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Anyone do futures bets?


Armybrat

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On 3/11/2020 at 10:25 AM, ztejas said:

I put $400 on Golden State repeating in 2018 in February for something like -170. 

The Rockets series got interesting. 

I had them also...think I laid like -200. Jumped in relatively late in the season.

If the NBA doesn’t play 82 games it’s going to cost me money. I have the Jazz over at -105 that was looking dicey, even before all their players were dying...but I also have a Nets under at +150 that is solid. Shortened season would have both refunded.

 

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For the past 3 seasons the Tampa Bay Rays have been a good futures bet.  They haven’t won, but every season they have at some point been half the odds they started at.  This year they are again a good bet (I think they’re currently 20/1).

 

They will almost certainly make the playoffs.  They have a deep lineup, excellent SP, and plenty of farm depth to acquire additional talent at the deadline.  I would like them as low as 12/1.

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After more than a decade of playing poker--and even moving countries to do so, a few years ago I made the full-time transition into sports betting.  It's crazy the numbers that I think are "normal" now, considering what I felt comfortable with in 2018.  That said, and on topic, Futures bets are a waste of time for everyone.  You can just put that money in a mutual fund and get a higher expected return than laying money on a futures bet that won't settle for months.  Sure, it's less fun, but if we're talking about your money, taking a bet that settles in a short period of time is the better play.  Not to mention all those futures tickets that get lost, win, and never get cashed.

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On 6/3/2020 at 7:20 PM, Governor said:

After more than a decade of playing poker--and even moving countries to do so, a few years ago I made the full-time transition into sports betting.  It's crazy the numbers that I think are "normal" now, considering what I felt comfortable with in 2018.  That said, and on topic, Futures bets are a waste of time for everyone.  You can just put that money in a mutual fund and get a higher expected return than laying money on a futures bet that won't settle for months.  Sure, it's less fun, but if we're talking about your money, taking a bet that settles in a short period of time is the better play.  Not to mention all those futures tickets that get lost, win, and never get cashed.

Most of my futures bets are on credit. I’ll even take a slightly worse number than I have available at other outs to not tie the cash up. It’s not legal and depending on exposure the limits might shrink on me, but it generally has worked out.

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On 6/23/2020 at 8:25 AM, HRSchenker said:

I always put $100 on the Rangers winning the world series and $100 on the team with the worst odds. Futures betting is such a crap shoot that I have to go big for me to feel like it's worth it.

$200 is a lot to bet on the rangers every year

 

also to OP, I don't think you can bet on yourself in a death pool

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On 6/23/2020 at 9:38 AM, cochamps said:

In January, I placed a couple of over / under win totals for two MLB teams.  At this point, I assume that I would apply the winning percentage of those at 162 to the 60 game season for the new over / under numbers.  Does anyone know?

Those are gonna be No Action. You can look up the sportsbook rules online if you know the casino, my guess is there is a 160 or 158 game minimum for action. You can get a refund for the bet amount.

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15 minutes ago, Dr Fear said:

Those are gonna be No Action. You can look up the sportsbook rules online if you know the casino, my guess is there is a 160 or 158 game minimum for action. You can get a refund for the bet amount.

Thanks.  This is correct for anyone else who might wonder.  

I sent my betting slips in to get a refund in the amount of the original wagers.

 

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23 hours ago, Dr Fear said:

Those are gonna be No Action. You can look up the sportsbook rules online if you know the casino, my guess is there is a 160 or 158 game minimum for action. You can get a refund for the bet amount.

Bud, sorry but I have to ask. Is your handle based on the name of a drink from Tien Hong on Burnett RD circa 2000-2002ish?

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On 6/3/2020 at 7:20 PM, Governor said:

After more than a decade of playing poker--and even moving countries to do so, a few years ago I made the full-time transition into sports betting.  It's crazy the numbers that I think are "normal" now, considering what I felt comfortable with in 2018.  That said, and on topic, Futures bets are a waste of time for everyone.  You can just put that money in a mutual fund and get a higher expected return than laying money on a futures bet that won't settle for months.  Sure, it's less fun, but if we're talking about your money, taking a bet that settles in a short period of time is the better play.  Not to mention all those futures tickets that get lost, win, and never get cashed.

Hold on, we have a pro sports bettor on here? We should all be rich by now.

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Hahaha.  No pro bettor gives away or sells his picks.  Literally zero props selling picks on Twitter, online, on late night TV ads--ZERO, are worth a shit.  If they were winning on their own, they wouldn't offer their picks to the public.  Either they're complete frauds (some of whom are clueless, but good salesmen), or, more likely, they used to be winning bettors who either got lazy with their modeling, or just haven't been able to keep up with the evolution of the industry.  Things move fast, edges are small, and good outs are top secret.  Besides, by the time I've placed a bet, I've moved the line worldwide, so unless you've got a local PPH with static lines (if so, please let me know hahaha), following me would result in neutral-EV bets at best.

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On 7/8/2020 at 12:41 AM, Larry T. Spider said:

Hold on, we have a pro sports bettor on here? We should all be rich by now.

