What do you think is the most important asset for a professional sports better?

These responses are remarkable.

I am coming up with my own questions, but I feel they will be much better to be asked in private. We shall see I guess.....

Yet another A+ well.

Between all your endeavors (sports, affiliate marketing, selling businesses), it sounds like you are well on your way to becoming quite wealthy. Is there a specific financial goal you are working towards?

There is now, there was probably a lot less before. [Obvs any specific bank may be out of the RE biz]. Not saying its a great idea just figured you'd thought about it since you are out there.

What are your thoughts on the future of the sportsbetting industry? Do you think it will become easier to make money or harder or no change? What changes if any have you noticed in the past 15 years?

Would you rather be able to fly or breathe underwater (and your skin wont get all wrinkly)

This is awesome. Thanks for doing this, rsigley.

How did you get started in derivatives? What are some important resources for someone who would like to begin betting derivatives? How important was your knowledge of stats in betting derivatives?

How successful have you been with baseball (I believe you said you were trying to figure it out)? How important are advanced stats in your work with baseball? Do you feel that the SABR has made it easier or more difficult to win betting baseball (with the huge amount information available)?

You mentioned that you may have too much data with regards to line movements/markets, etc... Do you use that information to determine when the ideal time to place a wager (for your capping obv)? Is handicapping a separate skill from predicting where lines will move? If a line moves against you, do you feel that your initial projection was wrong or do you generally increase your Kelly stake?

Oh, and how many five year olds?

Do you have a time-horizon where you will quit once you have made x amount of money, or are you invariably destined to be hitting the 1q lines of Superbowl LXX? Has sportsbetting changed the way you look at money and wealth accumulation/risk taking/life? Do you have any cool graphs you can show?

whats a derivative?

do you dream in black and white?

Derivative is anything based off the full game. 1q, 1h, alt lines, team totals etc.

Rsigley, do you do nothing more than chase steam on the derivative markets or does your database play into effect? I remember in Shipits well he said you better know what your doing in derivative markets or you can lose a ton just like that. Shipit at least claimed to model. So do you just bet non moving derivative lines when the full game line steams, or does your database play into effect?

do u play poker? What games/stakes?

On average how many non arb bets do you place per month?

sigh, no edit button. I also would like to which inefficient markets other than props should be taken advantage of if there are any for small bankrolls which can't arb.

you should buy a wife from russia

You can find your own in Ukraine/Belarus much cheaper and higher quality.

"but you can get a very good estimate without any handicapping at all "

This was in the other post about beating over/under player yardage. Can you expand on how?

sorry I was in WSOP main event yesterday [60k chips!! with my awesome tight-passive style] and don't like writing long things on my phone.

Yea it seems like it would be a good money maker, but if I can't finance and have to put up 1M or so the risk is way too much for me. I was actually reading that really long thread in BFI about real estate investing and it seems good. My house I bought for 58k in cash and paying the back taxes which were < 10k or so (talked them down from 97k by just going will you take 58k, wait one day, and they're like ok) and it has 4 BR, 4 bath, pool, home theater, and a lot of land. It is really ridiculous how cheap it is out here.

Right now I have a lot of cash just sitting and doing nothing due to ignorance/scared of losing it.

No idea about industry. I mean it's been pretty stable for the past couple of years since the US pullout / neteller / funds being seized. Small books get by by offering reward programs and not paying winners, bigger books are still the same. I guess the only difference is WSEX failing. I've only been sports betting since 06 (gambling in general since I started college in 00) and the only change has been really no more free money. On the first of the month there used to be free 2-3k in just casino bonuses.

If US ever changes their stance, there will probably be a resurgence in new books but they'll probably have unprofitable business models and give away too much to lure new customers and eventually go broke or be bought out. And I guess fly since I can't swim too well so breathing underwater would be useless.


Derivatives because I couldn't handicap anything at the time and I needed action and I'm smart enough to realize just because a line looks off [like Indy underdogs to Texans] doesn't mean it is so I wasn't just going to bet random lines with no information. Database you really need for derivatives, otherwise no way to find out if the total is X the 1H total should be Y.

