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.
Some Thoughts on Betting Systems
A few weeks ago, I pulled the curtain back on THE System, one of the oldest scams betting touts use to fool people into thinking they have an edge. But we shouldn't let an unfortunate name taint our impression of all betting systems without doing our due diligence first. After all, if you lurk around the seedier corners of the gambling world, you'll come across plenty of "fool-proof systems" for beating the house. Maybe one of these has some merit?
Let's consider the most famous system of all: the Martingale.
The Martingale is simple: find a game with a roughly 50/50 chance of success, place a bet, and then double that bet every time you lose. For instance, bet a dollar that a coin flip will come up heads. If it comes up heads, bank that dollar and start over. If it comes up tails, increase your bet to $2 and repeat. If it comes up tails a second time, bet $4 and repeat.
(The Martingale can easily be applied to games that don't feature 50/50 odds; all you have to do is make sure that each bet is sized to return some small profit after covering all previous losses. For the sake of illustrating the math involved, we'll stick with the coin flip game going forward.)
The possible outcome tree of a Martingale system is as follows: 50% of the time, you'll get heads on your first flip and win a dollar. 25% of the time, you'll get tails on your first flip (-$1) and heads on your second flip (+$2) and win a dollar. 12.5% of the time, you'll get tails (-$1), then tails again (-$2), and then heads on your third flip (+$4) and win a dollar. And so on.
Given that as the number of flips trends towards infinity, the probability of eventually flipping heads becomes 100%, the Martingale is theoretically a "fool-proof" system to win a dollar from a coin-flip game.
Allow me to repeat with a different emphasis: the Martingale is theoretically a fool-proof system to win a dollar from a coin-flip game. So long as you have infinite time to make infinite flips and infinite money to fund them.
Coming Back to Reality
In practice, occasionally, you'll get 19 tails in a row. It's extraordinarily rare, sure, but it happens. And then, on the next coin flip, you'll be on the hook to bet more than a half-million dollars (after having already lost more than a half-million dollars). And the upside, if you succeed, is you get to walk away from the whole affair with a single dollar in profit. (The downside, if you fail, of course, is you've now lost a million dollars and are on the hook for betting a million more.)
Under real-world constraints, the Martingale has an extraordinarily high chance of winning you a dollar and an extraordinarily small chance of subjecting you to complete and total financial ruin. If that opportunity was presented as a single bet, few people would take it—but break it up over a series of bets and suddenly people love it. At least until they find themselves wagering $16,384 to win a dollar.
(You could, of course, cap your maximum bet to guard against financial ruin, but the lower the cap, the more likely you are to hit it before you flip heads. Your downside risk is lower, but your chances of losing money are higher. Still, this is a very wise decision if you ever decide to try the Martingale, which you absolutely should not do. And remember, too, that Vegas can likewise cap its bets. Good luck finding a casino willing to wager billions on a coin flip, even if they think the odds are tilted slightly in their favor.)
Some bonus nerdiness before we move on: the Martingale attempts to return a profit in situations where you don't have an edge simply through good bankroll management. Even if we set aside the real-world constraints entirely, how can any bankroll management guarantee a profit in situations where we don't have an edge?
It can't! The Martingale guarantees you will make a $1 return if given infinite flips, but any number divided by infinity becomes zero—or at least can be treated as such for our purposes—so the expected value of each individual flip remains zero. It only looks like a guaranteed profit because our intuitions in situations involving infinity are fairly terrible.
The Martingale is Fairly Representative
All betting systems are like this. They ignore real-world constraints, or they fail to account for the disproportionate downside risks compared to the relatively meager upside, or they forget about that whole "dividing by infinity" thing. This is the gambler's dilemma—there is no betting system that will make negative expected value bets profitable. (The reverse is not also true; there are lots of betting systems that will make positive expected value bets unprofitable. Next week, I'll teach you how to lose money making nothing but +EV bets.)
If there were a fool-proof way to "get" Vegas, Vegas would have gotten got by now, and yet when last I checked, they were still building more casinos. The only way I know of to turn a guaranteed profit from a betting system is to convince some poor suckers to pay you to teach them your betting system.
You're almost certainly not going to make money from betting, at least not in the long run. (Though you'll have plenty of streaks in the short run that might give you that illusion. Such as the streak we're currently on!)