I did it professionally for almost 15 years.  Getting busy with kids at the same time that analytics on the internet drastically tightened up lines eventually made my edges small and rare enough that it was just too much work for too little return.  I'll still handicap season win totals and bet some of those, and I'll still grab bad numbers when I see them (ironically MLB seems to have the most these days even though it was the first market to be heavily influenced by analytics).  I also still do the NFL Super Contest, but those are static lines so it's different.

I was mostly a pro football and college basketball guy, but with 2 or 3 internet accounts and about $50...you can have nearly every statistical advantage I enjoyed for the 2000s across both sports, so in practice everybody now has that info for essentially free. The two sports that were my wheelhouse are now too efficient for me to reliably beat because of it. I'm not sure the NFL is beatable at all if you're betting the pre-flop spreads...it's bordering on perfectly efficient unless you figure something out before the market.  As one example, last year the market reaction from the Rosen -> Fitzpatrick move was insane, so for several weeks I was on the Dolphins at huge plus numbers until they figured it out.  The Dolphins were 40% of my season long individual game bets last season, which shows you how little conviction I had in every non Dolphins game.

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On 7/9/2020 at 3:04 PM, Governor said:

  Besides, by the time I've placed a bet, I've moved the line worldwide, so unless you've got a local PPH with static lines (if so, please let me know hahaha), following me would result in neutral-EV bets at best.

I didn’t realize that Governor was Billy Walters. How do you post bets from prison?

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12 hours ago, VolenteHawk said:

I did it professionally for almost 15 years.  Getting busy with kids at the same time that analytics on the internet drastically tightened up lines eventually made my edges small and rare enough that it was just too much work for too little return.  I'll still handicap season win totals and bet some of those, and I'll still grab bad numbers when I see them (ironically MLB seems to have the most these days even though it was the first market to be heavily influenced by analytics).  I also still do the NFL Super Contest, but those are static lines so it's different.

I was mostly a pro football and college basketball guy, but with 2 or 3 internet accounts and about $50...you can have nearly every statistical advantage I enjoyed for the 2000s across both sports, so in practice everybody now has that info for essentially free. The two sports that were my wheelhouse are now too efficient for me to reliably beat because of it. I'm not sure the NFL is beatable at all if you're betting the pre-flop spreads...it's bordering on perfectly efficient unless you figure something out before the market.  As one example, last year the market reaction from the Rosen -> Fitzpatrick move was insane, so for several weeks I was on the Dolphins at huge plus numbers until they figured it out.  The Dolphins were 40% of my season long individual game bets last season, which shows you how little conviction I had in every non Dolphins game.

How much were you or other pros you know putting on games? Always been curious about that. 

I know it’s probably too much to type out but I would love hear about your process for betting college basketball. It does seem like the place you could find some bad lines with the sheer number of games on the board each day.
 

 

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8 hours ago, Larry T. Spider said:

How much were you or other pros you know putting on games? Always been curious about that. 

I know it’s probably too much to type out but I would love hear about your process for betting college basketball. It does seem like the place you could find some bad lines with the sheer number of games on the board each day.

For an off the shelf college basketball game where I thought I had a regular edge, I was betting $500 per game.  For major conference stuff that was no big deal and could be done in one bet at one book (find best number, pull trigger).  For smaller conferences most shops would limit you more than that, so you might have to bet it in a couple of spots.  You also might wake up to $50 limits on any given morning, depending on your success rate.

I'm an an analytics guy, so my process for betting was actually kind of boring.  I had a spreadsheet with power ratings, so I'd make numbers for every game before they came out, compare the opener to my number, if two teams I had strong conviction on were playing I'd immediately bet it...I'd dig deeper into the others, sometimes the market is right and I'm wrong, obviously. How the spreadsheet was made is probably more interesting.  In the preseason, I'd use the previous years stats to assign a number to each team Big 6 + A10 + Missouri Valley (arbitrary but it took about an hour per team).  Anybody can do that, of course, the trick in making the numbers "good" is being able to figure out who was a basket better or worse than they "should" have been the year before.  What I was doing was finding outliers in certain numbers that don't actually represent a skill, even though most people think they do.  My favorite example (that people still argue about) is 3P% defense.  We all grew up with coaches yelling at us to defend harder/contest/whatever, so it's intuitive to think defense has a lot to do with 3s going in or not...but with very few exceptions it's actually random.  A team that is otherwise properly rated by the market but has been extremely lucky or unlucky on 3s going in against them was a gold mine...for every team that you find a couple of points of value in vs the market, that's worth thousands of dollars. Sadly, you could use KenPom's data to make better numbers today than I ever had, get every team, and spend less time than it took me to rate Creighton in 2001. If I could pick one way that KP fucked me the most it was teaching people to adjust properly for tempo. We all understand now that having Florida State +5 against Virginia is WAY different than against North Carolina, but not many people were thinking that way 20 years ago.  And that rat bastard showed everybody and for free.  In the early days he actually adjusted this too much, and systemically overrated ultra slow teams.