For line shopping you could always use SBR Half Point calculator but
a) you don't know what lines they're using; are they accurate, are they using NBA lines from 1989; etc.
b) how up to date it is, they said it's constantly updated but the push %s don't seem to move when I checked last c) you have to manually input every line which is tedious

So having your own setup is much better since you know all those answers. Stats is useful because lets say the total is X and by magic there's for halftime 50% of the totals fall below and 50% above Y, so the line should be Y +/- 100. But there's always some error involved, so Y might actually be bounded by like +104/-104 or something and you would want to use that to calculate your edge.

I also took a lot of probability courses doing stats and they're useful in helping you learn how to setup complex probabilities where it's not just something simple like 1/X. When I want to analyze something I spend the most time just writing out what I want, what I have, and how to get there. The calculation part is trivial, but if you set everything up wrong then you are screwed. Same thing with setting up a database. Getting tons of data into a database is easy, but structuring it to give you what you want in an efficient manner is the hard part.

In baseball I had really good first 3 years, this year was kind of bad. The problem with this year was I finished reworking my whole setup literally 3 hous before the first pitch on the Monday before the game. I was getting lines that were pretty close to closing which looked nice, but occasionally some games were ridiculously off (like -200 when the line was -120). So I looked through it and I had a lot of calculation errors and once I fixed it went back to making more sense but I missed on the nice April returns. SABR has bee useful but I think the biggest thing the SABR community has done is produce very accurate projections year after year. I'm not sure if the books have really given much respect to this yet because every year what happens is: Crush April, make little to no money from May-August, crush September when a lot of rookies are called up. You just have to be careful with the projections you're using, like ZIPS underrates most groundball pitchers for whatever reason. At this point in the season I tend to use my own projections based on their current stats and it worked well last year. This year okay in only 3 weeks of using it.

Since I've done some tests and conclude that the line near closing (like 1 hour before) is not significantly different than the closing line I've been trying to bet earlier. I guess it helps books not hate you since it doesn't look like you're "chasing steam" plus then you don't get pissed if the line closes on you. When line shopping for 2H I tend to wait closer to close because there are always heavy swings in 2H lines. I dunno much about predicting but I mean if I have it as -120 and its -110 no point in waiting. If it goes the other way sometimes I will add more (like to +100) but the kelly calculations are pretty hard and I have not been able to write a formula to do those type of calculations that won't lock up my computer. I figure (probably wrong) that in the long run if you are doing the same thing and its correct the lines moving against/for you will even out.

And do you mean how many 5 years can I beat up or have sex with at once?

I don't really care about the money, I guess I could comfortably retire now and get a ranch but then what would I do with my life. I always wanted to work for NASA doing space things which is why I did geophysics/went to Antarctica but that is probably never going to happen so just going to keep hustling whether its sports betting, selling ****ty internet products, whatever the next gimmick is and not spending any money until I die. Growing up I really didn't have any money and I still live like I don't have any money so I don't think it has changed me any. Overall I'm still very risk adverse and spend too much time analyzing things before committing to it. And graphs of what? I can see if I can find my screenshot I posted 3 years ago where I lost 22 college basketball games in one week by 1/2 a point and almost got emotions out of gambling.

Alt markets like 1H, 1Q, what gmcarroll said. Other things too like R+H+E in MLB game. It can be loosely derived from the total and other things.

Some markets like 1H total I just really go straight database. 1Q is tricky because there are some other factors involved. Like in the NBA for whatever reason home court advantage is strongest in the 1Q. Football you have to be careful on who is receiving, so there are some factors to consider. Overall I mean it's straight DB + some situational adjustments, not sure if that would be considered modeling. I could also just of ran really good for the past couple of years, anything is possible.

Also some books constantly make the same mistakes year after year which you can easily spot like moving off a certain number to another number which is worthless. You see that a lot like the 1Q total will be X +120 under -140 over then some book will just make the line X+0.5 -110/-110 or X+1 -110/-110 and yea that's not a good idea. The only book I haven't seen make that mistake is the Greek.

