Quote:
Originally Posted by mrducks
Further research shows that it is $300 for 2017 but if you get more than one entry, they offer a discount. They had over 750 customers last year so at $300 a pop, they brought in over $225K in gross profit. It's just a 2 man operation and their overhead seems to be pretty minimal. Their biggest expense is just time because they need to manage 750 accounts each week.
The receiving picks and confirming picks seems to be pretty quick, but I'm wondering how submitting picks works and how much time that takes. They also need to double check tickets before leaving the sports book window because they would be responsible for Westgate employees making mistakes.
Obviously they have awesome reviews posted on their site but I'm wondering how many mistakes (wrong picks) they made over the years. It's bound to happen with them making 5 picks for 750 customers 17 times in a year. Just a 1% margin error means they made over 600 wrong picks. So 60 wrong picks would only be 1/10th of a percent which seems extremely likely with so many transactions happening. I guess that is unavoidable though and just bad luck.
There are multiple companies involved in this. The biggest thing to do is to find one that doesn't enter the contest for itself. If you're in the hunt near the end, you really don't want your competitor having access to your picks.
I'd be most worried about the potential of a proxy selling my picks to one of the bigger players toward the end of it. With the dollar amounts involved in winning, knowing what the 2nd place team picked would be quite valuable if you were the first place team. Especially in those cases where there is a margin between the top players and the rest of the field.
I'm sure there are laws/rules against that, but it seems like it would be almost impossible to police.