Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series — Going Against The Grain
Video Transcript Below
Going Against The Grain
Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series, explains the common questions around how does sports betting work? — this section covers Going Against The Grain.
Specifically, how to find value and be profitable when it comes to strategy for sports betting.
Andrew Pace
Andrew is a Multi-Millionaire, Professional Sports Value Analyst & the Creator of inplayLIVE — an online program & community that teaches how to invest on live sports through the art of value wagering. He’s taught thousands of students to successfully beat the book and go on to reach 5, 6 and 7-figure profits.
Video Transcript
Ritzker: How can sports betting become profitable?
What better way to start then talk about where you identify value in the first place. And that is going against the grain. Every single day, we see hundreds, thousands of sporting events go out there that are handicapped by the books, handicapped by professionals.
And they use infinite algorithms to produce these, right. But what happens is that the public's money starts to come in when these markets open up to these pregame betters and start betting on these things and moving the lines.
So talk to the people about what does that mean when a line starts to move, when money starts to come in, when public bets on something, what does that do for you?
Pace: Yeah, so I think the most simple analogy to make here is using a roulette wheel. Okay.
Let's just pretend a typical roulette wheel. I think it has like 38 numbers on it. And then the single zero and the double zero there's 18 red slots. There's 18 black slots. Right? Um, if 90% of the people betting at the casino bet on black, how much red pays always stays the same.
So I always say to people, imagine if red paid more where the odds of winning are 47%, when you bet on black or red. But all of a sudden red became 51%. And you could just bet on that for the rest of your life. And, you know the odds of hitting it are now becoming more and more and more profitable as people continue to bet on black. When people bet on sports casinos and sports books hedge their risk, as you know, and when they hedge their risks, what they do is they make the line less wagered - more appealing to bet on.
So, like a very typical spread, um, let's say the chiefs are playing the Ravens. They played each other on Monday night football two days ago and the line was three and a half. Well, let's say the public thought that the line should have been four, five, seven, whatever, and money just pours in, or maybe they're just fans and they have no clue, but more people that on the Ravens than they bet on the Chiefs, you will see that line opening line of three and a half turn into four, four and a half, five, five and a half and so on and so forth.
Where from a statistical standpoint. Even with the vig, which is the cut that the house takes on a sports bet. Even with the VIG, you can actually start to, or potentially see value. And one of the things online, when you look up all of these “how to make a living on sports betting”, “How can you profit from sports, betting, all these other things” - they flippantly skip over the detail of actually how to find value. They skip over that and they basically put it in your hands to figure out, well, how the hell do you do it? And like, there's so many different ways that you could theoretically find value or justify value. But one of the most simple ways is the public driving the line.
Too far in one direction, all other things constant, right? if a significant player gets injured in the line moves, that doesn't necessarily mean there's value. If the weather was initially for sun and it turns to snow and the total drops from 55 and a half in an NFL game, down to 47 and a half that's that adjustment is for a reason.
So all other things, constant, just public money, moving the line. Is where theoretically there could be pre-game value, but we're talking about value that is like razor thin, like the best of the best of the best people that do this - they get a three percentage, but 2% is very, very typical. So you're winning typically at a rate of 54 or 55% on bets that pay a 1.9 or minus one 10 in American odds.
And I mean, you got to have a huge bankroll to do that. Number one, but number two, I also just find it kind of boring. Yeah, but that's a grind, you know?
Ritzker
Yeah, I think that's something that you emphasize in your materials is that there's so many opportunities to find value within a sports game.
But coming back to that public money, that's where you can, those opportunities are created a little bit more, right?
So all the public money driving things one way creates a window for you within that game going the other way.
And so a big part of what inplayLIVE is about is about going against the grain and taking into consideration all those factors and just betting smarter.