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 offbeat 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.
How To Make a Risk-Free Profit (Provided You Have Billions In Liquidity)
An observation: if a bookmaker sets a line such that 50% of the dollars are bet on one side and 50% are bet on the other, and all action is taken at -110 odds, the bookmaker is fully indifferent to who wins or who loses; the house is guaranteed a 4.5% profit either way.
Many believe that this is how Vegas operates, essentially matching bettors with each other and creaming off a 4.5% vigorish for the service. The line, therefore, is not an estimate of relative team strengths, but rather a balancing mechanism, carefully calibrated to ensure half the money is on each side of the action.
Based on this model, it's a small leap to see that one side of the action must be more appealing to the successful bettors (the "smart money"), and by extension, the other must be bait for the unsuccessful ones (the "dumb money"). Many touts will offer to sell you tips about which side of a given game the majority of the sharp money is taking.
This fundamentally misunderstands where the majority of the "sharp money" is at any given moment. In a random Week 11 matchup between the Browns and the Raiders, the vast majority of the smart money isn't on the Browns, and it isn't on the Raiders: it's on the sidelines. And that's where it's going to stay... unless Vegas screws up by setting a bad line.
Weekly lines, you see, must genuinely be Vegas' best estimate of relative team strength. If they're not, highly sophisticated bettors with massive bankrolls will swoop in and punish them. This often results in unequal action during the season, with most of the money coming in on one side or the other.
From the perspective of the books, that's fine; the profit is no longer risk-free (if the heavily bet side wins, Vegas will lose money on that game), but it does open the door to greater-than-4.5% returns (if the lightly bet side wins, Vegas will make a killing). As long as the lines are good, unequal action can actually result in more profit in the long run.
The fact that Vegas is setting lines to estimate team strength rather than to equalize action is true of every single game of the season except for one. Because there's one game every year where the majority of the money is somewhere other than "sitting on the sidelines". That game, as you might have guessed, is the Super Bowl.
Industry estimates suggest as much as $1.76 billion will be wagered on the Super Bowl this year; not enough to bankrupt Vegas, but enough to put a serious hurt on it if things go poorly. The quintessential example from history is Super Bowl XIII, also known in Vegas as "Black Sunday". The Steelers opened as 2-point favorites over the Cowboys, but all the early money came in on Pittsburgh. In response, Vegas pushed the line as high as -5, at which point a late surge of money came in on the Cowboys. The final line settled at Pittsburgh -4.
The Steelers won the game by 4 points exactly, which meant all the early bets on Pittsburgh -2 won... and all the late bets on Dallas +5 won... and all of the last-minute bets on Pittsburgh -4 or Dallas +4 pushed and were refunded. (Situations where line movement leads to Vegas losing both sides of a bet like this are referred to as "getting middled".)
Black Sunday's impact through the industry is still felt today; it's a big reason why prop bets are so popular during the Super Bowl (Vegas started pushing them hard in the aftermath as a way to mitigate risk). It was also a lesson to Vegas to focus on equalizing the action on the biggest game of the year.
Because the Super Bowl line works differently, it ironically means that this is the one time all year that the old canard that there's a "sharp" side and a "square" side might genuinely be true (if the line that equalizes action deviates from the line that represents true team strength). So, as a tout, perhaps I should tell you which side of the Super Bowl the square money will be on this year?
Except I don't really know; I continue to offer no edge whatsoever. All I can tell you is I like the Seahawks -4.5, and I'm as square as they come. Make of that what you will.
