'd found one particular edge.

Tom Brownlee [00:06:01]:

And, frankly, it was crazy that our, subscription cost was £10 a month because people were using this edge to make tens of 1,000 of pounds a month. So we were really underselling our product at this time. You pay a tenner, you can make 20 grand, you're doing quite okay. And as word spread about that, we were lucky enough for one of our members to get in touch with us. He was an IT professional. And he said, guys, you know, the theory is good, but the practice, your IT infrastructure is amateur at best. Duncan being an accountant, me being a civil engineer. If I can give you an example, in the UK, we have what are known as football coupons, soccer coupons in the shops.

Tom Brownlee [00:06:51]:

So you can go in, you can get a printout piece of a 4, and it will list all the football games, and you can pick which game you wanna bet on and put these into multiples, parlays, however you wanna bet on them. So in the morning, we would run our models, and we would work out our own odds for teams to win particular games. And then we will go into the shops, and we would type up the coupon and then compare our odds against the coupon. And just like that comparison, we then put a table up on the site, and those are the teams to go and bet on. The problem is the second it goes on the site, it's out of date. We don't bring in any new information. It's not live. It's a JPEG sitting there.

Tom Brownlee [00:07:33]:

I mean, this is back in 2016 we're doing this. And, our our IT expert, if you like, came along and said, I can build certain pieces of infrastructure, but that's not gonna be a static JPEG. It's gonna be live. The inputs will change live. The outputs will change live. And all of a sudden, we've got a 247 dynamic running tracker for these football coupons. And, it was really we were very lucky to have him as a member and then him drive up to Worcestershire and say, could I join the team? And when we saw what he could do, the answer was most definitely yes. So he became, if you like, the the 3rd member now of the Bookie Bashing team.

Tom Brownlee [00:08:13]:

And, we've just gone from strength to strength since then.

Shane Mercer [00:08:16]:

Wow. So how many people are are are part of the group now?

Tom Brownlee [00:08:21]:

So we fluctuate, between about 407100 members. We've had, 2 to 3000 through the door. We sometimes get people joining for a month, and we never see them again. We've had people that joined us in 2016 and are still with us in 2024. It's a rolling monthly subscription fee. A lot of the time, people need a break. One of the worst things we can ever hear is if somebody hits a big win. We had, we had someone use our horse racing track, and they ended up in, in the tabloids in the UK, the Daily Mail, the Racing Post, because they used our horse racing tracker to pick 4 quite high priced horses.

Tom Brownlee [00:09:00]:

I think the off the top of my head, 16 to 1, 20 to 1, 40 to 1, 33 to 1. They stuck them in a multiple. This multiple is going to the lucky 15. It comprises of as you excuse the ambulance going by outside. It comprises of, 15, different bets, doubles, trebles, quadruple. And they all came in, and he placed a 50p lucky 15. He won £446,000 from this one particular bet. And we never saw him again because that was enough for him not to resubscribe to next month and go and do something else.

Tom Brownlee [00:09:33]:

So, we were one down after that particular month because of the success that we've had.

Andrew Pace [00:09:38]:

Tom, that sounds like one of the smartest bettors that's ever existed.

Tom Brownlee [00:09:41]:

Well, yeah. Get in and get out. Yeah.

Shane Mercer [00:09:45]:

You know? Pace, I mean, this must sound so familiar to you because, you know, I mean, it sounds like a very similar story to to sort of the makings of inplayLIVE.

Andrew Pace [00:09:56]:

Yeah. There's definitely definitely some similarities there. I I think the the sport overlap is is almost nonexistent, so we might as well we might as well just push our communities together and

Tom Brownlee [00:10:06]:

For sure.

Andrew Pace [00:10:07]:

And, bring North America to Europe. Right?

Tom Brownlee [00:10:09]:

When when did you guys start at inplayLIVE? Can I ask when?

Andrew Pace [00:10:13]:

The we launched for when sports returned in North America from, the COVID break. So if you recall yeah. If you recall at that time, the NHL and NBA, which are are big sports that we bet on at at inplayLIVE, they actually they actually were in bubbles. So they had no fan arenas in, like, these controlled environments, and they had a real hard time with, like one of the athletes jumped out of the bubble and went to a strip club one of the nights and then, like, got suspended and couldn't play.

Tom Brownlee [00:10:43]:

Yeah. Of course, they did. I mean, you you think one of the safer places would be an NHL ice hockey rink for COVID because you've got the helmets on and it's freezing cold. But, you know.

Tom Brownlee [00:10:53]:

You live, you live. We had a really interesting time during COVID because, we were live throughout it, but the schools shut in the UK. And my daughter was 4, 5 years old, and I was particularly annoyed because if you're a key worker, you got to send your kids to school. So 60% of her class got classified as a key worker. As a professional gambler, I was the opposite of key worker. I had to have my kids at home. And we found we kind of paused a little bit on new model development, which is a bad time to do that because in soccer, they took away all of the crowds. And then the fundamental action within the game all fell away.

Tom Brownlee [00:11:34]:

There were fewer cards. There were fewer bookings. There were fewer corners. There were fewer goals. And unless you were betting on this, which we weren't, you got absolutely hammered during the COVID times because of the lack of action. And another thing, all the away teams started winning because the home advantage was completely lost. If you were sharp enough to spot these trends at the beginning, you cleaned up. Unfortunately, my daughter was at home, and I was homeschooling her and tried my best not to go stir crazy, with all the pubs shut in the UK.

Andrew Pace [00:12:07]:

You know, it's it's interesting that you bring that up because our we bet on American football, which is obviously completely different than what we call soccer. Right? European football. And when those stadiums emptied out, like, the home away advantage was completely erased. No no debate there. But the scoring was unprecedented because the noise of the crowd is such a major factor in American football. And we absolutely just cleaned up that season because it was higher scoring.

Tom Brownlee [00:12:37]:

And when you say that, you mean tons of points. And the the unders were hitting all of the time, were they?

Andrew Pace [00:12:42]:

No. The overs were hitting like wildfire.

Tom Brownlee [00:12:44]:

The over were hitting all the time.

Andrew Pace [00:12:46]:

And in American football, you can bet on the result of the drives. And at that time, sports betting had just been rolling out across the United States in kind of a wild wild west type approach. And they were all competing for business with absolutely no idea of, I guess, the the approach of risk that a sports book needs to take when they're managing when they're managing risk. So I guess what I'm getting at is if you had a main market line, you know, that you might take 5 figures of action before the game starts on, They were doing the same for their derivative markets. So they were taking the same amount of risk on a pregame side as they would take on a proposition for the next drive or the next result of a play in an American football game. So I remember that season in one particular moment where I was able to spin 5 figures on a punt. And I don't mean a punt is in a wager because that's you guys will reference a a bet as a punt. I mean, a punt, an American football where he kicks the ball away.

Andrew Pace [00:13:57]:

And and I I'll never forget when that bet went in because I was like, what is going on right now? Everyone's competing for for each other's business. So we were betting on the result of the drives to be touchdowns, for amounts of money now. Like, if you were to go do the same thing today, first of all, you wouldn't make any money because they've corrected a lot of the odds. 2nd of all, the scoring is nowhere near what it was that season, so it wouldn't have an expected value that that that I think would be positive or or nearly to the degree that it was then. But 3rd, you could only maybe get a couple $100 down, or a couple £100 down in in in your case, that you're referencing there. But, yeah, that season was nuts for us. And and you're you hit the nail on the head. If you were doing something previously that was working before that year, I don't think the sport mattered.