My NFL style is a little more intuitive to people, once you explain the logic to them.  Recovering a fumble is a pretty random event.  Some crews call more penalties in the secondary.  A team's SOS is better measured by projected win totals than last year's records (ESPN still fucks this one up every year).  Third down conversion is dictated far more by how successful you are on 1st and 2nd down than by teams having vastly different ability to convert 3rd and longs. The other area I made money was by not overreacting to injury moves, that's almost universally overrated. If Patrick Mahomes misses a game and whatever warm body starts, I'd move that game about 8 points.  People think "8 points isn't much, Patrick Mahomes is the MVP", but NFL teams are so jammed together that it's actually a shitload.  Hence my Dolphins love last year.  You can quibble with the difference between Josh Rosen and Ryan Fitzpatrick, I didn't even calculate it last year...I just saw the number come down and go back up 6 points different and immediately knew that was wrong. The fact that they beat the Patriots in week 17 to give the Chiefs the 2 seed capped my love affair with that team.

Full disclosure: I was successful but never moved worldwide lines.  That's some baller shit.

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I started the MLB betting thread last year (and had my best ever season...now that my bets are lower).  If you peruse that, it provides some insight to my style...good pitchers at plus money, series prices of +190 for team with two real life aces, fading bad teams in bad spots, etc.

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/topic/9559-mlb-betting-2019/

 

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  • 1 month later...

@ztejas What are you trying to do? I am not a bookie. 

I think that placing futures bets a lot of times are - bad math deals for the gambler. If you're talking about winning a division? Yeah that makes some sense. If you're talking about betting the Mavs to win the West? Take whatever you were going to invest in the future and bet the series price. Roll your original investment + profit into the next series price. Almost always you are going to come out way, way ahead should your team actually win what you are investing in them for. 

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9 minutes ago, Baboontyme said:

@ztejas What are you trying to do? I am not a bookie. 

I think that placing futures bets a lot of times are - bad math deals for the gambler. If you're talking about winning a division? Yeah that makes some sense. If you're talking about betting the Mavs to win the West? Take whatever you were going to invest in the future and bet the series price. Roll your original investment + profit into the next series price. Almost always you are going to come out way, way ahead should your team actually win what you are investing in them for. 

I'm trying to place a bet. I'm not looking for gambling advice - looking for advice on where to set up an account or if it would be easier to just try and track down a bookie for a one off.

Thanks though. 

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Well super easy to set up an account at bovada or betonline.ag. both take credit cards. My state doesn't allow it but if yours does I've heard that the book at Draft Kings is way better than the traditional offshore books. Also take a look at bet365. These are all reputable books. You are not going to get hosed out of your money. Good look. Cheers. 

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14 minutes ago, Baboontyme said:

Well super easy to set up an account at bovada or betonline.ag. both take credit cards. My state doesn't allow it but if yours does I've heard that the book at Draft Kings is way better than the traditional offshore books. Also take a look at bet365. These are all reputable books. You are not going to get hosed out of your money. Good look. Cheers. 

Thanks. I've used bovada in the past - was wondering if the landscape had changed at all. 

And yeah, fanduel or draftkings would be awesome but I'm in Texas.

 

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14 hours ago, ztejas said:

@VolenteHawk I'm looking to place a $100 futures bet - I don't have an online account open at the moment. Is there a website that this would be painless to do through? Should I just try and find a bookie instead?

I haven’t opened a new account or funded one in a long time, but I use betonline.ag and betdsi.eu the most right now, and they’re both fine with timely payouts.

Though betdsi deals dime lines in baseball, so unless their number is skewed I go elsewhere this time of year. If you’re just aiming at a futures bet I’d check a few different spots and choose based on price, I think.

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7 hours ago, VolenteHawk said:

I haven’t opened a new account or funded one in a long time, but I use betonline.ag and betdsi.eu the most right now, and they’re both fine with timely payouts.

Though betdsi deals dime lines in baseball, so unless their number is skewed I go elsewhere this time of year. If you’re just aiming at a futures bet I’d check a few different spots and choose based on price, I think.

Thanks. Betonline.ag was easy. $7.50 fee on $100 but whatever. 

Threw $40 on Clippers +125 and $60 on Blazers +1400 to win the West.

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On 9/1/2020 at 11:30 AM, VolenteHawk said:

Take a look at the Kansas Jayhawk football schedule and try to find 3 wins on it.  Currently U2.5 -145.  I'd probably rather have U2 at a better price, but in any even...I'm taking it to pound town.

Alright look here, Covid.  KU has to play all their scheduled games for this bet to pay instead of push, and there is a bunch of money at stake.  Stop fucking around.

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1 hour ago, closetohumping said:

Cowherd seems to be money at NFL futures

I'm in good shape this year, pretty much stuck to the stuff from my post in the thread below. Steelers over for shitload at slight plus money, Steelers division for medium at 4/1, Dolphins over for a lot, Dolphins division to win a decent chunk at 9/1.

I have 3 limit bets on that Jayhawk under.  REALLY need them to play all their games.

 

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