Not really. I used to play heads up on FTP but some guy kept reporting me as a bot and my account would get locked all the time. Never got banned though, but the heads up games are pretty hard for me to beat now since I'm not that good. I've played a couple of tournaments recently (just register for whatever is starting right now whether its a satellite or real) and I'm in Day 2 of WSOP main event but nothing else. There was a stretch where I played 29 hours of 10/20 NL on bodog a year ago but I was just bored. Never was a fan of poker.

I dunno like 3,000-4,000. It's hard to tell only because if I place the same bet at multiple books in my records I keep them as separate bets. On an average college football day I was placing like 160 bets, average nba maybe 20-30, baseball 20-30, nfl 40-50, hockey 20-30.

If you have a small bankroll then you should probably focus on props involving baseball, basketball, and hockey due to the sheer # of games. You will turn your money over faster. R+H+E is a good one but its hard to find good lines in the past couple of years, no OT in hockey, any point prop in the NBA, always seems to be some value in a couple of team totals or alt baseball totals. Some book manages to set the "no OT" prop wrong every week in NFL but even if you bet it for the max every week, it's only 17 bets with a small limit so the amount of money you'd make is small. Small bankroll the best approach really might be just keep doing what you're doing but add a % of your paycheck to it each week. Eventually you should get to a good amount. It sucks for people now with no bankroll because bodog free $50 bets everyday are gone, majority of bonuses are scambooks, etc.

I don't really want a wife though. I prefer to be alone. Was going to get married actually 2 years ago and I couldn't go through with it so I just left. Part of the reason I moved to Nevada (in addition to taxes)

Sure, google overround and read about it. Or just use Ganchrows excel spreadsheet posted on SBRForums. The books aren't going to set the line directly in the center like you can calculate but it gives you a rough idea of what they consider a fair line. Everyone in general should read most of his posts. Like 95% of them are really good.

How epic would it be if you win the Main Event? Would you give us a special shoutout when Norman Chad interviews you?

How much time on average do you spend on your database? Is it something you spend time every day on, or more like just every season you spend 20+ hours on it updating and tweaking it?

I'm assuming you have it setup so that you are alerted automatically when you attempt to make a duplicate bet on the same team/derivative? So when you bet the Mets and then go to bet the Mets in the first 5 innings on a different book, it lets you know so you aren't betting 2x on the same team?

Doubt I'd win since I'm not very good but it wouldn't really matter if I won. I'd actually prefer to not even make the final 9. I had no idea that they play the final table in November and make a big deal out of it, don't like attention. Just entered on a whim. Went there to cash a ticket that was going to expire and had nothing else to do and money burning a hole in my pocket so I registered. Then they told me I couldn't play until yesterday which sucked. No idea who Norman Chad is but sure.

It is setup to notify me if something goes wrong but I check occasionally to make sure stuff is okay. Theoretically I shouldn't have to touch it at all unless I want to add a new sport (like I did for the World Cup). Everything is automated and runs at certain times and backs up offsite so if something breaks it can be fixed quickly. Also the way it is setup its easy to add most new sports, like I added CFL a couple days ago and it only took 7 minutes.

And yea it keeps track of what has already been bet (switches color and moves it to another category), but some alt markets have small limits so sometimes I have to click a button to move it since I can't reach the limit it tells me to bet.

Also, is it possible to beat horse racing? I've been getting interested in it just because there's so many races but it seems like a majority of the tracks have ridiculously small handles. Is it only a good sport when you get a lot of dead money i.e. Kentucky Derby?

search function n00b

oh yea the horse racing thread is just like $500 pick 5 tickets that win once a year, so i guess pick 5/6 are only beatable things?

i hit the 50 cent pick 5 last week at monmouth and won $150 on a $4 ticket!

I tried using the discounted Harville formula using the Win Pool fair odds to value the Place/Show markets. It doesn't work.