As announced on Twitter earlier this afternoon, Frostbet has been approved for an official DraftKings promo code. We were given a promotion link earlier this week, which allowed you to earn the best possible sign-up bonus when you registered your account. But now everything is complete! This clears up some confusion, as a few people were asking me if they needed a promotion code to go along with the link (the answer to that is no, they both do the same thing).
If you want to sign up for a DraftKings account, and get the best possible bonus available, the promotion code to use is, to no one’s surprise…
FROSTBET
Really creative, I know.
As with all of our bonus links on this website, I will be updating this one every time something new comes up. We get notifications when to expect changes, so you can always be sure that the code FROSTBET will get you the best offer available.
Currently, this promotion will give you a 100% first deposit match (up to $600), and a free entry to a $100K contest. This is the best offer that DraftKings currently has.
In the articles that I have written for this section of the website, I have made it clear how one would go about earning a living from sportsbetting. You start off by determining what the true spread or total of the game should be. Once you have that figured out, you compare it to the offered line (with represents that perceived odds). The bigger the difference between your number and the sportsbook’s number will determine how much of an edge you have, and thus, how much money you should bet.
But determining the true odds of a game seems really fucking hard, right? Lets be fair; it is rather difficult to pull off. It may take years of sportsbetting experience (not necessarily critical knowledge of the sport itself) in order to determine these numbers to a high degree of precision.
However, that does not mean that individuals who are new to the world of sportsbetting (or at least new to the world of profitable sportsbetting, there is a big difference) should be intimidated. Let me introduce you to the way that you should approach each bet that you make from day one. The more you stick with this strategy, the further you will develop as a profitable sportsbettor.
The State of Mind
Please be honest with yourself when you read this article. Its just you and me here. No one else needs to know.
Start off by asking yourself if you are a profitable sportsbettor. Chances are if you found this article via an internet search, the answer is no. And thats fine. If everyone started off with the knowledge that I am about to give you in this article, Vegas would not be nearly as tall and shinny as it is today. Like many things in life, you must start off a loser before you can learn how to become a winner.
Forget everything that you think you know about sportsbetting. Seriously, even if you consider yourself an intelligent person, there is probably a few strands of misinformation hiding in your mind. I guarantee you I am going to blow your mind in the next paragraph.
The key to profitable sportsbetting is making enough good bets. That seems simple, and I am sure you knew that already. The problem is that many do not know what a “good bet” really is. 98% of people will end up being career losers when it comes to sports-betting. 98% of people will also tell you that a good bet is a bet that wins.
Absolutely not.
Does that surprise you? It should. Keep reading.
What is a good bet?
A good bet is a bet that would generate a profit if placed an infinite amount of times. For the most part, one side of a game (whether it be a spread, total, or moneyline) will leave you with a profit if you bet on it one million times. The other will cause you to lose money.
I have written plenty of articles on how oddsmakers make their lines. But since its so important I am going to tell you how its done yet again. The odds you see at a sportsbook are set based on perception, and not probability. The casinos would like to attract an even payout to each side of the game. This means that regardless of who wins, they will be taking in and paying out the exact same amount of money (for a game that is lined at -110 / -110, such as a football spread and total). They take the small profit from the juice and call it a day.
This means that the oddsmakers will shift their lines based on how they believe people will bet on the game. If the true spread of a game should be 5.5, but they know that a large portion of their action will come in on the favorite, you can be damn well sure the number will not open up at 5.5.
Instead, you can expect something higher. Obviously it depends on the situation, but something between 6.5 and 8.5 for an NFL game would be common. The larger the margin between the true spread (5.5) and the perceived spread (6.5 – 8.5), the bigger your edge. The bigger the edge, the better the bet.
If you make enough of those, you have no choice but to make money betting on sports. Its math.
Margin Estimation for Rookies
Determining the true spread or total of a game is difficult. Some people think they know how to do it, but no one knows for certain how accurate their predictions really are. To be honest, it may not even be worth your time trying to figure this out.
Instead, you can spend your time mastering margin estimation. This can be taken up by novice sportsbettors with intermediate sports knowledge, and can be mastered over the years as you progress towards becoming a full-time sportsbettor.
This concept does not find you crunching the numbers trying to figure out which spread you can apply to a game to get a 50% ATS output. Instead, you attempt to guesstimate (fuck that word) the margin based on your knowledge of the market.
Its time to stop betting on things that you believe are going to win. Its a bad habit. Instead, you will examine all of the games that you feel that you have a sufficient enough knowledge of to comprehend, and you will bet on the sides that you believe have the largest deviations between the true and perceived odds.
