One of the slowest times of the year for fulltime sports bettors is July/August. It’s the only time of the year when no two major sports aren’t going at the same time. Not complaining but to be honest with you but I would rather have things busy and can’t wait for things to pick back up soon with football coming back into play later this month.

Typically I like to average somewhere around 300 plays a month throughout most of the year but this time of the year that amount is cut in half with there being only one sport in play. Less plays means less money bet which also means less money made. In the future when money isn’t as important to me than maybe I will enjoy this time of the year but until then I have to “earn” and in order to do that I need games and lots of them.

August is the calm before the storm with the pace picking up all over the place in the next few months and coming to a peak around December/January with a full slate of college hoops games going almost daily combined with the NBA action and hockey also if I decide to finally jump into that. So I will spend these next few days enjoying the last little bit of slow time before the mad rush begins. I can’t wait!!!

Took a little mini break over the All-Star break and am now back into the thick of things again. To be real honest with you I don’t enjoy the time off. I know pretty that is pretty sad but I find the down time rather boring actually and would rather there be baseball games played. I guess 362 days out 365 isn’t enough. Hey what can I say, I love the daily action of this.

I actually did spend some of the break working on one of my favorite type bets of the year, the adjusted over/under MLB win totals. I have found myself doing very well against these over the last few seasons. A lot of my success comes from following baseball so closely prior to these plays being posted but even more of my success is because of all of the work I put into beating these numbers.

I spent a few hours on the night of the All-Star game, not watching the meaningless game but instead looking at strengths of schedule for the second half of the year for every team in baseball. I ended up making 14 bets, so about half the league. I would be very upset if I were to lose money overall on these plays and in fact I am really hoping to carry about a 10% ROI on these over the long haul on these plays. The reason I feel these plays are so beatable is I just don’t think the sports books put a lot of time into making these numbers. In fact I was quite shocked at a few of these posted totals but you never know, lots can go wrong also so we shall see how it goes.

As for getting back to work on the day to day grind of betting baseball, that has gone great so far since the return. Not so much from a motivated standpoint as the time off created some bad habits for me as I started doing a lot of my work the early morning of the games instead of the night before (which I feel is crucial for one to do this if they want to take full advantage of winning at this very difficult game). Not sure why but just couldn’t get into it for the first week back, thankfully it had no effect on my results though. In fact until yesterday I was going through my best stretch of the MLB season so far. It’s a small sample size but do feel I have added a new twist to handicapping pitchers, placing a greater emphasis on their current form and because of that things have really started too fall into place of late for me. Plus I have done real well with what I call judgement calls, games where I could make a play or pass a play all because of a few pennies here or there.

These judgement calls usually make or break a season for most sportsbettors. I haven’t done as well as I would have liked to do on these plays this year until recently. Trying to put a lot more “outside the box” thinking into these close call games. So far it seems to be working. A lot of these plays are plays I decided not to play and they have been losing (which is actually a good thing for me). These plays can be every bit as important to my bottom line than the plays I do make.

As for today, I have a handful of plays going on what amounts to a short card for MLB. Funny thing is my volume is way up also since coming back from the break. not sure why this is because before the break I was really struggling to find anything, in fact the last day of the first half of the year I played just one game for that day. Now it seems a six play day isn’t out of the question at all some days. I made a play on the Mets, Brewers, Rangers and Braves with a decision to come later on taking the Rays and Twins but in order to do so I would have to play against C.C Sabathia and Justin Verlander, which isn’t an easy and a lot of times a smart thing to do but hey value is value and that is what makes a bet a bet for me. So even on a shorter card in MLB today, it looks like again I will have between 4-6 plays in the action.

Information…. that one word is the key word when it comes to beating the very difficult game of sports betting. When I first moved to LV to bet on sports my plan was to drive around from sportsbook to sportsbook and pick off all of the “off numbers”, numbers that were slightly off of the consensus line. This plan lasted a little more than a week when I realized that this wasn’t something I wanted to do every day as a job. I had bet this exact same way quite successfully back in Michigan for a few years but did so while betting over the Internet. That was sitting comfortably at home and just clicking buttons all day. This here would be something totally different, it would be dealing with big city traffic, finally finding a parking spot, walking through the casinos and all of the huge crowds and then hoping that when I do finally get to my destination the number I was looking for was still there to bet. Not too mention add in the LV heat, UGH!!! This was work and I hated every bit of it and so I thwarted the plan just eight days into it. But now I had one major problem, I had just moved out to LV to do this for a living and had no idea how I was going to do things now.