Andrew Pace [00:14:46]:

You were probably gonna gonna see some variance that wasn't gonna be wasn't gonna be welcomed.

Tom Brownlee [00:14:53]:

Yeah. Any anytime there's, like, a fundamental change either in the rules of the sport or in something like a COVID lockdown or something like that, there are always opportunity to try and break everything down into first principles and look at that. I remember, didn't they change the rules in NFL a few seasons ago? Was it 2019, something like that, where they were protecting the quarterback a little bit more? And then the theory was, well, he's not gonna get sacked as much, and so there's gonna be more yardage as a result of that. But before the season starts, nobody really knows for sure how much that's going to correct, and yet it's gonna have fundamentally huge differences on the outcome of the game. I mean, big swings in probability. So it becomes who can who can model that most accurately fastest as well? It's so easy halfway through the season to go, that would have been the most profitable easy thing to do in the world. But halfway through the season, it's too late. You gotta get there first.

Andrew Pace [00:15:45]:

Right. Totally. So you have a big dart tournament coming up. Did I say that correctly?

Tom Brownlee [00:15:50]:

The PDC World Championships as known as the start of Christmas, 15th December. Darts is one of those things. It's barely a sport. It's more a paddle to mind in the UK. I've never been to the Ally Pally, the Alexander Palace in London. I've been to other darts events. But of all, like, the most minor darts event in the UK, the the the primary purpose of visiting that event is to get as much alcohol down your throat as possible and sing songs.

Shane Mercer [00:16:21]:

Sing songs. Love it.

Tom Brownlee [00:16:23]:

And barely in the background, you might notice that there is a professional sport going on at the same time.

Andrew Pace [00:16:29]:

Right. Okay.

Tom Brownlee [00:16:30]:

That is certainly secondary to proceedings. And the, Dots World Championships takes it to a new level. It's almost like you have to turn up in fancy dress. The songs are ludicrous and funny, and the television launches it with all images of snow and jingles and Santa. And, my kids love it, and they're only, 58 years old, and they love watching the dots at Christmas. And, I enjoy modeling the dots, especially in the PDC World Championship because, this is something where it's quite difficult to get hold of data. And something like NFL Moneyline, I've never had an edge, in NFL Moneyline. I don't have an edge in Champions League Football, and one of the reasons is everybody's got the same data as me.

Tom Brownlee [00:17:17]:

They've probably got more, and, there's a lot more intelligent mathematicians out there than me. So I'm not gonna take them on. I'm gonna go and find where I can get an edge. And years years years ago, I invested some money in asking somebody to start collecting automatically collecting dots data for me for all kinds of random tournaments, not just the big players, but the players that come through the Africa tour, the Asian tour. Now you hit round 1 of the PDC World Championship, and you've got the most famous guy in the world, you know, Michael Van Gerwen versus some guy that's come through the African tour. Nobody's heard of him. Nobody knows who he is. And, critically, hardly anyone's got any data for him.

Tom Brownlee [00:17:57]:

But I know the last 4 or 5 games, he's hit an average of 84.7. He's throwing a 1 80 every 2.6 lengths, and his average checkout is this. And because I've got that data look. This guy is not gonna progress through to the latter rounds. The latter rounds of the PDC World Championships are quite hard to, to get an edge on because it's the more well known players, and everyone's got good data for that. But rounds 1, round 2, round 3, especially with the shorter format, you can find some pretty decent edges there. One I'm looking at just now is, the number 170 checkouts in the PDC World Championship. So 170 checkout is the maximum checkout you can get.

Tom Brownlee [00:18:41]:

It's trouble 20, trouble 20 bull's eye. It's relatively rare. Running from 2019 up until now, there have been 3 and then 8 and then 7 and then 4 and then 6. Small sample size for that six 0.25 what 1 seventies per world championship. So the expectation for this year, the standard has improved. The format is the same, but, 6.25 would be on my lower lower ebb of estimation. And out there right now, I can see some bookmakers pricing up 7180, such a, you know, half, sorry, 7170, which is half a 170 over the expectation I have for this tournament. They're pricing it up 6 to 1, maybe 5.0 plus 500.

Tom Brownlee [00:19:33]:

I'm making that closer to evens, and that's a really, really big bet. Anything, you know, where I can multiply my money by 6, and I think it should be a coin flip. You don't get that equity quite a lot of the time. My first reaction is I must have done something wrong when this bet is this big. But just going off the averages since 2020, I don't know who's come up with this, but I don't think it's gonna be around for much longer in the next few days. And before I second guess myself and too much, I'm just gonna be sending all my runners out and getting on what I can get on in the betting exchanges. In the UK now, ShopBet has simply cannot bet at soft bookmakers. Bet 365 is not an option.

Tom Brownlee [00:20:17]:

The Betfred William Hills can't do that. But I can go to shops, and I can use betting exchanges, and I'm gonna be topping up as much as I can on 7 +1 seventies in the world champions because when that goes off next week, that's gonna be it's gonna be under it's certainly gonna be under 5 to 2, 2 to 1, something like that. So it's a bet for me right now.

Shane Mercer [00:20:37]:

Wow. I feel like you just dropped some extremely valuable darts knowledge on us, and I have no idea what to do with it.

Tom Brownlee [00:20:46]:

That's it.

Andrew Pace [00:20:48]:

Barbecue sauce, baby. That's awesome stuff, Tom. Really, really cool, and I love the angle there that you you broke down. And, I feel like I'm gonna be searching up in Google how many one seventies were in TDC at some point, at some point in December, because I've I've never actually gotten into it. I've seen some of the clips on on social media of of some of the big moments that have occurred, and it absolutely looks electric. So and I can feel so I can Tom, I can feel your passion. I don't know if it's for the drinking or for the darts or for both, but I can feel it.

Tom Brownlee [00:21:22]:

It's evening time here. But, in a little bit of after timing here, last year, there was a definite edge. There was a kid. Who's 16 years old. He was barely old enough to play in the adult tour. He could only start playing in 2023 because they didn't allow 15 year olds on the tour. When but when he was 15, when he was 16, he was throwing darts that nobody had ever seen.

Tom Brownlee [00:21:47]:

The averages, the one eighties, he was, he was winning events on his first and second time. And all anyone could think is this has to regress to the mean. A 16 year old is not gonna walk into the world championships and win it. He's too young. He's too inexperienced. He's on fire now because he knew, but this is short term. And he went up at a 100 to 1 to win the PDC World Championships. And, we looked at him on him, and I mid and betted him, not max bet, because it was another one of those.

Tom Brownlee [00:22:16]:

I was second guessing myself that if he's a 100 to 1, I've done something wrong to make him a lot shorter. He got all the way to the final, and, if you were on an each way bet, you won a pretty decent payout on your place. Unfortunately, he lost to the world number 1 Luke Humphreys. But that Luke Littler kid, he's one to look out for for the future. He's unbelievable. He really is. Well, for sure.

Andrew Pace [00:22:51]:

Well the expected growth is so much less than than, you know, a traditional, you know, a minus 110 or what would you say fractional 9? What what would that be for you? 9 over 10? Is that

Tom Brownlee [00:23:02]:

Yeah. odda are 9 to 10. 9 to 11. Thing. Right?