Understanding the Market
Its not as hard as you think it is. If you understand how the market works, you will be able to estimate these margins without a problem. Sit back and rather than looking at the game through your own eyes, look at it through the eyes of the common individual. How exactly do they see the game, and what is their first impression when they see the line that the oddsmakers have set?
I do not want this article to be about “fading the public”, since approaching this with a one-sided stance is never productive, regardless of which side you find yourself on.
The Opener
You start off by examining the opening line as soon as it is released. Sportsbooks release their opening lines at different times, so its important to locate those that release theirs the earliest (as the opening lines of the slowpokes will reflect the already-moved lines of the early birds).
After acquiring and not acquiring Brewers outfielder Carlos Gomez last night, the Mets one-upped themselves by choking away a six-run lead in an afternoon match against the Padres. Three straight hits following a rain-delay on the last out to concede the go-ahead run.
What Happened
The Mets were leading 7-1 after the sixth inning. Thats a lot of runs for a team that probably has an overall batting average around 0.050. They went on to give up a grand-slam to Derek Norris in the next inning, but managed to regain composure up until the last out of the game. Then it started to rain.
And rain.
And rain.
The game was delayed for 45 minutes before both teams returned to the field to go through the last out. With the Mets leading 7-5 with empty bases, it seemed likely that they would walk away with the victory. But its important to remember that we are talking about the Mets, here.
Resuming the game on a 0-1 count, Derek Norris singled. Matt Kemp followed suit. And on the first pitch, Justin Upton launched a three-run home-run out of Citi Field, giving the Padres at 8-7 lead.
There was another rain delay for nearly two hours following the Upton home-run. Spoiler alert, the Mets did not score in the bottom of the ninth to lose 8-7.
The Odds
New York closed as small -105 home underdogs to San Diego (who were -115 road favorites). With the trade deadline looming, you can be sure that there were plenty of bettors who opted to back the still-in-it Mets, over the might-be-selling Padres.
The Padres were +1500 live heading in to the 8th inning down 7-5.
Reactions
The best part about a bad beat are people’s reactions. Here are a few excerpts from Twitter, and other sportsbetting discussion forums:
This thread titled “If you need the Mets, check in!” should be good.
The Mets go up early any everyone gets cocky. OP reveals that he put his entire account on the Mets.
With the Mets leading 7-5 with one out to go, the gallery chimes in to say that the game has been delayed. Cecil the Lion says completion is unlikely.
OP is not happy, especially since the final batter was already down 0-1. The game was less than a minute away from being over.
This guy has over 40,000 posts and still has no idea whats going on:
OP is flipping through the newspaper to see if its true (hint: its not):
Lemmings scrambling to figure out the betting rules (to be fair, I had no idea what they were either for this case):
After scrambling to figure out the rules, we have the first start time. Just one more out, what could go wrong…
Shit.
The classic line.
The moment after.
If you are going to twist the dagger, you kind of have to do it while the beast is still alive.
WAIT! There is hope… a second delay after the Mets blew the lead.
Back to the newspapers to see what will happens next, since the Mets won the last full-inning.
God only likes WINNING teams, mth61. Haven’t you seen every Super Bowl winner interviewed ever?
More misinformation.
Its raining pretty hard. But its not water thats coming down, its droplets of hope. Sweet, innocent hope.
Oakland plays in 8 hours. Tony is from the future.
RavensFan2k3 fights back.
Still trying to find the rules to see if its worth praying.
Not sure about this interaction.
Yes, this game was fixed. The weatherman had a ton of cash on the Padres live at +1500.
An emoji is worth a thousand dollars. About the same value as a Mets collapse.
If there is one thing that I have learned, always trust random percentages spewed out by people with money-wad avatars.
Mets backers coming to reality that they will not suspend a get-away game with three outs left.
Ouija would probably be a better closer than whatever the Mets throw out each night.
Here comes the postman to hand out parcels of false hope:
He took the bait!
Caught him! If only the game Mouse Trap was this easy. It takes so fucking long to set it up, and the game only lasts a few seconds.
Thanks, jtoler.
Ken Rosenthal confirms that the game has been suspended (per reliable source jtoler).
A+.
Boom.
Finally, after 83 posts, someone has a bit of common sense.
Finally, after 84 posts, someone has a lot of common sense.
“They don’t care about money” – A guy who bet money on the New York Mets
Someone calls out Cecil the Lion for losing his head on that last post (sorry, that was terrible).
There is always a guy who takes a bad beat really hard and then claims to have nothing on it.
jtoler, ESPN insider and reliable source, has now decided that the game will finish.
Thanks, tips.
The total.