I sat home the next week trying to think of the best way to go about all of this. I had some ideas but I wasn’t very confident that the path I did choose would even work. I was like every other losing sports bettor out there up until 2006 when a friend I had met at the sportsbetting forums I frequented told me how he was betting sports daily and how he had been winning at sports betting for over seven years. He filled me in on all of his secrets and right away I started to win. Along the way I got pretty good at what he taught me and that others were calling “the Pinny lean”. Basically what I did was use the line at the top sportsbook in the world, Pinnaclesports.com as my answer key in the question of “if this bet was a good bet or not?” I compapred the lines at posted at Pinnacle to the number that was in front of me that I could bet and if there was a large enough discrepancy between the two lines then I made the bet at the other sportsbooks. I didn’t really care about the name of the teams, the sport played, the type of bet, none of it mattered and it worked, I won!!! Believe it or not it was pretty much that simple. My whole goal was to lock in a better price/bet by a certain amount than the closing line at Pinnacle and I was on my way.  Sure it was work and took a lot of time everyday but all and all I was winning at a nice 2-3% ROI and for the first time in my life the book(ies) were paying me and not the other way around. The winning continued pretty steadily for a few years using this approach, enough so that I thought about all the endless possibilities I could have with all of the LEGALIZED sportsbooks in LV and Nevada. So in the summer of 2008 I quit my job in Michigan and away we went went… 

So now here I was in LV with no plan, no job and thinking to myself how I can I win at this?I was very scared to go back to “handicapping” because like every other wanna sportsbettor I had lost doing things that way in the past. Over the years I had developed relationships with a few winning sports bettors at some of the sportsbetting forums. Being someone who loved to ask questions, I decided I would ask some of the most successful bettors I knew what the key to winning at sportsbetting was. A few answered me, most didn’t but one answer was simple and to the point. This guy said “information” was the key to winning at this. At first I thought what does he mean? Like if the point guard for San Diego State has food poisoning? I mean come on how in the world could I know this this kind of stuff? It seemed like an answer from a cheesy gambling movie where the big gambler gets the phone call that the star player was out all night partying and is hungover for tonight’s game. There was no way I could find that kind of information everyday to make enough bets/money to do this for a living.

After a few e-mails back and forth and a lot more thinking it started to become more clear what he meant by information. What he meant was finding out stuff that is probably not factored into the line. I now had a ton of free time everyday because I would not be spending most of it driving around town looking for off numbers that beat the closing line, instead I could spend all of this free time focusing on reading, watching and finding information that the computer geeks and the sportsbooks weren’t factoring into their line. Basically become a sports fanatic. Know anything and everything I could about a particular sport and most importantly try and know about things first so that I can stay ahead of the betting market. It’s knowing when a team had a closed door team meeting after a loss the night before, it’s seeing a pitcher come back from injury and now he’s throwing way better than he has all year, it’s finding key stats like a pitchers velocity having dropped almost 2mph this season from last or knowing that a team will be without three of their top five hitters in their lineup in tonight’s game. These are just some examples of the information that I used last night in the games I bet and that stuff is out there if you work everyday to find it and you are following a sport closely. When a betting line is made the books usually just look at the seasonal numbers and average them out, then they adjust for recent form and go from there. It’s nothing to complex on there part and they it don’t have to be either as they are already playing with a 5% edge.  That isn’t the case on the sportsbettors end of things, you better do something to end up with a better number than what the market number closes at.

There are many ways to go about winning at betting on sports, like trying to come up with a computer math model that recognizes betting value but let’s face it I am not going to “outmath” the computer whiz kids that are out there today. The “information” method is the method that what works best for me and most importantly I actually enjoy it, which I think is extremely important also. With that said I do still make a number on every game, every day and I find a lot of my plays doing things this way but I also factor other things into my numbers, things that I feel the books for whatever reason haven’t factored into their lines. It can be a lot of work but it’s also why when others ask me aren’t you afraid you will one day lose your edge at this or that if I think the sports betting market will be too tough to beat, etc… My answer to them is that this should never happen, not as long a I/you are working harder at finding the winning information that is out there. That is what it takes to win at this, a 110% daily commitment  to being a winning sportsbettor. 
 
How exactly does all of this work on a daily basis? I will give some examples of my typical day and the winning information that I look for in my next blog.

Summer in Las Vegas means only one thing….HOT!!! This summer hasn’t been as bad as the others but it’s but pretty rough the past few weeks with some scorching 100+ degree days. It gets almost unbearable but still not nearly as bad as being snowed in. For this former Michigander if I had to pick my poison I would go with the heat over the snow just about any day. Plus in Vegas it doesn’t get really uncomfortable until we climb past the century mark as days in the 90′s are surprisingly quite pleasant. I think they call it dry heat out here, LOL!!
 
As for my summer from a betting standpoint it means pretty much only one thing and that is baseball, all day and everyday. This is really the only time of the year I focus entirely on just one sport. I did bet some WNBA last summer but decided to only mess with baseball this year.

Some may think boring when it comes to baseball but not me as baseball ranks right up there as my favorite sport as a fan and as a bettor. When I first moved out to LV in 2008 baseball was the one sport that I worried about betting as I hadn’t had really any success betting it before moving out here. After lots of tweaking, I finally felt I got a good grasp of it about two years ago and now baseball has become a sport I love to bet and probably the one I do the best at because it has the most games/bets.

As for this baseball season it been like all the other one’s, a real roller coaster ride. Baseball is the sport that has the toughest bad beats too swallow, IMO. I am not sure why that is, maybe because there isn’t much scoring but losing a game late in baseball is the most painful of any of the other sports. Also baseball seems to be the streakiest of all the sports that I bet. I have gone on some incredible streaks betting baseball, a lot more so than any of the other sports I have bet.

