The below was run as a three-part newsletter series that I am going to pull together here for folks to have in one place should they want to return back to it. I have made minor edits to make it work as one long newsletter.
I hope you enjoy!
The topic/question I get asked the most about on Twitter / DM / email / wherever people use to message me is what type of things that have made me a successful and, most importantly, profitable gambler long term. This is a great question and one absolutely worth the time to discuss.
The first thing to note is being a long-term profitable gambler is VERY HARD. It takes lots of time and effort. It took me LOTS of losing to learn hard lessons that I am hopeful to impart here. The second thing to note is that only about 5% of gamblers are profitable long-term. Yes, read that again. Winning is not the norm, losing is. Remember this when folks claim on Twitter that they win 90% of their bets or are up some insane amount of units.
Given the very long length of this newsletter covers:
Why I do this
Buying picks
The 3 Magic Words
Betting Math
Bankroll Management
Radical transparency
Trust the Process
What not to do
I hope you enjoy and I know this is absurdly long so you might end up reading it in parts, enjoying it over your lunch today or printing it to read on the can at work!
Why I do this
Funny enough I am actually going to start this whole thing with the 2nd most frequent question I get which is why I do this and give it all away for free as it will help give context to the rest of this newsletter. The answers are simple:
I truly love gambling and I want others to enjoy it and it is always more fun when you win
I am not a “capper”. I am someone who bets and I am just sharing my picks with you like I do many of my friends.
I would be running my models, doing my analysis anyway so this is just me writing it down
While running this site adds a bunch more work, for the time being, I find it fun and when it stops being fun so will my posts.
There are many folks who truly want to get better at gambling and if I can be of any help to those people I would love to and, as I point below, once you start selling picks you are disincentivized to help others
For those who just want to turn a profit, I hate that people feel they have to pay for picks that aren’t profitable so I want profitable picks to be available to people who can’t afford $100 a monthly subscription or to bet $100 per unit
I make my bets just before I hit publish so others tailing doesn’t effect me at all other than in horse racing and frankly I do not think we are moving markets
The reason I am doing articles like this is that I want people to have a positive and healthy relationship with gambling and I think if you follow what I lay out here and in Part 2, the chances for that to be the case will be increased.
Buying Picks
I figure I would get this controversial a topic out of the way early…..When you set out gambling you have to decide why you are doing it. Are you looking to personally become a better gambler, are you in it to make money or both? Note, your answer can be different by sport and where you are in your journey, I know mine is / has been.
If your goal includes “becoming a better gambler” then I would tell you buying picks will do next to nothing to help you improve unless the person selling you the picks is willing to sit down and explain to you exactly what went into their picks (they likely won’t1) or be willing to chat through your view of their picks.
While the following tweet is true about trading it is also true about gambling:2
If you are going to buy picks because you want to make money and you do not care about improving as a bettor yourself, I totally get it so here are a few helpful rules of the road as you consider who to give your hard earned money to:
Check to see if there are people out there giving away picks for the sport you are interested in for free - trust me, there are tons of us.
Ask the person how long they have been a bettor, what is their exact profitability and do not just assume because they are active and have a big following on twitter or youtube this is something they do3.
Ask whether they publish their results publicly or, if not, if they would be willing to send you something that shows their tracking4. They should have this readily available (it should be updated at least weekly, but preferably daily) and it should break down their information in numerous ways that include at minimum weekly, monthly, annually, all time as well as cuts by sport and types of bets and amount wagered, etc.
Make sure they have reasonable bankroll management standards and watch out for folks who chase. This can take many forms but it will generally be them shortening their cards while raising units bet per side, starting to take big favs for big units, or starting to change their normal strategy. There is a reason most of gambling Twitter don’t have track records that are very long - it’s because they don’t practice effective bankroll management.
If you see someone saying “PLAY OF THE MONTH”, “lock emojis” or “10u (bomb emoji)”. Stay away.
Make sure you take into account the fee that they charge when you think about profitability. If you are a $10/ unit bettor and the service you are buying is $80/ month then you need that service to return at least 8u of profit for you to break even. Most of the people selling you picks do not do this math and will say it’s up to you to manage your own finances and they are right!! Do the math and see if they are worth the price!
Be wary of people who use betting jargon like “reverse line movement”, “fade the public”, “sharps are hammering X” or “chasing steam”.5 The footnote gets into some of the details why this is something you want to avoid but always ask “does this person actually have this info?” and that goes for ActionNetwork (they don’t) and VSIN (some do).
Have you ever seen someone post a pick that says “NY Giants +7” but when you look at your books they are +6? Many “cappers” will post picks with lines that are not real so ask the person where they get their lines.6
Ask the person whether they personally bet their picks. Never put your money where they are not willing to put theirs and you should absolutely feel comfortable asking to see copies of tickets and they should be willing to show you them immediately with dollar amounts visible! (I know I always have them on demand and have zero issue when someone asks to see one). Be wary tickets that do not not show you dollar amounts, do not show the time and date of when it was placed, or look like it’s been edited. I have caught many guys with fake tickets.