Andrew Pace [00:23:06]:

Yeah. Right. Whereas your your expected value might be higher on the 100 to 1 wherein your expected growth Yeah. Is is far less. Right? And, like, we've we've placed we just, some of some of the some of our members just came off a a really big plus 4,000, win in college football. And we we had a 150 to 1 leg that was ended up being one one loss away from from cashing, in in a close match too. So, we we've really had some of those long odds come through. And that's where, I mean, that's where the role of hedging obviously can can play a massive factor in betting.

Andrew Pace [00:23:43]:

Like, I hate the word. I hate the process. But did you did you look at hedging that that particular wager?

Tom Brownlee [00:23:50]:

Hedging's for gardeners. So, love it. We we we have, we have a journey we've been on in the United Kingdom, and that is we have a massive problem with, another winning community. So if you think a 100% of bets a 100% of bettors exist, 97% of those bettors I've heard are losing. Of the 3% that are winning, about 2.9 of those 3% are arbitrage players. There are there are those that seek out a bet and then will bet the other side. They'll put down a £1,000 to make sure they win £2.50. Mhmm.

Tom Brownlee [00:24:28]:

Betting exchanges became very, very big and very, very popular in the UK, up till about 2015, 2016, 2017. It's kind of amazing that they weren't they didn't turn into the most popular form of platform for betting for recreational punters because they offer the best odds. But as they became popular, so did the arbitrage, and then that caused a real big problem, for sharp bettors getting on in the UK because, you know, there's very little difference between a value bettor and an arbitrage player. For the value bettors, we actually had to start looking for what to find value where the money didn't exist on the exchange. Because if we find a bet of Manchester United at 4 to 1, plus 400 and the plus 300 on the exchange, we can bet both sides of that and guarantee some profit. And then we'll turn up the next day, and the bookmakers will not pay out for us. Oh, they will, and they'll restrict us. Last week, a rig a guy called Rig Johnston.

Tom Brownlee [00:25:29]:

Have you heard of this guy? No. He's an American golfer. I've not heard of him. He came through DP World Tour, which is the European Tour qualifying school. I was talking to a shop. That school is so competitive. If anybody comes through it, they're playing the golf of their lives. Okay? So it's really interesting to watch the guys come through there because they're on fire.

Tom Brownlee [00:25:49]:

So he comes through there, and, he win he goes down and plays the Estes Hand Australian Open, and he's a 175 to 1. What's that? 17,500, I think? And he wins it. And a load of people have gone and got on him, 175 to 1, and a particular Irish bookmaker that exists in the UK betting high streets called Paddy Power. So they've gotten in and bet on him a 175 to 1. They walk in on Monday morning, and Paddy just go, we're not paying you. We're not we're not gonna pay we're not paying you a 175 to 1 anyway. Well, probably, we reckon we'll pay you about a 125 to 1. And they skimmed off 1,000 and 1,000 even pounds, from people because they couldn't manage the book properly.

Tom Brownlee [00:26:37]:

And their argument, I think, is that he traded just a little bit lower than a 175 to 1 on the exchange at the same time of these bets. So they could have been arbitrage bets. I'll tell you this. We're talking about the European tour, a 175 to 1. He would have traded for pennies. You wouldn't have been lobbying him for very much. You might have got £2 on and laid those £2 and guaranteed yourself 12p. But they're using this as justification that it's a palpable error, a clear and obvious error.

Tom Brownlee [00:27:07]:

Exactly the same thing happened in the Barbasol championship in 2022. That particular guy, was Trey Mullinax, again, and it was someone just like Riggs Johnson last week. We put him out in our model as a good bet to a 175 to 1. He won. It was 10Bet who we recommended that people bet with. They log on to their account on Monday morning. 10Bet have decided to pay out at a 100 to 1 instead of a 175 to 1 for the same reason. They're saying it's a palpable error.

Tom Brownlee [00:27:38]:

It was a stale price with an arbitrage bet. The total amount of money they skim off their customer base was over £1,000,000, and this is a free rolling from them. It's disgraceful behavior. And for all the reasons lined previously, I'm slightly uncomfortable betting at very high odds because I'm now in a situation where I don't trust the bookmakers to pay out and play fair and square.

Andrew Pace [00:28:03]:

So let me ask you a couple things here. Okay. So the sportsbook has access to what exchanges our pricing any market at, as do we.

Tom Brownlee [00:28:16]:

Yes. They do.

Andrew Pace [00:28:17]:

We head out as players, and we take a wager wherever it is, an exchange whatever, and they can go back and change the odds of the bet because an exchange offered something that could have be viewed as a 1 to 2 pound arb?

Tom Brownlee [00:28:35]:

That's their justification. That is they're they're they don't say it out loud, but Okay. But I'm I'm doing a deep dive into the reasons that they're using. The price came down on the exchange. And when you watch a horse or a golfer come down on the exchange, you can see the UK bookmaker odds follow it. So there there's no more traders. There's no more smart money, line makers, UK bookmakers. They are tracking the exchange.

Tom Brownlee [00:29:04]:

If you wanna get a little bit a little bit clever, you can sometimes deliberately put money down on the exchange to manipulate a price and watch the bookmakers follow that false price. But yeah. Yeah. And Paddy Power, they they merged with Betfair Exchange, so their computer system is all in one now. And so that was the justification they used to this to to the people that went in to try and get their money on Monday morning.

Andrew Pace [00:29:31]:

So the very company that they own being the reason why their company couldn't pay out the price that they offered.

Tom Brownlee [00:29:38]:

That's what they're see. It it's it's theft is what it is.

Andrew Pace [00:29:42]:

It's it is. It's theft. So, Tom, just just to continue here, 10 bet. Now they were SB Tech here in North America. Yeah. Are they SB Tech still in the UK?

Tom Brownlee [00:29:54]:

I think they left the UK betting, markets. Don't quote me on that because so many people have, But, yeah, they were SP Tech. And,

Andrew Pace [00:30:03]:

I'm I'm playing on 10Bet here right now. They have a new odds provider in their crypto casino now.

Tom Brownlee [00:30:08]:

Yeah. Okay. I see.

Andrew Pace [00:30:10]:

As you've said that I'm looking at my account with 10Bet right now.

Tom Brownlee [00:30:14]:

Can I give the can I give them some credit?

Andrew Pace [00:30:15]:

Are they SB Tech?

Tom Brownlee [00:30:19]:

Yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:30:21]:

That is that is unbelievable.

Tom Brownlee [00:30:24]:

Can I give them some credit? Sure. Myself and, Pete Ling, who you had on your podcast.

Shane Mercer [00:30:33]:

Yeah.

Tom Brownlee [00:30:34]:

Recently. He we started leaning some pressure onto 10Bet. We wanted to make this public. We didn't wanna let it die. And I have to say, after maybe 3 or 4 days, the CEO of 10Bet, who's over in Israel, arranged a phone call with me, and he explained to me what had happened, which is they opened up the book on Monday morning, and they saw this £1,000,000 doll €1,000,000 red figure. Then the justification for what they did, which is they freaked out and it was their entire year's golf profits down the pan, and the middle manager decided that it was a stale price, and they were going to, pay out it less. But then they've the CEO has reviewed all of the information, and he did make the decision to pay everybody out at a 175 to 1 in the end.

Tom Brownlee [00:31:25]:

Everyone could log on to their account. They could withdraw their money. And then if they tried to place another bet, they found that their max stake was 1p, and they were restricted in every sport, and they couldn't get another bet on. But at least they did get their money at a 175 to 1. I do give them credit there. It's easy to make a mistake. It takes a little bit of a man at least to put your hands up and say you made a mistake and make it right. They maybe could have taken a few more bets from people, but that's a business decision.

