Most sportsbooks are known to take aggressive steps to counter winning players, usually by drastically reducing their betting limits or 86ing them outright. However, there has been little public discussion of what exactly prompts a book to take such action. (Hint: it’s not just how much you made from them.) How is it that some professionals have been able to take the money for years and move on?
Plug alert: I’m hosting a 100% charity fundraiser in Las Vegas in August called Game Show Boot Camp, and one of our workshops is about how to audition in front of TV producers. I like to offer a thought experiment: “what would the absolute worst competitor look like (eg slow the game down to a glacial pace, speak so quietly that the audience can’t hear you) and how can I do the opposite of to this?”
In that spirit, let’s imagine what you would do if for some reason you were trying to get banned as soon as possible and discuss how to avoid being that guy.
Size your bets recklessly
I started betting on sports online in the mid-2000s. There, the limits were transparent: if you were ever curious about how much action would be taken on an event, you could type $1,000,000 into the betting box and see what countered the computer.
When I played for the first time in Las Vegas a few years later, I discovered that they do things differently here. If you show up at the window and eagerly ask how much you can bet on a prop, you immediately begin to profile yourself as the “wrong” type of customer. Even if they take a sizable bet from you this time, they’re keeping an eye on you from the start.
Think of two types of customers: one is a casual gambler looking for some action (ie, the sportsbook’s favorite type of player), and the other has inside information that Tom Brady is coming out of retirement. Which of these guys would want to bet every penny they’ll be allowed, instead of a specific round number? Don’t make yourself too obvious.
(Incidentally, I found that in many shops asking for a $3,000 bet was a success, while asking for betting limits resulted in a cap of $1,000. This is yet another reason to gamble.)
Even on an app that clearly reveals the maximum bet, betting that exact dollar amount is the kind of move that automatically gets you on a list. While this list includes both sharpshooters and gambling addicts, it doesn’t take a sportsbook genius to figure out which one you are.
How should you size your bets to avoid the spotlight? Of course it depends on the list of sports and the situation, but in general I have found that betting 70-80% of the limit in betting apps is a sweet spot where you still have a good profit, but do not hinder the computer’s built in algorithm for bookmark your account. At some point, you’ll still be done with a manual review, but you should stay that way longer.
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Bet both sides of the same game
Many winning players bet on games they don’t have an opinion on, simply because they can find a price outside the market. Sometimes the market changes enough that taking the other side looks extremely tempting – you can lock in a safe value and reduce your risk in the process, perhaps creating a liquid middle. Should you?
In a vacuum, sportsbooks should love customers who get both sides: the book collects a 4.5% vigilance on transactions (at least in theory) and you’re increasing their total betting volume without breaking even. on each side. However, there are two main problems here:
- This is something that professionals often do and amateurs don’t, so it seems suspicious
- It is extremely easy for the sportsbook computer to automatically report your account whenever you do
On the rare occasion that a sportsbook has actually acknowledged why it closed my account, this was usually the cause. The good news is that they will often let you off with a warning the first time, but my advice is to never bet both sides in the same shop. (It should be fine to do this in different applications.) You don’t want to draw a bullseye on the back.
Clear the board
It goes by many names—board-clearing, steam-chasing, forward running—but by any name it’s the practice of watching like a hawk for a big market move or breaking news, and then betting on the side of hot in a shop that hasn’t fixed the line yet. This will make you money in the short term, but it will quickly make you persona non grata.
Sportsbooks hate board sweepers, and with very good reason. The relationship between a shop and a sharp bettor is based on a covenant: your bets tell us when our odds are low, you earn some money from us, and we use that information to more accurately determine the spread point. At least two Vegas sports books will also take large bets from gamblers known to have inside information on athletes’ health. For those shops, it’s worth a thousand dollars in expected value to know when a quarterback is hiding an injury, because they can now set their odds of drawing action on that QB’s team. Information is king.
Board sweepers take the book’s money without offering anything of value in return. Usually they’ll bet in response to breaking news on Twitter or a syndicate that moves the entire market—publicly available facts that the book would include in their point spread just seconds after you place a bet. In most stores, if you’re taking the money without providing useful information, they won’t let you play.
Unless you’re the type of player who finds shady ways to keep flying under the radar, clearing the board isn’t a long-term recipe for winning.
Focus too much on one market
It’s hard enough to consistently beat a betting market, let alone one. For many bettors, the best strategy is to stick to a specific low-limit market (eg NFL player props or Atlantic 10 basketball) that is more prone to mispriced lines because players the bigs don’t bother with it and the starter isn’t too concerned. by setting an exact number.
Your short-term returns can be very good, but if you focus too much on one type of bet, the sportsbook will eventually notice. I once found a shop that estimated its NHL team total by duplicating another operator’s lines, but the duplicator included overtime and shootout when the creator did not. Since about a quarter of the games go to OT, I had a huge advantage betting the bottom on almost every team – until the day my advantage, along with my betting limits, suddenly went to zero. Even pro-friendly sportsbooks have responded to my action by removing certain betting markets altogether, knowing there must be a reason I continue to play them so aggressively.
How can you avoid killing your golden goose? It’s hard to say exactly how much you can win before the sportsbook catches up with you, but you should at least try to mix in some other types of camouflage bets, rather than betting on every prop on the table.
Final Thoughts
While you are betting, consider how the sportsbook will perceive your action and avoid obvious statements. I once had a ticket writer tell me I had written “sharp” on my forehead in permanent marker while placing five big MLB futures bets on a trip to the window – I couldn’t keep playing that store much longer. Be smarter than me.
If you want to meet and learn from TV icons like James Holzhauer, Amy Schneider, Brad Rutter and more, Game Show Boot Camp is coming to Las Vegas August 19-21. We will have workshops on how to impress TV producers and be a great competitor, an official Jeopardy! audition, and the opportunity to compete against the greats. There will also be a main event, Titan Throwdown, where contestants face ten champions from The Chase, Jeopardy and Master Minds. All proceeds from both events benefit homeless and disadvantaged Las Vegas high school students.