Find out how much the person uses for the units. Do not think just because they bet a lot of money they are good or because they bet small amounts they are bad, but if someone is using $5/unit and they are dropping “10u play of the month bombs” it is good to know they are really risking $50 if you are sitting there wagering $100/unit and risking 1k.
If you have ever watched the TV show My 600lb Life you know Dr Now has a book that is titled Scales Don’t Lie, People Do. This is the sports equivalent of that - If you buy someone’s picks, make sure to keep your own track of their performance including the need to buy points because their lines are bullshit. While many “cappers” will report results they unfortunately tend to lie about them. Anyone remember my #IsYDCReal days? I know one twitter capper who recently claimed to be up 350 units in 9 months. If that were true (it isn’t) they wouldn’t be selling their picks on twitter and they would be the best gamblers of all time. If you can afford it, buy a service and just track their picks without betting them or bet them for like 1/4 of the risk they are telling you until you can verify their results.
Be careful of anyone who posts only winners. Take a look through the full timeline of what someone posts and you should be able to see quickly how often they are posting picks and how often they are posting winners. If they post often but infrequently post about winners, well they likely aren’t profitable. If they post a lot and seem to only win, they are likely a liar. You can even do quick math of their results on a ticket to see if it adds up or across posts to see if the math is consistent.
I am a believer that if you buy a service from someone it is because they are doing something you can’t / won’t do yourself. If that is the case then you should be willing / able to trust them fully and follow along with ALL their bets. If you buy a service and see something fishy or don’t believe you can follow their picks then you really should not be using them and be doing it yourself or finding someone else.
Remember, no one is an expert in everything so err on the side of folks who specialize in a specific sport or set of specific sports. Proceed with caution if a single person or group of people claim they can handicap NFL, MLB, NBA, Tennis, EPL, IPL, horses, UFC, Bellator, La Liga, CPL, Russian ping pong, AFL, horse racing, and F1
If you are someone who only buys picks and doesn’t do their own handicapping then you absolutely can keep reading this and Part 2 but you might not find the rest that helpful.
The 3 Magic Words
Years ago I taught the fall onboarding training for my company’s college grad new hires. The one question I got EVERY time I taught that class was “What will make me successful here?” and 3 word my answer to them is the same thing that will make you a successful gambler “Attitude and Effort”.
Look I am a pretty smart person, but I am not the smartest person in the world. I can’t control how smart but there are two things that are entirely in my control, my attitude and my effort.
Now, I believe these things are inextricably linked and frankly without the right attitude and the willingness to put in the effort nothing else I write here matters. It really doesn’t.
Thomas Edison once said “I didn’t fail, I just found 2,000 ways to not make a lightbulb. I only needed to find the one to way to make it work”.
When it comes to gambling you have to have the attitude of being willing to fail, to learn, to push yourself, to be humble, and most importantly to look yourself in the mirror and know your effort was worth it. Yes that is right, while your attitude needs to be one willing to accept losses, not sugar coat them, and to learn from them.
It can be really easy to remember the losses, especially the bad beats (Mito and my 175-1 ticket @ the PGA Championship will stick with me), but it is really important to not forget the successes as well (that three week run of 65-1, 10-1, 50-1 we had in golf about 6 weeks ago).
Another area where you can see this is how much effort are you willing to put in to learn. For example, a few weeks ago I put out my summer reading list. Did you look at that list? Did you buy any of those books? Did you buy one but not crack it open? You do not have to read every book on my list and certainly you can find your own list of books to help you, but hopefully your attitude is not one of “I can figure this all out myself”. If you find any good gambling books, I am more than happy to take recommendations myself! I just finished “The Logic of Sports Betting”, which was a reader recommendation.7
I could go on and on on this section, but just remember that you can have the best attitude in the world, but if you are not willing to put the effort it, then it doesn’t matter. As you will see why I say that but always remember this game takes LOTS of work.
Betting Math
The topic everyone LOVED in school….MATH!!!!! Okay okay I won’t get into too much detail and I promise this won’t get into multivariate calculus but there are certain things you need to know.
Okay, first thing we need to do is be able to take a money line and turn that into the % chance we think it will happen aka the implied odds. There are two equations you need (X represents the odds you see):
For negative MLs → X / (100+X)8
For positive odds → 100 / (100+X)
Let’s do two quick examples with odds you see frequently like -150 and +300:
For -150 we have 150 / 250 = 60%
For +300 we have 100 / 400 = 25%
Now when you hear gamblers talk you will hear them throw around the term “EV” as in “+EV” or “-EV”. EV stands for Expected Value and what this is referencing is “if this exact match played out multiple times how many times would this bet win?” and this simplistic answer is that you want to bet any time you have an EV advantage.
