Nothing is impossible

[redietz]

I really don't know exactly what everyone is doing, touting picks, selling picks, recruiting customers that pay for service packages, getting free roll percentages from investors etc etc. Whatever the case, it's all the same to me no matter how they wrap it up.

If everybody's making money year after year after year with a proven solid record then I don't see how I could have an issue with it. But what I oftentimes see if someone has a good year and suddenly everybody's hooked. Eventually may end up tanking everything averages out and everybody ends up a loser. I've seen too far too often guys are fudging their stats. I don't know, there's all kinds of shenanigans going on.

This is why "Tipsters or Gypsters?" stopped publishing in the 90's. Most sports services dropped out because, unlike other monitors, McCusker published multi-year records. Once services were confronted with their modest multi-year records in print, they decided being X-rayed wasn't the percentage thing to do. And McCusker was tough -- he assigned a line (usually Leroy's Friday line at 3 PM or thereabouts) to grade, so you actually were down between 1% and 2% in the published results from what you had done betting-wise with shopping.

People didn't just fudge their stats -- when USA Today first started publishing, there were two full pages in their Friday issues filled with sports service ads. The ads claimed 89-7 and 110-11 records for this, that, and the other thing. Eighth page ads on down claiming completely impossible things in full view of everyone. Finally, after thousands of complaints, those two pages were reduced to a handful of classifieds. I actually called USA Today at the time and said, "You know, all of this stuff is impossible. You are doing people a disservice."

Now, philosophically, is any of this worse than fast food restaurants using clowns with the net effect of creating obese children, or is any of this worse than the Marlboro Man? Probably not. So if you consider fudging (make that out and out bald-faced lying) stats a terrible thing, there is an immense laundry list of capitalistic abuses in virtually every field of goods and services that should also be addressed and condemned. "Things go better with Coke?" Do they really, and do those things include dentist visits?

Winning at sports betting is not something that is guaranteed year to year. Every year is different. You can kill it for three or four years, as Billy Walters did with his original computer group, and then the well runs dry, and if you do not know the sport intimately and completely, if you are relying on angles and algorithms and trends, you can be completely dead in the water going forward. That's part of the reason I get such a kick out of people nonchalantly saying they win at college hoops and NBA, and oh by the way, hockey, and maybe the WNBA while they're at it. Sure they do. And Things Go Better With Coke.

So how many games do you think it would take to prove or disprove someone's claims they are a winning Sports bettor? Let's take some of the more reputable guys who somehow make money from sports betting(other than only just betting and making for themselves) do they let their clients know before they get involved you may not have a winning year? I can't imagine that's a very good sales tactic.

I always did. But then again -- LOL -- I was also known as the guy who, until I turned 35, never kept a client I actually met in person. People do not appreciate reality. They prefer dreams.

My estimate on that kind of thing is 200 or more plays AND spread out over three years or more. That is not a lot of plays, variance-wise, but you can get a sense of what someone is trying to accomplish and what their style is from that number of plays. Some people don't like knowing that their losing plays are likely to get drilled by 30 points or more (my personal favorite kind of loss). Some people don't care one way or the other.

And frankly, things can turn on a dime. Some seasons are amenable to certain kinds of handicappers beating them. At the same time that Billy Walters was having one of his monster early years, I had a huge season. My season was not as good as his, however. But sometimes success creates a feedback loop wherein handicappers want to stick with precisely what worked best (trendsvestite-ism), and that is often a bad idea.

I treat each season as its own challenge. I am well aware that I am at risk and can get my head taken off if I just do some rote things.

P.S. Something just occurred to me. It makes me uncomfortable when talking with non-civilians to refer to people as "sports handicappers." There are people who win at college hoops. There are people who win at college football. I've known people who won at NBA totals. I don't know anyone who has won at more than two sports from a pure handicapping straight play standpoint. I mean, I've won at more than two sports, but it's because of futures. I don't straight play them. If you have someone like Billy Walters, who assembles roundtables of specific experts, then I guess you can say Billy Walters won at multiple sports, but he's not doing the actual handicapping.

I did know one brilliant guy ahead of his time who won via middles/arbitrage 20 years ahead of everyone else. He's the only guy who said he won every year, and I believed him. But what he was doing wasn't straight handicapping. It was 24/7 numbers maneuvering. He was on top of offshore betting before most people had internet access.