So cute, so innocent.
The only thing positive about the Mets is their opponent’s run differential.
“assdfasdfasdfsdsf” – Mets bettor, July 30th 2015
Everyone is an expert:
Lion boy going all out researching to see if God hands out miracles on Thursdays (hint: he doesn’t):
Yes, they are stubborn for not wanting to fly back here to play three more outs during their next off-day:
124 posts deep and the jokes don’t get any better:
All hope is officially lost:
Sorry:
Salt meet wound:
My condolences, your $50 Mets ticket was a great man. I loved him like a brother. He died too soon.
It does not take detailed knowledge of every sport to make a living off betting. In fact, it does not even take a detailed knowledge of any sport. In some circumstances, it may suit you better to have a casual understanding instead of an intense grasp. Betting on sports for a living is actually really easy. All you need to do is understand how the sports-betting market works. And thats what Frostbet’s Advantage blog is here for.
If its so easy, why doesn’t…
…everyone do it? Sorry to finish your sentence, I have heard that phrase so many times. Many people associate gambling with losing because, well, so many people lose. I think the statistic was that 98% of people will be career losers when it comes to sports-betting. There is actually a pretty good explanation for this.
Before we can dive into the details, its important to make sure that we correctly understand how the sports-betting market works. I am sure a few of you already have an idea of how things work, but its important to make sure that you have not been misinformed on anything. Mainstream media outlets like ESPN and FOX desperately try to churn out gambling-related content to generate page-clicks. The problem is their writers have no fucking idea what they are talking about. Its very easy to subconsciously store a piece of this information at the back of your mind. I think it would do everyone some good to read the next section of this article, instead of skipping it. Regardless of your experience.
Understanding the Sportsbetting Market
I will likely be including this section of the article in every other Advantage piece that is released on Frostbet. Its so important, and each gambler should be reminded of it each day when they wake up. Seriously, set your alarm message to this post if you have to.
If you understand how oddsmakers set their lines, you will have the majority of the knowledge necessary to grasping the sportsbetting market. The casinos are never trying to directly beat you. They want to earn their money off the juice (or vig). If you were sitting with a friend and you wanted to bet on an actual coin-flip, the fair odds would be 1/1, or “+100”. This means that for every $100 you were to risk on the coin-flip, you would return $100 in profit if you won. Since there is a 50% chance of the coin landing on heads, and a 50% chance of the coin landing on tails, these are fair odds for the scenario. If you were to bet $100 on heads an infinite amount of times, you will more or less break even in the end. This is due to the fact that the event odds (the coin-flip) are identical to the betting odds (the 1/1, or +100).
If you were to bet on the same coin-flip with a sports-book, you will not be getting the same odds. The juice will be applied, which means that an event like this would be -110. This means that you will now need to risk $110 to profit $100 on the same event that has a 50% chance of winning. This also corresponds to 10/11 odds, but I am going to drop the fractional notation for the rest of this article. Its for scrubs.
If you were to bet on heads an infinite amount of times with the sports-book, you will naturally lose money. It will be a slow process, but your bankroll will eventually whittle down. This means that whatever bets we decide to place will need to hit more than 50% of the time in order to break even or generate a profit if we were strictly betting on lines that were -110. This includes most spreads and totals for football and basketball.
The percentage we need to beat with -110 average odds is 52.38%.
How do we beat the 52.38%?
Now if you are thinking that every -110 line is a 50/50 game, you might think it is impossible to reach the necessary cut-off. We saw that example with the infinite coin-flips. The secret is that nearly every -110 line does not fall into this category. One side has a significantly higher chance of hitting than the other side.
I mentioned that we need to understand how oddsmakers set their lines to understand the sports-betting market. Lets take a look at that now. Lets say we had a group of people who were going to collectively risk $220,000 on the theoretical coin-flip scenario mentioned earlier. Heads is -110, and tails is -110. Regardless of which side the money comes in on, we know that the house does have an edge.
Now if the theories of sports-books trying to beat every single person who places a bet at their facilities is true, then that means they would rather have $220,000 on one side, right? Absolutely not. While the house has the chance to make a huge profit, they also an equal probability of losing a ton of money. Thats called gambling, and last time I checked, their customers are the gamblers. The safest option is to have $110,000 on heads, and $110,000 on tails. Regardless of who wins, $100,000 will be paid out and $110,000 will be collected. They are guaranteed to make $10,000 profit in both situations. That is the secret to a sports-book’s long-term success.
Now we need to ask ourselves if a sporting event that has a true 50/50 probability is released to the public, will the amount of action naturally balance out to both sides? The answer is no.