Andrew Pace [00:31:50]:

Right. Honestly, you said you'd like to give them a little bit of credit. I'm gonna give you a little bit of credit. Well done.

Tom Brownlee [00:31:57]:

Yeah. Like Well, I mean, can I just say this is we've been beaten into submission in the UK? When I, announced what Paddy Power had done on X the other day, the number of customers who sided with Paddy Power was unbelievable. I thought everybody would be on the side of the punter, but there was, you know, a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying, well, you you got what he deserved, or you're betting on an error, or this is a stale line, or you're using too many runners to bet on shots. I mean, this this has come from years years years of the bookmaker telling the punter that they're badly behaved. And this narrative has been whipped up, and people start to believe that it's true. And, we're in a very strange place just now. We really are.

Andrew Pace [00:32:44]:

Well, let's let's play devil's advocate. Okay? Let's let's play devil's advocate here. Give me the best argument that someone gave you that we could try to side with them being right, that the sports book was justified in in this case with Paddy Power.

Tom Brownlee [00:32:59]:

Yeah. So the various arguments were, it was an error because it was top price. Now I would just say someone has to be top price. And, also, somebody William Hill were also 175 to 1, so they would join top price. They paid. And they did pay. That's right. Yeah.

Tom Brownlee [00:33:17]:

But they they're whether it was at the same time or not, whether the prices started coming in as a result of us tipping them out them out, I don't know. The I mean, why they don't just close the book when they take too much money on 1 individual player, I don't know. I mean, the technology there must exist. But, there are some crazy, crazy arguments used. And one of the craziest I've heard is I was, well, it wasn't me. I had a runner go into a shop and place a bet, and the bet won, £5,000 English, and he went in to collect the money. And that particular shop said they weren't gonna pay out to him because they don't take money from shop customers. They only take money from recreational punters.

Tom Brownlee [00:33:58]:

And they showed the terms and conditions that said that. So we took them to court, and they got took to task. The the judge is pretty he he he went pretty nuts at them for even trying that on. And we we always get paid out in the end when we take them to court, but sometimes it's, you know, it's like pulling teeth. And, again, this is part and parcel of betting in the UK. I've been in a betting shop the other day. If I go to Vegas and I put $100 into the machine, somebody comes over with a drink and asks me if I want a free glass of champagne. Right? If I go into the UK as I did, the other weekend, I put, 20 pound notes into the machine.

Tom Brownlee [00:34:35]:

The manager called over from the counter and said, what do you think you're doing? And I went, I'm betting on horses. And he went, no. You're not, and he pressed the button. And the reason he did that is I was just play putting more £20 into the machine than he's used to, and he's suspicious of sharp plays. And, he made me feel like a criminal. He made me feel like a criminal as opposed to bringing me a glass of champagne.

Shane Mercer [00:34:58]:

Pace this is just like what a soft book would be if it existed in brick and mortar. Like, it's it's it's unbelievable. I can't

Andrew Pace [00:35:07]:

Well, the so so on the on this note, if anyone is listening that has an argument to support the sports book, I actually don't wanna fight or debate with you. I want to hear it. So if there is anyone listening right now that can justify what Tom just said, and I'm not talking about telling a different story. You posted the odds. You have the ability to change them. You have the ability to pull them when a certain amount of money comes in, and you are gonna take all the action that you took and then punish the player, your customer, for playing on your site. If you have an argument against that, I wanna hear it. Drop it below because, Tom, I gotta say, like, I've seen a lot.

Andrew Pace [00:35:48]:

Those are some fucking insane stories.

Shane Mercer [00:35:50]:

That's absurd.

Tom Brownlee [00:35:50]:

I mean, that's a that's a good point Pacee, because I've yeah. I've never gone and tried to cash a bettor than they've gone. You know what? It was 40 to 1. We're gonna give you 60 to 1 because this other player was the wrong price. You know? If if you're always cutting the odds, at some point, you've gotta increase the odds as well, haven't you? But that never happened. You know?

Andrew Pace [00:36:08]:

Your top priced top priced is is, like, their sportsbooks trying to make their name in North America right now where they advertise being top priced. Imagine now the ad plays, you know, you just bet on a a Sunday NFL slate, and and they say you can get the very best odds at bet 365 in North America. We're offering same day, no big pricing. And then on Monday, they say, hey, guys. We fucked up. We have to change everything that we just did retroactively. So I'm not talking about for this Sunday. Retroactively, we need to go back and take all your money.

Andrew Pace [00:36:42]:

Oh my god. And you know what's crazy is I think about, like, the landscape in North America, and I think, like, is this where we're heading? Because this is fucking nuts.

Tom Brownlee [00:36:50]:

I mean, the error that the UK market made was that there are very, very few now statisticians and market makers and anyone sticking their neck out. If you look at a lot of the the soccer games, they're all identical pricing across the bookmakers because one person goes up and everybody copies them. But they have a lot of middle management whose job is simply to maximize the company's profits. Those middle management guys, they they are they go through graduate training, which says, look out for arbitrage players. See if you can find areas where, we can skim a little bit of money away from people. And, look, as a professional gambler, if they if they ever try on with me, I will always take them to court. But I feel sorry about the guys that are just in shop betting a fiver. Because if you bet a fiver and you're expecting £20 back and they give you £10 back, you're not gonna go to all the effort of taking them into court.

Tom Brownlee [00:37:41]:

The sum of all of the money taken from the low wagering players must be extraordinary, and that's the big scam that I can see.

Shane Mercer [00:37:50]:

How often have you had to go to court?

Tom Brownlee [00:37:52]:

Five times 5 went to court 5 times, won 4, lost 1. The one I lost, other people who genuinely were nothing to do with me, I knew them, but I was not, economically invested in their bets. I was completely separate from them. They went to court for exactly the same reason, and they won. So the annoying thing was we had the same case, the same logic, the same problem. The problem was it was a 25 to 1 bet at William Hillshire, there to be a goal in the first half of every game in league 1, in French league 1, that particular Sunday. On that Sunday, Paris Saint Germain were not playing because they were playing in the Champions League final, which we knew weeks in advance. So there was a goal in every game, and when we all went to get paid out, they said, you're not having 25 to 1.

Tom Brownlee [00:38:40]:

You're having 5 to 1 because Paris Saint Germain weren't playing. We thought they were. Oh, we didn't think they were. We knew we knew they were in the Champions League final for a long, long time, and we had £200 on it. So 25 to 1, we thought we were owed £5,000. Other people had more money than that. The other people, they won their cases. They got their money.

Tom Brownlee [00:38:59]:

Exactly the same case. We lost it. Sometimes you're just gonna throw your hands in the air and say, you know, we tried our best. There was nothing more we could do.

Andrew Pace [00:39:07]:

Tom, you went to court for £5,000?

Tom Brownlee [00:39:11]:

Yes. I did.

Andrew Pace [00:39:13]:

Wow, That's impressive.

Shane Mercer [00:39:14]:

Yeah.

Tom Brownlee [00:39:16]:

I nean you gotta make a stand sometime. Yeah. You hate it. I absolutely hate it.

Andrew Pace [00:39:19]:

Shane I might be motivated to go get some money from some books right now.

Andrew Pace [00:39:23]:

On my screen right now, I've got dead money on, like, 4 books that I kind of have given up on. I might you know, maybe you you've you've reinvigorated me, Tom. I'm ready to go light it up. Jeez. Wow. Good for you, man.

