With football fast approaching, many cannot resist the temptation to bet on pre-season football. If you tell anyone you are doing it, you will be called a degenerate gambler. Now while you are guaranteed to get mocked, is betting on “NFLX”, or any pre-season game for that matter, shunned upon in the world of profitable sportsbetting?
The Big Question
When placing a bet, the one question you need to ask yourself is whether or not the wager you are making is a good bet. The true definition of a good bet is something that would generate a profit if bet an infinite amount of times. In nearly every situation, one side of the bet will do this, while the other side will subsequently net a loss.
We determine what side of a game is the profitable one by deducing what we believe to be the true odds of the match. What you see at your local sportsbook is not derived from math and probabilities, but rather the way the game is perceived by the gambler. The sportsbook wants to ensure that they are guaranteed a small profit regardless of which team wins, thus desiring to attract and equal amount of action to both sides. If they set everything based on probability, they would be at risk more times than not. The bigger the margin between the true odds that you have determined and the perceived odds set by the linemakers, the bigger the edge. Its that simple.
It would be foolish to criticize someone for making a bet that they were confident in saying that it abided by the latter criteria. If I am giving you +101 odds on the literal flip of a coin, you better be taking it.
The Bigger Question
Even if we understand everything said in the prior section, should we still be wagering on pre-season football? We need to ask ourselves if we have enough knowledge about the market to be able to evaluate the edge of an exhibition match. A lot of people who do not know what they are talking about will say that its all about having the “right information”. Lets be realistic, there is no information that you can apply to the full sixty-minutes of a pre-season football match that should be deemed valid. Do not kid yourself. Here is a so-called “Vegas expert” making a fool of himself on Twitter:
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Please tell me more about how your 4th string quarterback projects to match-up with the 232th string wide receiver. I dare you, I double-dare you motherf*cker. I do not think I need to go into much details about him, his TV show should speak for itself (in a bad way). Here is another character who has drawn a lot of controversy over the past year:
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We will get into some of the things Fezzik has done another time. He makes it clear that he believes there is money to be made in pre-season football. Hours later, he followed it up with this complaint:
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That honeymoon lasted longer than my own. F*ck, I’m cheap.
The Verdict
We get some laughs out of watching some of these guys try to come off as experts. The “information” that Steve Stevens has is either a lie or un-applicable. Anyone who tells you that pre-season football success comes from having inside tips are just trying to get inside your wallet. But this does not mean we should dispel the idea of making good pre-season bets.
Like I said in the introduction of this article, you would be a fool to laugh at someone who is making bets on the side of a game that they believe will win if bet an infinite amount of times. The pre-season is a different animal, and if you plan to take it on you should be analyzing it strictly from a perception stand-point. Do not humiliate yourself by trying to determine what the true spread or total of a game should be, but instead access how the masses betting on this game are interpreting it. The oddsmakers do not have any idea what is going on either. To ensure their success, they are playing the man, not the ball. I don’t think thats how that saying goes, but whatever.
Because you are throwing away the part of the handicapping process that involves determining the true spread, its difficult to access the magnitude of your edge. Enough knowledge of the market will allow you to know if you have it, but it is difficult to estimate it to a high degree of precision. With this, I condone betting on pre-season football under two conditions: (I) you place your bets strictly through interpreting how the game is being perceived, and betting accordingly, and (II) using one consistent unit size, preferably one that is half of your traditional wager. There is no such thing as a five-unit bomb in the pre-season. Unit size is determined by magnitude of edge, and only a liar has that information.