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Originally Posted by Riverman
Please describe your conversion from square to sharp.
before i began betting sports, i played poker for several years and crunched baseball stats for fun, so i didn't start out as a square in the traditional sense.
my timeframe basically went like this:
april 2005 (one month before graduating college): deposit $1000 at pinnacle, ask bugstud what "+110/-118" means, conclude i'm ready to bet for profit. i bet 1k on the red sox at 3-1 to win the division because it's a good bet, and the $100 bonus on illinois to beat UNC because i went to college at illinois. okay, that one was probably as square as it gets.
june 2005: bored with poker and not getting any job offers with my math degree, i deposit some more money into pinny and begin betting $200 a pop on 5-inning lines based solely on the pitching matchups. i attempted to identify which pitchers were under- or overrated based on their current ERA and peripherals. my system was to wait for two such pitchers to face each other, then:
underrated vs. overrated: bet the underrated pitcher
underrated vs. underrated: bet the under
overrated vs. overrated: bet the over
i doubt this was very +EV if at all. either way, i wasn't getting rich overnight, so i stopped after a few weeks.
september 2005: i begin betting sports for arbitrage and bonus purposes, which was surprisingly profitable in the neteller era. while i'm shopping for odds, i notice that the indians are hugely underpriced to win the AL wild card, as they were very unlikely to accidentally win the division in the process--as opposed to the yankees and red sox.
watching the indians blow that in the last week made for a fun time in aruba at the UB tourney.
march 2006: world baseball classic. this was the turning point for me. every intelligent statistical analysis said there was big value in the dogs, so i bet a bunch of futures (cashing japan 30-1 to win, plus mexico +1200 to win pool B and korea +550 to win pool A) and most of the games (fading the US = free money).
by the final game, i was set to profit 25k from the classic if cuba won, 40k if japan won. (before the tournament began, my bankroll was in the 80k range.) i decided that the moneyline for the final was ludicrous--apparently no one in the states had heard of matsuzaka at this point--and didn't hedge, although i did take some cuba +750 in live betting once japan jumped to an early lead.
that extra 15k has probably led to hundreds of thousands in eventual profits for me. it boosted my confidence, kept me off tilt, and gave me more money to bet on...
late march 2006: the detroit tigers.
detroit probably never had better than a 15% chance to win the AL central that year. hell, they didn't actually win it. still, the 30-1 division odds offered at pinny--and some other bets, like
this infamous one--were a big step for me.
i sunk all of my bankroll into futures bets and hedges at various points during the 2006 season. the tigers were the big winner, but i also took the twins, padres, and dodgers, who all made the playoffs.
by the end of 2006, i had a nice bankroll built up, and i started betting individual games in 2007. even though i'm still learning all the time, i think i was firmly in the sharp column by this point.
the first time i compared my own estimates of futures odds to the lines the bookies were offering, and saw how far off they can be? that's about all i can think of.
i spent a lot of time designing my model for individual games, so there was really nothing "a-ha" about it.
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Easiest sport to beat, in your opinion?
do futures markets count as a "sport"?
three days ago, the widely available line for minnesota to win the nfc north was -250; by the time the bears game kicked off thursday, it was -450. as far as i can tell, i was the only one betting this for any significant sum.
i think baseball is the easiest actual sport to beat for any statistical handicapper, but it depends on the person.