Tom Brownlee [00:39:35]:

Trust me, by the way, you you can't get a UK bookmaker to lay a lot more money than that these days, unfortunately. You know? You're not gonna see much more than £5,000 in a single payout.

Andrew Pace [00:39:46]:

Okay. Okay. So I have a question for you then. Mhmm. I know I know you have you have kids. You have a family. You have a life in the UK. Have you thought about moving somewhere where the grass is greener?

Tom Brownlee [00:39:58]:

Well, I mean, I know what my edges are in the UK. Right? So, I I I use various different edges. And one of the particular edges that's very strong is something called each weight bias. So do you know each weight betting? Right? Yep. Yep. Now it as far as I'm aware, in North America, in other jurisdictions, in Greece, in Australia, it doesn't work in the same way as the UK. We fix our place price to the win price. So if it's 4 to 1 on the win, the place will be 1 quarter of that.

Tom Brownlee [00:40:29]:

It'll be evens. Okay? Whereas there'll be 2 different prices in Canada or America, not in every book, but a lot. So it'll be 4 to 1 on the win, but then the place is completely separate. It's its own number. Now what we are able to do with that structure is we are able to find bias in the market. We can find particular events where that shouldn't be a linear relationship, and we can hit it, on an industrial fashion. And we do this across golf. We do it across horse racing, and it's an extremely lucrative money earner.

Tom Brownlee [00:41:04]:

If you like, it's quite boring because there's not that once you figure out how to do it, there's not that many mathematics left to do. It just churns in the background over and over again. The 7 runners out into shops. They place the bets on the horses, and this amount of money rolls in very sort of consistently with a if you're placing singles, 5% return on investment. Long term, if you're placing multiples, about 20% return on investment. If I Long term, if you're placing multiples, about 20% return on investment. If I could go into America and do something like that, I would, but I can't because I don't see the opportunity. And in America, I love NFL, but I've no idea how to model it.

Tom Brownlee [00:41:39]:

I tried. I I have a background in statistics. I can model football, soccer, because I've spent so long doing it. I got it right. I can model dots. I can't model American football for the same reason I can't model rugby. I have a real problem with these sports which jump in, points distributions of fives and twos. It makes my life really hard and just pisses my melon.

Tom Brownlee [00:42:02]:

So, and I I can see where the edges would probably be in NFL, and this is same game parleys. So something like tonight, Joe Burrow to throw over 300 yards to get 3 passing touchdowns and the Bengals to win. Look. That kind of intercorrelated modeling, where if he throws over 300 yards, he's more likely to get passing touchdowns and the Bengals are more likely to win, That's a difficult mathematical problem to work out, and I don't reckon anyone's got it perfectly spot on. And it's, because nobody's got it perfectly spot on, I reckon I've got a chance. I've got a really good chance at taking on the trainers. Whereas the Bengals to win, unfortunately, I'm just gonna put my hands up and say that's too hard to do because it's been it's not been solved, but it's been you know? It the people doing those mathematics are way further down the line than I am.

Andrew Pace [00:42:54]:

Right. Right. I didn't necessarily mean, I didn't necessarily mean the United States, but, you know, per perhaps Costa Rica or something like that. But I I wanna dive into a couple things you just said there. First of all, I'm thinking about Luis Uyshuizen. I think it was the US Open. And it was Phil Mickelson is walking down the fairway, and it looks like Phil's gonna get, you know, one of his most storied wins at a major. And I could be misremembering this, but I think Louis Euyshuysen needed an eagle to force a playoff, and he laid up.

Andrew Pace [00:43:23]:

And it made me think, are your each way analogy? And I thought to myself, what I thought to myself, what a fucking loser.

Andrew Pace [00:43:31]:

Meanwhile, if I had an each way bet that had some some edge, I'd be just going nuts because he didn't risk he didn't risk dropping lower, in the standings. So that's a really interesting analogy. And and, just just if you guys don't understand the analogy that he's making, I'll put it in some North American terms. Let's say that you took a long shot to win the Super Bowl this year. Who's who's, who's someone at the start of the season that maybe maybe could, you know, surprise people. Let's go with the Steelers. So are you on the side?

Shane Mercer [00:43:58]:

I mean, they're they're they fit the bill.

Andrew Pace [00:44:01]:

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Vikings Vikings, Steelers, whomever. Right? Well, if the Vikings are facing, the Chiefs are a bad example because they always seem to win by one score or less. But a team that's notoriously thumping other people let's say they're facing the the 2,000 and, 2,011 New England Patriots or 2007 New England Patriots, and it's like the Giants against the Patriots in that game. Let's say you have huge odds on on the Giants, but then they're minus 11 underdogs in the Super Bowl. If the each way is paying the same divided by 2, right, to to to to go to the Super Bowl as to win it, you got huge theoretical value there because you're not handicapping the opponent.

Andrew Pace [00:44:47]:

Right? So that's what he's getting at with the the the each way lines there. Now now for just because you brought up the the SGP, I I wanna actually flip your thinking a little bit there because the Joe Burrow passing yards are actually more correlated with them losing the game. So that's where that's where things aren't handicapped from.

Tom Brownlee [00:45:08]:

This is where my American football lack of, like, in-depth strategy comes in. You know?

Andrew Pace [00:45:12]:

Well the recreational players, they're gonna say, I want Joe Burrow to pass for 300 yards. I want Ja'Marr Chase to catch for 80 yards. Hugely correlated wagers. Sportsbooks handicap that brilliantly. Yeah. There isn't necessarily added value there. And in fact, there's there's there's added expected loss with with putting those together, and then the Bengals to win, you throw that on. Whereas the flip side to it is if you were to take Burrow for 3.50 or 400, Chase for a 100, and the Bengals to lose, that's actually correlated and pays way more.

Andrew Pace [00:45:43]:

Right?

Tom Brownlee [00:45:44]:

So it's about getting these correlations that work in favor with each other. Yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:45:48]:

Yeah. Yeah. And there's there are teams of people across North America that are working on that in in massive capacities right now. Now with with what we do, we're mostly betting live. So we'll try to capitalize on something like that that live. But from a pregame standpoint, if you have a theory, there's some crazy SGP odds that exist. But again, when you when you boil it all down, the expected value is still gonna be very similar to any pregame handicapping sides. It it might be double, which you'd be like that that's a huge difference base.

Andrew Pace [00:46:20]:

Like, it might be it might be 5 to 8% ROI instead of 3 to 4. But the the hit rate is far less because we're looking at things that obviously have have much higher, higher probability of hitting.

Tom Brownlee [00:46:33]:

These same game parlays, combo bets, we call them, they're very, very popular in the UK. And as you say, they're very recreational heavy. The bookmakers try and push customers towards them. We actually collect all of them in a model, across all the bookmakers. We must collect 50, a 100000 different combo bets, across a day. And of those, perhaps, you know, a 100 might be positive expectation. But the modeling, I do enjoy it. In football parlance, they do will often do something sorry, soccer parlance.

Tom Brownlee [00:47:04]:

They'll do, I think tonight's Wolverhampton Wanderers to get 3 goals and to get 8 corners and Fulham to get 2 cards is, for example, 10 to 1. The interesting thing about this is that it's counterintuitive because if Wolverhampton get 8 corners, they're less likely to get goals because the goalkeeper is saving all of those goals. So they you know, to get those corners, they're not getting more goals than their pregame expectation. So if you can work on that and work it out, there is a lot of value to be had. Doing what you guys do, which is using, I think, more intuition and your own eyes, to me is a lot more fun because it's less set and go. It's more traditional professional bookmaking. If I but if I can give you an example of the 2015 Rugby World Cup. I don't know if you guys watch the Rugby World Cup.

