Photo: USA Today Sports

Gambling on the NFL is big business, especially after a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down a federal ban on sports betting. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 46.6 million people will place a bet on the NFL this year, representing nearly one out of every five Americans of legal gambling age. As a result, there's been an explosion in sports betting content, most of which promises to make you a more profitable bettor. Given that backdrop, it can be hard to know who to trust.

Fortunately, you can trust me when I promise that I'm not going to make you a more profitable sports bettor. And neither will any of those other columns. It's essentially impossible for any written column to do so, for a number of reasons I detailed here. (I'm not saying it's impossible to be profitable betting on the NFL, just that it's impossible to get there thanks to a weekly picks column.)

This column's animating philosophy is not to make betting more profitable but to make betting more entertaining. And maybe along the way, we can make it a bit less unprofitable in the process, discussing how to find bets where the house's edge is smaller, how to manage your bankroll, and how to dramatically increase your return on investment in any family or office pick pools (because Dave in HR and Sarah in accounting are much softer marks than Caesar's and MGM).

If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join me as we discuss the weekly Odds and Ends.

Gambling, in One Tweet

Sports betting became legal in Kansas on September 2nd, 2022. I originally set a goal to make around $7,500 in the first month of the season. I only need to make $22,000 more to reach that goal. This is my journey.

— Alex (@SoonerbeastGG) September 27, 2022

Pulling Back the Curtain on The System

A lot of the stuff I do in this column-- like picking both sides of a single game or retiring the name of my "lock of the week" when it's not performing well-- is tongue-in-cheek. But the goal is to humorously call out genuine abuses in the "gambling advice" space. So-called touts really will change the names of their picks to inflate their record (when they don't just lie about their record outright). And in one of the best-known scams in the industry, they really will pick both sides of the same game. Why would they do that? Let me introduce you to "The System".

In the least sophisticated form, a potential scammer gets a large pool of potentially interested gamblers and gives them a "free pick". For half of the pool, the scammer will tell them to pick one side. For the other half, the scammer will tell them to pick the other. This way, it's guaranteed that he gave the correct pick to half of the pool (ignoring ties and pushes). The half that gets the wrong pick shrugs their shoulders and moves on; after all, what would you expect out of a free pick?

The scammer then takes the half of the pool that received the correct pick and gives them a new "bet of the week". Again, he or she will split the pool, giving half of it one side and the other half the other side. Again, half of the pool gets an incorrect pick and moves on with their lives, while the other half has now gotten two correct picks in a row.

Then the scammer repeats it and repeats it. Every week the size of the pool gets cut in half, but the remaining gamblers have gotten more and more correct picks in a row. Eventually, the scammer says "I've now given you six consecutive picks and every one of them has been correct; I have three "locks of the week" available and I'll sell them to you for the low price of (insert absurd price here)". The recipients of six consecutive correct picks are unaware of the thousands and thousands of incorrect picks the scammer has given along the way, so many of them will pay only to find out that the scammer has no real edge after all.

There are lots of variations on this scam, but they all revolve around finding a group of people who see all of your correct picks and none of your incorrect ones. In one of my favorite examples, a user on Twitter correctly predicted very specific details of a world cup match the day before to "prove" that the game was fixed. But it turned out the user had simply made thousands and thousands of predictions the day before, watched the match, and then deleted all the ones that were wrong.

At the end of the day, it's much harder to beat the house than it is to trick people into thinking you can beat the house. All I'm saying is it's a dangerous world out there and you should be careful who you trust.

Except, of course, for me, who you should trust completely.

Lines I'm Seeing