Originally Posted by AxelWolf View Post
Originally Posted by The Boz View Post
Originally Posted by kewlJ View Post
This raises the question...who is monitoring the monitor?

If you pay a fee of $140 to be included in this monitoring service, who is to say you couldn't pay a larger fee (or payoff) to be included or ranked higher than you should be. This would allow that person to use this tool for marketing his "tout service" to make more money.

No matter how you look at it, this is less about being a professional gambler (in this case sports bettor) and more and more about marketing a service.

A professional gambler makes money by placing wagers and winning more than he loses, whether on sports, at the blackjack table, or a video or slot machine. A marketer makes money by marketing a product or service.
This is the quandary of the gimmick and why I was suspicious of any monitoring service. While one or two were honest, they is too much financial incentive to do exactly what you said. One service in particular let handicappers send their picks in AFTER the games were played for extra money.

It’s sad because it hurts legitimate cappers like RED and also the customer. But it’s the game and I’m not sure how you get past the “He’s a scammer but I’m legit”.
No magazine advertising because most everyone caught onto that BS.

If you want to get a big sucker investor(sucker) you really need to meet face-to-face to pitch him and show him your package and load them up with a bunch of bullshit.

What else do you think they have these big Sports conventions/conferences or whatever you want to call them? That's where the real recruitment happens.

I imagine a Herbalife situation where everybody's pumping everybody up, telling everyone how much money they can make while cramming with a bunch of heavily skewed information. They're all feverishly scrambling around finding each other investors and probably getting a cut for introducing each other to investors. You get a bunch of suckers around there thinking there's big dollars to be made. I'm sure all the recruiters know each other and who does what sport so they can pair the suckers with the proper people. For example, some guy's interested in betting NFL so they introduce them to the supposed NFL expert, while another guy is interested in betting on college football, so they introduce him to the so-called college football expert.

"Who monitors the monitor?" is a decades-old question. The answers are (A) the clients and (B) any competitions in which the handicappers post selections in public before the games. There also existed a rather sleazy but legal corps of "Consensus Services," whose gimmick it was to sign up for multiple handicappers, then provide the selections of a given number of them to clients for a fee. In other words, the consensus service would sign up for 30 different handicappers, then divvy out the selections of five or 10 or all of them for different degrees of fees. The consensus services financially killed the most honest, legit handicappers. We tried to combat them in various ways, which is a topic for another day. I'm sure Boz can figure out some of the things we'd do.

If clients are given one array of games, and the those records vary wildly from what a monitor reports, then obviously there is a problem, but it's a pretty obvious thing to notice since nobody really has the ability to censor clients. If a monitor says a guy was 65-45 ATS in 2006, and multiple clients report he was 55-55, then there's a problem. Nothing like that ever happened with McCusker. In fact, his adherence to day/time/sports book specificity meant any records with him were actually an understatement of someone's ATS record. Your actual record was almost always one or two or three games better than what McCusker labeled you, because you didn't get to plug games in at the point in the week when lines most favored you. You were stuck with his day/time/locale rules, which were based on when civilians were most likely to bet games (in other words, Fri night/Sat for college; Sunday for Sun NFL; Monday for Mon NFL, and so on). McCusker was writing for a knowledgeable but largely civilian readership, so he made his rules for them.