Andrew Pace [00:47:52]:

No. No. But let it rip.

Tom Brownlee [00:47:54]:

South Africa played Japan. South Africa are one of the best rugby teams in the world. Japan are not. And this is meant to be a route for Japan. And I think the line was set before the game at, 200 to 1 for Japan, higher than Riggs Johnson. They didn't have a chance. The points handicap, I think, was minus 48 for, South Africa in a game where you traditionally get 40 points. So I was watching this game, and I don't do a lot of live stuff.

Tom Brownlee [00:48:27]:

I prefer doing the pregame stuff mostly because at Bookie Bashing, we don't have the technology to move the data fast enough, so we don't concentrate on live. But I'm looking at it. 10 minutes go by, and these 2 teams look equally matched. Like, Japan are smaller, and you think as time goes on over the game, South Africa will show the dominance. But they were in the scrum, and South Africa weren't winning it. Japan were up for this. They were excited. They were aggressive.

Tom Brownlee [00:48:56]:

They were the underdog coming through. And so I think, I wonder what the line is now. I look at the markets, the betting exchanges, and they're exactly the same as they were pre match. They're 200 to 1. I think how can that not have changed? Is anyone else seeing what I'm seeing? And so Yeah. Yeah. The most amount of after timing ever look. I I couldn't believe I was right over the markets, but I couldn't leave it alone.

Tom Brownlee [00:49:18]:

So another one that I minimum bet, and Japan ran out 34-32 winners in that game. There's no scenario after 10 minutes of that game. If you Monte Carlo analysis, if you ran that game 10000 times, there's no way they win less frequently than what every 200 times. It was always a bet. And all you had to do was use your eyes, trust your gut, trust your intuition, and just understand when, you know, the the model makers the the line makers are just, you know, they're fast and sleek at the start of the match.

Shane Mercer [00:49:47]:

Love that story. Pace that has to hit home.

Andrew Pace [00:49:52]:

Ya that sounds that sounds that sounds like every day of our life really.

Andrew Pace [00:49:57]:

That's good fun.

Shane Mercer [00:49:57]:

That's awesome. Tom, I don't wanna take up too much of your time, but I wanna ask you because you hit something off the top of the off the top of the show that I wanna get back to because I think it's it's kind of interesting, and I wanna hear more about it. You mentioned a group, that your group is maybe at odds with in the UK, and and it sounds like there's some like, you have a rivalry with another betting group. Is that is that right? And can you elaborate?

Tom Brownlee [00:50:21]:

What's happened in the UK for a long period of time? I talked about, the 3% of winners. 2.9% of those are arbitrage players. And, they're pretty annoying because they take away a lot of the value from the value bettors. So, I mean, I don't want to bet both sides of something to guarantee a risk free profit. I find it so dull. And, also, I don't like the restrictions that come with it. But over time, large arbitrage communities have popped up in the UK, and they were sold to non sports bettors. So there's this forum called MUMnet for stay at home moms.

Tom Brownlee [00:50:58]:

And, the arbitrage communities would go on to MUMnet and say, do you wanna make money from home? It's risk free. Come along and use our software. And if you get a bet, you can bet Henman to win and Henman to lose. And no matter what happens, you'll end up with some money. And if you get the right odds, you can do your arbitrage. So as they did this, we had to find blinds, find markets, which couldn't be hedged, which a lot of it was the same game parlays, the combo bets, things like that, or low liquidity markets, or obscure markets. So not Manchester United to win, but perhaps, Oglund to have 3 plus shots on target. It's slightly harder to edge the other side of that.

Tom Brownlee [00:51:41]:

Over time until 2022, 2023, we coexisted in the same space but tried to ignore each other. But all of the arbitrage players are now restricted and can't get any money down. And so their large communities are now pushing out value betting software, and they're doing it, if you like, slightly irresponsibly if you ask me because they're pushing out, you know, high variance, high volatile sports betting, which requires knowledge about bankroll management and, you know, winning runs and losing runs. And they're pushing it out to groups of people who have been used to a steady risk free, income. And, with that, it is just making it a little bit harder to get money down in the UK on positive expectation bets because it's it's something called the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is a concept in economics where the the sheep will happily graze on the land until the farmer's neighbors notice how healthy the sheep is, So he puts his sheep on there, and then everybody's grazing and the grass dies and the sheep die. So it's the same concept as the time we made the comment.

Shane Mercer [00:52:51]:

Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense, and that rings true in a lot of ways for for some of the conversations that that I've had in the betting community. Did do you find that that this even happens within your own group where, you know, you find something that's exploitable and everybody goes to it quickly and then it disappears?

Tom Brownlee [00:53:10]:

Yeah. Sustainable edges are tricky. They are, you you really gotta figure out what can what not grown, but what can be managed, amongst a lot of people and what can't. So for example, you might find, even something like a hole in 1 in the masters. One, if enough money goes down on yes or no on a hole in 1 in the in the masters, those lines will be cut across the board, and it's not gonna take a lot of money to shift those lines. So figuring out what's sustainable and what isn't sustainable is difficult. In the UK, in William Hill betting shops, at the beginning, I talked to you about, we were £10 a month, and some groups were making £10 a month out of us. And so that worked was in William Hill betting shops, there are these screens and there's 25 buttons underneath them, and there would be 25 bets of the day.

Tom Brownlee [00:54:02]:

And I remember looking at one of those bets thinking that's a crazy price, but it's quite complicated to work out because it was something like the New York, football soccer team to have, more than 3.5 corners in the first 15 minutes of the game. So you've gotta know quite a few things here. You've gotta know about clustering of corners. You've gotta have an expect expectancy, time distributions, Poisson distributions. Very difficult to work out in shop. Yeah. So what we did is we phoned the William Hill in England that opened the earliest. It was a county called Derbyshire, and we paid for someone to go in with coffees for the staff to keep them sweet.

Tom Brownlee [00:54:38]:

And he'd be stood outside as the door opened, and he'd go in and he'd take photographs of all 25 of them. And they'd be sent through to us, and we would have a team of people with a number of databases that could very, very quickly go through all 25 bets. And we found out that, on average, about 22 of them were negative expectation, One was positive expectation, and 1 or 2 were just huge. I mean, they were massive expectation, 200, 300%. Wow. And we and they would take sizable bets at the time on these. So if it was, 10 to 1, they'd happily take a £1,000 on it. They'd put the slip through a couple of times if you wanted them to because they were convinced these bets were bad.

Tom Brownlee [00:55:19]:

They couldn't price them up well enough over in Gibraltar headquarters. So we started smashing them along with a number of other teams, but then the worst possible thing happened. They all started winning. You see, you can place good bets, but good bets don't have to win, and bad bets don't have to lose. You know? Great positive expectation bets can lose, and no one will ever know how good they were. But, unfortunately, all the good bets started winning. Every Modi made a heap of money, and then William Hill shot them off. And that was back in about 2019.

Tom Brownlee [00:55:50]:

To this day, in 2024, you can walk into a William Hill on the high street. You see that screen. It's got 25 buttons on it, but they don't do anything anymore because we killed it. So we weren't sustainable enough.

Andrew Pace [00:56:02]:

You can, hang that in the rafters, Tom. It's a banner.

