This is the part where I mention:
1) People have been doing this for decades.
2) Boyd was the target in the 80's and '90's, with bettors descending on the various Boyd properties simultaneously (there were a half dozen, including the Stardust).
3) I have a couple of personal stories. I did this myself, not as some big "AP" move, but because what else are you going to do once you have your seat at the Stardust and have two to three hours to kill?
4) The books are well aware of this, but there is no real self-defense other than to limit amounts (as they did with me). Now bear in mind, this was the '80's. They would actually call "key" and review my cards whenever I'd turn them in, regardless of how small the amounts. They limited me to $50 a card at the Stardust, with the manager checking me out at the windows.
5) It does no "APs" any favors to broadcast this and publicize it via websites. Why do that? It's the same kind of self-congratulatory, screw-the-other-players move as when "Stanford Wong" publicized the vulnerabilities/angles in teaser betting. All it did was screw the savvy bettors so someone could take "credit" for knowing it.
6) There is actually a somewhat more sophisticated version of doing this (still simple, though) that most folks who were doing it employed during the 80's and 90's. The sophisticated version attacked college football lines more often than NFL. That's what I did. It was better than this. I think (no, I know), that 30% profit figure is a real reach.
7) Finally, you should really not be assigning "EV" to this except in past tense, as the effectiveness of this changes year-to-year, often depending on rule changes, of which there have been many since the 80's. Trying to calculate "EV" for this going forward is a mental/psychological trap assigning more abilities and control to the bettor than actually exist. You can presume and assume, but in the real world, occasionally that gets you clobbered.
An aside -- what I just wrote in #7 above is also what limits the utility of Billy Walters' charts (employed in other of mickey's posts). Those charts use historical data. Mickey treats it as if rules haven't changed and those charts aren't specifically dated. Big hole in mickey's logic. Again, you can use them in past tense, but you have no business projecting much of anything from them. So are they useful? In a very crude, overall way for civilians maybe, but not in any current sense.
And finally, I wrote this same spiel some years back regarding the same topic, probably on WOV, which I'm sure endeared me to Shackleford greatly. Mickey must not recall. I suspect mickey's memory is not what it was. But neither is mine. Coffee helps, mickey. Coffee helps. Those $6.51 coffees from the Golden Nugget serve a purpose in our waning years.
P.S. You just learned more in this post than by reading the sum total of what Shack and mickey combined know about this subject. Unless I'm getting a serious stipend, that's it for me. My time has value.
P.S.S. I had a client/partner in the 80's, a Jewish accountant from New York, who flew to Las Vegas each week just to do this for thousands of dollars each weekend. He would actually fill out the tickets, which took a good eight hours, and then fly out. He used this and another, slightly different strategy. He was the guy who entered The Castaways (forerunner to the SuperBook contest) and who I took over for about two-thirds of the way through.
https://theskepticalgambler.blogspot...castaways.html
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