A good sports betting column should be backed by a profitable gambler with a proven track record. It should offer picks generated by a sophisticated and conceptually sound model. Most importantly, it should treat the subject with the seriousness it warrants.
This is not that column.
Instead, this will be an off-beat look at the sports betting industry-- why Vegas keeps winning, why gambling advice is almost certainly not worth the money, and the structural reasons why even if a bettor were profitable, anything they wrote would be unlikely to make their readers net profitable, too.
While we're at it, we'll discuss ways to minimize Vegas' edge and make recreational betting more fun, explain how to gain an advantage in your office pick pools, preview games through an offbeat lens (with picks guaranteed to be no worse than chance), and touch on various other Odds and Ends along the way.
A Better Way To Beat The House
I hope after a month together (or for long-time readers, as many as three years) my position on sports betting is crystal clear—you're not going to make a profit in the long run, but as long as you bet responsibly, your losses should be fairly predictable, and the entertainment value can very easily be worth the cost.
But it's important not to extrapolate that opinion beyond the confines of this column. I'm writing about betting game outcomes—the spread, the total, the money line, futures (we'll get to these later this season), etc. These are the sharpest and most heavily wagered bets every week. This opinion should be viewed in that context.
While you're not going to be better than Vegas at predicting games, there are other areas where it's more plausible that a bettor would have a genuine edge. One such area is player props (or bets about individual players' production for the week). Our Sam Wagman writes a weekly feature called Prop Talk on the subject; while he's off to a slow start this year (just 9-14 through five weeks), he finished last year 55-25 and has a 62% lifetime success rate since he took over the feature.
Now, I want to add a few words of caution. Writing about props suffers from the same problem as writing about spreads-- by the time the piece is published (to say nothing about the time it's read), the lines are already stale. Sam is undoubtedly seeing lines that are no longer available to his readers.
Also, even in a system dominated completely by chance, you should expect to see runs of good luck, so the existence of such a run is not sufficient to prove the system isn't dominated completely by chance. It's easy to mistake a lucky streak for an edge. This column has also seen runs with a success rate that high (though not over as large of a sample), and as I keep saying, I guarantee I have no edge at all.
Past results, as the saying goes, are no guarantee of future performance. Anyone who promises you profitability is a charlatan who does not take seriously their obligation to you. I would strongly recommend approaching player props with the same mindset I suggest for lines: assume you're going to lose money and treat it as the cost of entertainment. Never wager more than you can afford just because you think it's a "sure thing". There are no sure things.
But there are good reasons to believe that a strong record of betting props represents a genuine edge. Anecdotally, I know a lot more people who have made a profit betting props than betting lines. (I also know a lot more people who have lost money betting props than who have made money.)
More tellingly, I know a few people who were so successful with props that Vegas stopped taking their bets entirely. (Can Vegas do that? It can and it will; there's no law requiring it to accept your bet. If it becomes convinced you have an edge, it'll simply take its ball and go home. Yet another reason why you're not beating the house.)
Here's the biggest tell that Vegas itself considers its player props beatable: there are maximum limits.
There's a Houston businessman named Jim McIngvale (better known as "Mattress Mack") who is so famous for the size of his bets that Wikipedia devoted a section of his page to them. He bet $4.5 million on the Bengals to beat the Rams in Super Bowl LVI (and lost). He bet $6.2 million on Alabama to win the 2022 National Championship (and lost). He bet $3 million on TCU to win the 2023 National Championship (and lost).
(Don't feel too bad for him. He reportedly won $75 million across his various bets when the hometown Astros won the World Series in 2022, which is the highest verified payout in history. He reportedly uses futures bets like these as a hedge against promotions he runs in his furniture business promising to reimburse customer purchases if the Astros win.)
I don't know if McIngvale is up or down for his career as a sports bettor. (I'm not sure if even he knows.) But it's notable that he's able to offer a 7- or 8-figure wager, and Vegas is confident enough in its line that it's happy to accept. Vegas clearly believes that Mattress Mack doesn't have an edge.
McIngvale would never be able to wager $6.8 million on Amon-Ra St. Brown's receiving yardage prop—no sportsbook in the universe would take that bet. The fact that they're capping their downside risk so much lower is the clearest giveaway that they lack the same confidence that they're operating at an advantage against all comers.
Just Because Vegas is Wary Doesn't Mean It's Weak
Again, none of this is to say that you will necessarily be any more profitable betting props than you are betting sides. Most gamblers are not. But in general, it's more plausible that someone has a genuine edge here than elsewhere.
If player props are so beatable, why does Vegas offer them at all? For some reason, Vegas is unwilling to open its books to me, so I don't know if props are profitable or unprofitable on the net. Just because a small percentage of bettors can beat the system (for a while, before eventually getting blacklisted, with the maximum possible damage capped fairly low) doesn't mean that the entire system is unprofitable; the number of people who believe they have an edge is always significantly larger than the number of people who genuinely do.
Even if Vegas takes a small loss on player props, they still function as a useful loss leader, drawing new gamblers into a sportsbook's betting ecosystem so the book can steer them in more profitable directions. The clearest example of this came in Week 1 of 2023 when Underdog Sportsbook offered a promotion where new customers could bet on Aaron Rodgers to finish over or under 0.5 passing yards. Rodgers ruptured his Achilles before completing a pass, but Underdog paid out the bet, anyway, because the entire thing was always just a marketing stunt.
Customer acquisition is an expensive game; Vegas likely writes off losses as advertising expenses in much the same way that DFS companies regularly offered contests with large overlays (i.e., "guaranteed losses") early on while trying to grow their business. Sportsbooks were happy to give you a little money today if it meant they could take a lot of money from you tomorrow.
Taking this all into account, should you bet props instead of lines? If you think it would be fun and you never wager more than you can afford to lose, then absolutely!
If it doesn't sound like fun, though, I wouldn't bother. The second you start betting for profit rather than for fun, it becomes a job, and I suspect if you calculated out return vs. the time spent, you'd find even most bettors with a genuine edge were making sub-minimum wage on it.
Personally, I already have one job; I'm not looking for another.