Tom Brownlee [00:56:06]:

Yeah. Well, there's there's a few people that are best pleased with me, but, you know, if we haven't done it, somebody else would have.

Shane Mercer [00:56:12]:

So That's awesome. That's you know, kudos to you, though. I mean, you did it. 100%. Yeah. That's incredible. Tom, I think, why don't we leave it there on that incredible high note? You shared some fascinating stories with us, Tom. I would love to have you back on the show because I think we could probably talk for hours on end, but no problem.

Tom Brownlee [00:56:30]:

Hey, Shane. Thanks. Really good chatting to you guys this evening. Thank you very much.

Shane Mercer [00:56:33]:

Tom, before before you go, is there anything anywhere where people can hit you up, but they wanna reach out, they wanna connect with you? What what's the best way to get a hold of you?

Tom Brownlee [00:56:41]:

Sure. I mean, we run the Bashcast podcast in the UK, so you can go and, have a listen to that. And I'll be warned, it's about 50 50 me moaning about things that, you know, I find irritating in life and sports betting. And if you're in the UK and have access to UK betting markets, you can come along and have a look at bookiebashing.net. We got a load of, trackers and tools and things to aid people on their journey to be profitable bettors. So, and finally, on X, I'm at Tom Brownlee, b r o w n l e e.

Shane Mercer [00:57:11]:

Wonderful. Awesome. Tom, thanks again for coming on the show. Really appreciated this conversation.

Tom Brownlee [00:57:16]:

No worries, guys. Thank you.

Shane Mercer [00:57:18]:

Alright. We talked a lot about European football in the last interview, but now it's time to bring it home, and it is the grid iron grind time. And we've got John Wilson, the great ghost soon, with us for it as always or mostly always. John, glad to see you. Glad to have you in this week. Let's start with college football. We've got the playoffs set. John, just give us a a college football painting, if you will.

John Wilson [00:57:47]:

Yeah. Sure. So, SMU getting in over Alabama despite losing that JB Joe game, that was great for us. We had, SMU before the season started at, 12 point o, I think, to, to make the playoff, which turned out to be a great bet because they didn't even have to win their conference, to do it. So, looking forward to seeing what they can do in the playoff and just not sad at all that, Alabama's missing out this year, after a couple really bad losses. Just, you know, maybe we all need a a little bit of a break from some of those brand names every now and then. But, yeah, the there's some really interesting first round matchups. So, I think we have, Tennessee and Ohio State, in the first round.

John Wilson [00:58:30]:

I think I've mentioned that, you know, going north for some of these southern teams is definitely a a disadvantage. Normally, the college football season from a home and away standpoint wraps up in November. So, typically, it's it's done before a lot of the really bad or really cold weather hits. But this year, you know, we're getting some home games well into the towards the end of December. So, I I don't know that it's that big of a difference going from Knoxville to Columbus, but I do think it is supposed to be pretty cold in that game. We're we're obviously, you know, 10 plus days out from those games, so it's hard to know the weather. But that's a game where I really think the matchup actually favors Tennessee. I think the best part of the Ohio State defense is their, their their secondary, their passing defense, and Tennessee just really wants to run the ball a lot.

John Wilson [00:59:12]:

Their quarterback has not played well on the road, so that definitely scares me a little bit. But I think that getting them at 10 points is maybe a little too much. So I I'll I'll probably maybe take a look at Tennessee there. The next one I actually like is Indiana Notre Dame. I'm I can't get to the number of 7a half. I actually think, home field in general is under handicapped for these games, by quite a significant amount, like, maybe 2a half to 3 points slower than it should be, in my opinion. But from a matchup standpoint, I really think Indiana can slow down Notre Dame, and I just don't think Notre Dame is very good. They haven't played a very tough schedule.

John Wilson [00:59:49]:

They've just kind of struggled against the teams that they have played that are that are pretty good except that week one win over A and M. And, you know, Indiana had that one game that didn't look very good against Ohio State, but it was pretty competitive. And outside of some special teams plays, it was a lot closer, I think, than people seem to think it was from a scoreboard perspective. So actually, I think Indiana's got a got a puncher's chance there, so I like them at the at 7a half. The other 2 games, SMU up at Penn State, I I think these t I think Penn State is a lot better than them, and I that's a game where I really think a team from Dallas is gonna struggle on what is probably some cold windy weather up there. And then the Clemson against Texas, I think these teams are just not in the same class. Like, Texas has boxed with, Georgia twice. They didn't look good the first time, but the second time, they they definitely outplayed them, the majority of the game until the backup quarterback from Georgia, kinda took over that game.

John Wilson [01:00:40]:

And Clemson got embarrassed, just flat out embarrassed by Georgia, again, at the beginning of the season, but they just I don't I just don't think that team's very good. So those 2 games, I wouldn't I wouldn't touch unless I were taking, like, an alternate spread on the favor.

Shane Mercer [01:00:53]:

Awesome. Wow. Cool. Before we flip over to the NFL side of things too, Pace, I've gotta mention for all of our listeners out there, especially those that aren't a part of the inplayLIVE community because they don't know about this, But, we had some really big futures in college football this year in the inplayLIVE community. Thanks to John, including, a a a 41 to 1 over the weekend. Thanks to the, Arizona Sun Devils, Arizona State Sun Devils as, we we like to call them the forks because of the Trident symbol. But, if you're not part of the inplayLIVE community, that's the kind of stuff you're missing out on. And, I can tell you a lot of people in the community really benefited from from some of those futures calls.

Shane Mercer [01:01:31]:

So thanks for those, John.

Andrew Pace [01:01:32]:

Well, we learned today that hedging is for gardeners.

Andrew Pace [01:01:36]:

But one of the things we love one of the things we love at inplayLIVE is is where you can make a hedge where you can win both bets. And we touched on this last week about an alternate spread, potentially coming through, on a hedged parlor instead of just buying out of it completely, the cashing out argument, all that kind of stuff. But, John, I don't think you hedged SMU. Did you?

John Wilson [01:01:57]:

I did not. No. You know, Clemson Moneyline was a potential hedge, but it's if it were if it were a straight up something like you know that this result will, you know, actually hedge it, it's one thing. But it's, you know, the when it comes down to a committee of people subjectively picking something, you know, I think you just kinda had to trust what we had where we basically had SMU plus 7a half or something, at 12 to 1. What a great bet. You know?

Andrew Pace [01:02:23]:

Yes. But separately of that, we mentioned as the game is approaching, we know the winner of the ACC is in. So there's no concern there. You know, if you have the Clemson future, you can or sorry. The SMU future, you can take Clemson Moneyline, and you can hedge your bet. Right? I didn't think and we didn't think. We knew it was possible, but that if Clemson won that SMU would still get in, but it was such a good football game that we pretty much knew there was a really good chance. So, you know, these are the types of discussions that we have where if you had SMU at 12 to 1, and then you bet Clemson to win the ACC once that final game was announced, you you got, just an unbelievable scoop.

Andrew Pace [01:02:59]:

And, yes, Yeah. We called the Arizona State Sun Devils on a livestream late night when we saw how good they looked in the 1st couple weeks. So, really just a remarkable college football season at inplayLIVE, just tons tons and tons of fun. Excited for bowl season here. Bowl season caution, say it every single year. In our primers and our podcast, don't be surprised if you're a recreational sports bettor and you go to start betting bowl season if teams aren't motivated and don't care about the game that they're playing in, especially with the extended playoff. There's more teams that had hopes for the playoffs this year than in previous years because there's more teams able to get in.