How oddsmakers set their lines
Lets make up an imaginary game to bet on. Lets pick NFL teams, since spreads are the easiest way to demonstrate how odds are make. Think of a game that has the defending Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots hosting the lowly Jacksonville Jaguars. Remember, this is an imaginary scenario so throw out the Tom Brady suspension. And I am not suggesting that this would be the actual line if these teams played.
Vegas oddsmakers crowd in the back-room of a casino. Sweating over their calculators, they determine that the true spread of this game should be 5.5. If you were to set that as the spread and ran the game an infinite amount of times, both teams would more or less move towards .500 against-the-spread records. I like to call this number the true odds/line.
Now what would happen if you opened up this game with a 5.5 number? People see the great Patriots are hosting the terrible Jaguars, and they can bet on them to cover for less than a touchdown. You may have a few people betting on the Jaguars, but the majority of the action is coming in on New England. Its the same story as before; although they have a 50% chance of making a ton of money if the Jaguars cover, they also have the huge risk of losing a ton of money if they do not.
This is why you will rarely see the true spread of a game released by a sports-book as the opening line. Instead, they adjust their odds based on the public perception of the game. What line could they release that would get roughly 50% of money on the Patriots, and 50% of the money on the Jaguars? This new opener, which I like to call the perceived odds/line, would be something between 7.5 and 8.5. Now you would still have the group of people who cannot get off the Patriots, and you will have some action coming in on the Jaguars now that you have provided their betting supporters with enough points.
Now we have a game that has a true-spread of 5.5, and a perceived/released spread of 8.5. Now what?
Make the right bet
A trained monkey (and probably an untrained one, too) could tell you what to do next. If both teams would cover the spread ~50% of the time with a spread of 5.5, and you are given a spread of 8.5, you must absolutely bet on the Jacksonville Jaguars. Having an advantage of 3 points is huge. Mathematically, if you make enough “good bets” using this assessment method, you have absolutely no choice but to make money. And if you have the bankroll necessary to make large wagers, you will be able to make a living with sportsbetting. Its the only option.
At the start of this article I said that it could be dangerous to have extensive sports knowledge. This knowledge is fine as long as it is only being used to determine what the true odds of a game should be. If you start expanding, picking the teams you like, using trends, you start picking based on which side you like more. 98% of people bet like this, and thus 98% of people will end up being career losers. If you are not comparing true odds to perceived odds, you cannot make money with sports-betting.
I will have many articles posted on Advantage over the next few months regarding how to specifically determine what the true odds of a game should be for each sport. There is a different process, but for the most part, if you understand how the market works, you should be able to determine which way a spread has shifted. If you cannot find a reason why anyone would want to bet on the Jaguars in this particular game, then there will likely be value on them.
Match-fixing is interesting. It makes for a great story.
Don’t get me wrong, its a scum operation ran by evil villains who want to ruin sports, but its still intriguing to hear about. It happens more often than people think. Information about it rarely leaks as most of it goes undetected.
Until now, there are no media outlets dedicated to discussing match-fixing. You may find rumblings on a few sports-betting forums here and there, but nothing dedicated to understanding its ins-and-outs.
Welcome to Frostbet’s Matchfixing blog. Every single suspicious sequence in every single sport broken down. We will analyze betting trends and line movement to try to paint a clear picture of what happened, if anything at all.
First post. I am not going to pretend to be a good writer. Maybe in a few years I will look back on this post and see an improvement. Probably not, I’ll never get offended if you call me out on it. The goal of this website – this sounds like a fucking book report – is to create a betting resource written by people who know what they are talking about. There is a lot of bullshit that gets churned out by ESPN, FOX, ESPN, ESPN, and other mainstream outlets (like ESPN). The reason why this happens is because they employ writers. These people generally do not know anything regarding professional sports-betting, thus are either misinformed in their articles, or turn to shady Vegas personalities (scammers) for advice.
This website is going to have contributions from people who are professional sports-bettors first, and writers second (or third, or fourth – fuck, if you have writing experience, you will not be accepted). I am not even sure if I will let anyone else write articles for the website. Thats the type of person that I am – trust nobody.
I do not want this website to turn into a place that shills touts. To be honest, I will rarely have picks released on this website unless its something that I am very confident about and have the need to share it. There will be season previews and odds discussions. I will also have a set of sports-book reviews and guides on how to bet on sports professionally. Yup, as a full-time job. Its really not that hard. You just need the correct advice from someone who does not have an agenda.
I hope you guys stay along for the ride. I have a lot of work to do to get the website operational. Hopefully I will have my first official article up within the week. It will suck and no one will read it.