In the past I always laughed at others who spoke about how tough betting inter-league play was as. My thoughts were always ”baseball is baseball no matter who is playing who.” This year though I didn’t fare well during inter-league action. The funny thing is I was crushing the line moves almost daily during this time and more so than during any other time of the baseball season. In fact towards the end of inter-league action I decided to just take some profits on a lot of the games and scalp out of the bet as I was getting tired watching these games that I bet at -115 go up to -130 and lose. I figured I may as well make something for doing my job well. Not sure what happend over the past few weeks but it was a rough little stretch that I can honestly say that I am happy to see over. Since the league’s went back to playing each other on Monday I have had a couple of solid days of winning and my confidence has gone right back up with it.

If someone asked me for advice on how to beat baseball that would be simple I would say just play small underdogs, teams priced in the +100 to +125 range. No matter how hard I try too beat teams in other price ranges, these underdogs who are getting plus juice up to about +125 have been huge moneymakers for me in each of the past three seasons. I love nothing more than a short priced -115 favorite or so who I have priced at -135 in my numbers I made but to be honest with you I have spun my wheels on these type of plays in the past. It’s the underdogs where I see most of my positive results betting baseball. People have a hard time betting underdogs as generally speaking these teams don’t look like the better of the two teams in the game. I try to look for an underdog that I think can win their game. Maybe it’s not quite that simple as I actually make a number on every game and I play games more than 12 cents or so off the line I made.

This has also been a tougher year in baseball without the sportsbook Matchbook who served up 1-3 cent lines pretty much on all of the games. Losing them right before the baseball season has made things more difficult. You wouldn’t think it would make much of a difference being a moneyline sport but like I have stated here in the past if you added a few more cents to all of my losers and took off a few cents off for each of my winners, my baseball season goes from a winning one to a losing one. That isn’t just me either, that goes for just about everyone I would think. The thing is most bettors think baseball is the one sport where line shopping isn’t as important but I completely disagree. Sure it’s hard to see it for each game but over hundreds of games it does add up. I heard a rumor recently that there is another betting exchange in the works right now and if that is true than better days will be ahead for all of us baseball bettors.

Overall though I love betting baseball. Some complain the season is so to long, etc… I think that is the real beauty behind baseball, as it truly uncovers who the best teams are. Being proactive and seeing things develop before others is where you can really make money in a slow moving sport like baseball. Nothing better than seeing a team or pitcher improving before the other bettors see it or vice versa, seeing them regressing also. Plus being a huge numbers guy like myself, baseball is a stat freaks dream sport. I love to research numbers and dive into all the statistics and information that there is with each macth-up. The bottom line is when it’s all said and done you have to be able to some how, some way be able to put a price on each game and recognize value when it’s there and that is probably the hardest thing for most baseball bettors to do. Things don’t fit nice and pretty like in most other sports where you say “the Lakers are five points better than the Jazz”. Instead it’s “the Tigers are a good bet at +120 but they are not at +115″. That can be a tough thing to do well and I think only someone with a lot of experience doing this can do successfully. 

The bottom line is baseball is a different cat compared to other sports because it’s a moneyline sport. It can be harder to stay disciplined but believe me that type of discipline is the big key with betting baseball. Make a number and stick with it no matter what, betting only the plays that show value when compared to your line.

Hello all!!!

It’s been a really busy past year or so since I lasted posted here on the blog. In that time I have had a lot of people ask me about what I am was up to over these past ten months and I want to apologize for not getting back to all of you as I wasn’t quite sure what my next move would be at that time. I will be writing again here every day or every other day or so on how things are going for me out here in LV in my quest to bet sports for a living.

A lot has happened in my third fully year since being out here and I will slowly get into all of that over the coming days and weeks. I want to make sure that I enjoy writing again so I will do my best to keep things a little shorter than I did in the past with these blogs. I also feel that I have a lot more to share these days than I did in the past as my sports betting and the way I go about things has changed completely since when I first arrived here. Nowadays I do all of my own work, betting only the things that I like and at the best number. I follow sports and the sports betting market very closely and work hard everyday to be on top of it all. In the past I combined my plays with picking off slow moving lines and with following other players that I felt were playing with an edge. Through lots of trial and error I have settled on doing my own work daily and coming up with my own plays.

This change is philosophy has obviously effected the volume of plays I make each day as I have gone from averaging around 20 plays or so a day, to about half of that number a year ago, to now just five or so plays a day. That looks to be a drastic change but it happened slowly over a long period of time. My past records showed that making my own numbers and focusing on only the plays that I liked gave me my best results.

That is all for today (I told you that I would do a better job keeping this shorter). I am really happy to be back here blogging again as I have a TON of things I look forward to sharing here in the near future. For today I just wanted to swing by and say hello and open this place back up. Feel free to leave any questions or comments if you would like. I would also appreciate it if the word got out there to others that I am back, as I had quite a few people ask me in the past if and when I was going to be blogging again.