Andrew Pace [01:03:31]:

So, don't be shocked if certain superstar players aren't playing for certain teams and, if if your local team doesn't give a shit about the bowl that they're in. So, just be careful from a betting standpoint because teams' motivations oftentimes is the difference between value and lack thereof. Alright. NFL, John, any game stand out for you?

John Wilson [01:03:52]:

Yeah. The the only bet I've made so far, this week is I have already bet the Jags plus 3a half at home against the Jets. I just don't in what universe is this 3 and 9 or 3 and 12 or or 3 and 10 or whatever these this Jets team? How are they 3 and a half point favorites on the road? That team sucks. That's a hilarious I think it should be a pick. So I at 3 and a half in the NFL when you think it should be a pick is is a gold mine. So I took that. You know, I I there's other games I'm looking at, but I'm I'm just kind of waiting for more information on the line. I like the Packers minus 2a half or less in Seattle.

John Wilson [01:04:25]:

I think I can get minus 3 plus 100 right now. I'm just gonna wait. If it doesn't get to 2a half, I just won't play it. But that's that's what I like there. Lions, I like the Lions at home against the Bills. I just think the people continue to just kind of the the Lions aren't covering. So as when the Lions when the team doesn't cover as a favorite, people kinda just get done with them. There's all this news.

John Wilson [01:04:46]:

I'll constantly people talking about their injuries and all that. They still keep winning. So I actually think that number is gonna get close to a pick. I think it's down to, like, 1 and a half right now. So I'll be interested in the line's money line if it can get it at normal juice. I like the chargers minus 2a half or better at home against the Bucks, so a lot of chalk so far. I do think the Bucks and I think we're gonna talk about this later, but teaser good good teaser opportunity. But, I do like the chargers just to to win that game.

John Wilson [01:05:13]:

Kinda like the Bengals against the titans, I think they're minus 5 right now. I think it should be closer to a touchdown, and maybe that changes. We're recording this on Monday. So after the game tonight with the Bengals, if they have a really good game against the Cowboys, maybe that line actually moves up. So I might go ahead and grab that 5. I just the titans are just really bad. Like, and the Bengals are they don't have a great record, but I think they're we all agree they're probably a lot better and more talented than that Titan's team. And they, the other, game I've I've almost bet, but I think I'm just gonna wait and see if I get 16 is the Giants at home against the Ravens.

John Wilson [01:05:46]:

It's it's 15 right now. Would love 16. The the this game this game really doesn't matter that much to the Ravens. They have the Steelers at home next week. I think it's just go to New York, get a win, get out of there, and then just go ahead and start preparing for the most important game left on their schedule with a chance to come back and win that division. So, those are the games that I like the most this week. I think there's a lot of sharp lines. I don't show a ton of value on any on really any of those lines, but, I do think those are the the good numbers and the good sides.

Andrew Pace [01:06:18]:

Yeah. Awesome stuff. And, if you listen to our advice from last week about the Bucks to win the division, you can now, look into hedging if you wanted to. We, won't be hedging on our side, but, we're we're now ahead. The Bucks are, winning the division just like that. So what a swing, in the NFC South. Alright, guys. Teaser time.

Andrew Pace [01:06:37]:

Another teaser win last week. And, just with some line movement that came through, Sunday morning, we we released, a couple of ads to that as well, which all happened to came through. Took to come through and a huge shout out to the Jets for a situation where they could have just taken 4 knees and kicked a field goal and left 15 seconds for their opponent. Instead, they went out of bounds and left, Miami enough time to to almost win the game in regulation, but then tie it and and win it in overtime. Just unbelievably bad coaching and execution there. And believe it or not, it was Davante Adams that that stepped out of bounds there. So there's 8 games for teasers this week that I think fit the bill. I'm just gonna run through those games really quickly.

Andrew Pace [01:07:15]:

The Rams on the plus side, the Dolphins on the plus side. You could say the Commandos, on the minus side. That brings us to 9, either side of the Steelers Eagles game. The Bills on the plus side, the Bucks on the plus side, the Cards on the minus side, and, Seattle on the plus side, and, the Vikings on the minus side. That's actually 9 games. I'm gonna just narrow this down because there's just some things that that scare me here. And to be honest with you, even even with the 3 picks I'm about to to make for, the official one this week, there are a couple red flags where I'm just like, ah, jeez. I don't like this game, but I I gotta take the bucks plus 9.

Andrew Pace [01:07:55]:

Hopefully, that can get to even potentially a little bit higher, but, as we're recording this Bucks plus 9, Seattle plus 9, at home, I think that that Packers, Seahawks game, is almost a playoff game for both of those teams for for obvious reasons. And then the Vikings, at home, which is a part of the Monday night doubleheader. That will be down to minus a half. So I think those 3 picks will hopefully keep us rolling. Fine. Make sure you have a a good book that's paying out, plus 1.60 on those 3 pick parlays. And as always with anything that we call, or looking at pregame, you're gonna get the best odds and the lowest margins at pinnacle.com/inplaylive.

Shane Mercer [01:08:34]:

That's right. Forward slash inplaylive to sign up over at Pinnacle. And if you're already signed up, you'll get the very best odds there. I'm sure you'll be able to get the the odds that Pace just mentioned there, over over some of those other, soft books. Okay. Advent calendar. So this is something happening within the inplayLIVE community. Again, if you're not part of our community, come on in, see what it's all about.

Shane Mercer [01:08:54]:

This advent calendar is a way to get some prizes daily. Right, Pase? You've been handing out, prizes, and it all leads up to one big prize. Very quickly, if if people aren't familiar with it, what is it? How does it work?

Andrew Pace [01:09:06]:

Yeah. So we're you know, it's December. It's it's a great great time for betting. It really is. We have everything running, and then, of course, we have the holidays. It's just an awesome time. So every single day, members are given a new challenge. If they complete that challenge, they get entered into a giveaway on stream that night for, swag, jerseys, cards, whatever whatever it is that we're giving away.

Andrew Pace [01:09:25]:

But then those entries, accumulate and compound throughout the month, where we'll be giving away a grand prize to join us at BetBash, this summer, which should be a ton of fun and hopefully something that also helps people grow in their own betting journeys.

Shane Mercer [01:09:39]:

Here we go. Alright. Well, the advent calendar challenge for today is post a link of this episode on your social media. Screen grab it. Send it over to Sabrina. Maybe caption it with something that you were able to take away from the episode, something that you like. Maybe it comes from Tom, or maybe it's the teaser that Pace just mentioned. You could put that out there on socials as well.

Shane Mercer [01:09:58]:

Maybe it's your teaser record tailing, the teasers that are brought up here on the podcast. Comment something that you're taking away from the show. Post a link to the episode screen grab. Send it to Sabrina. Hey. Did I miss anything there?

Andrew Pace [01:10:12]:

No. I mean, the more the more posts you have, like, 1 per channel. So if you can post to x, you'll get an entry. Post to Instagram, you get an entry. Facebook, you get an entry, etcetera.

Shane Mercer [01:10:21]:

Beautiful. Multiple ways to to to get get your name in there for, for today's prize. Alright. Well, with that, pace, John, sports bettors around the world, sports bettors in the UK who may be tuned in for Tom Brownlee. Till next week, keep beating those books. Thanks for tuning in 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.

Shane Mercer [01:10:46]:

Have a betting story or wanna be featured on our podcast? Drop a note in the comments below. And if you wanna join inplayLIVE, use promo code BEHINDTHELINES.