What does this mean practically? Well if you bet a 10-1 parlay (~9% chance) and you feel the true odds are closer to 6-1 (~14% chance) then you should absolutely bet it because while the books might be pricing in that you would only win that parlay 3 times over 30 bets so they get a profit, you actually will win it 5 times and you will have the profit!
You ONLY want to make bets where you believe you have +EV.9
Getting used to doing this math and be able to do it quickly will really help as you on your gambling journey.
Bankroll Management
One of the biggest areas where gamblers make mistakes and go broke is bankroll management. Let me lay out my basics:
Your bankroll should be the money you are willing to risk and lose gambling- THIS SHOULD NOT BE FOOD / RENT / MORTGAGE / COLLEGE MONEY
I use the 1% method. What that means practically is that for each sport I bet on I set a certain bankroll and 1% of that bankroll is my standard unit. For tracking purposes with my models, I use $100 per unit and that equates to a bankroll of $10K. Yes, that means that because I bet NFL, NBA, and PGA I keep 30k total as a baseline. Now that is likely excessive and you can do a 10k total bankroll and keep 1% across all sports and that is just fine!
If you losing 1u of your bankroll gives you stress / bad feelings, lower that number. DO NOT BET MORE THAN YOU CAN AFFORD OR ARE COMFORTABLE WITH
I bet in increments of .25u, .5u, 1u, 2u, 3u. Generally speaking the frequency of my betting decreases as I add risk. For example, in the entirety of the last two NFL seasons my bets were as follows:
3u - 11 bets
2u - 45 bets
1u - 274 bets
0.5u - 179 bets
A natural drawdown can be 20-30 units. That is normal variance. That is why you need to make sure you have the bankroll to withstand those dips. Smart gambling is not eliminating cold streaks, that’s honestly impossible. Smart gambling is extending your hot streaks and cutting your cold streaks short. This is one of the main reasons I take issue with twitter touts and those that sell picks as they usually have zero concept of bankroll management.
Now, while I am a proponent of tiered betting there are many very successful gamblers who believe in flat betting. The Sharp Plays10 is one of them and here is a link to his article on the topic.
Once you start winning, it is important to make sure you are being smart with your money across seasons. I would give you my thoughts, but honestly Pam Maldonando11 published a great article Betting 101: Football is over. Now what?. It gives some great advice as to what to do with your hard earned winnings and bankroll management. I generally bank half my winnings and roll half of them into the following year to increase my units size, but what you do with your money is up to you.
Radical Transparency
As they say in 12 step programs “the first step is admitting you have a problem”. If you do not track every bet you make and do so with an amount of detail that allows you to analyze it then you are unlikely to be profitable long term12.
Yes this take lots of effort, but the reason I am saying this is so important is because the real fact that sports betting is set up for you to lose. You winning is the exception, not the rule. Unless you can figure when, how and why you are losing you have zero chance at fixing it.
It is really as simple as that.
The largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Capital, got that way through what they call “Radical Transparency” and this is something I encourage you all to do with yourself and your betting.
If you have followed me for any length of time you know I practice #Transparency, but what you do not see is that I am maniacal behind the scenes about tracking literally every bet I make (I have for years) as well as making sure I understand why I am winning and why I am losing.
I interrogate my picks and my models like I am a CIA agent and as soon as I see something is not working I drop it, just ask all those who were with me for the disaster that was my NBA TitanicModel v2.0. I spent well over 100 hours building it and all it did was spit out losers. You need to be robotic in your decision-making and take emotion out of it. It killed me to realize I wasted all that time, but that was a sunk cost and I was never getting that time back and all I could do now was either try to fix it for a 3rd time (the first 2 fixes clearly failed) or take a deep breath, know it didn’t work and move on.
Always remember, the most important person you can be transparent with is you.
Trust the Process
One of my favorite things to say about gambling is that winning a bet doesn’t mean you made a good bet and losing doesn’t mean you made a bad one. As the professional gambler Annie Duke said “What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process."13
Anyone can win a single bet and there are lots of people who can be successful over shorter term time periods, but can you make your success something that is sustainable over years?
I have found that creating a repeatable process that I can follow gives me a much higher chance of success. Now somethings about that:
My process works for me and it may or may not work for you
My process is different by sport (if you want to see an example, I discussed my in-season NFL process here and my PGA process here)
My process is different in-season vs off-season
My process is one of the things I am constantly evaluating and evolving as needed
When gambling you are looking for opportunities to find value14 with the belief that over time that value will create profits. Once you have a process that is creating or identifying opportunities you should make sure to keep doing it until it no longer works.
Now, as I mentioned in prior parts of this series, understanding why you won and why you lost is very important. As many of you know, I struggled to find positive results in golf for much of the early part of this year. Then, in early May, I had enough data about what I was doing to step back and redo my process / calculation to account for the things I was doing wrong. My results improved and did so rapidly with an amazing run that landed us with back-to-back-to-back winners of 65-1, 10-1, and 50-1 and 8 straight weeks of profits.
Now you will note in the 4th bullet above I said my process is “evolving” and I chose that word carefully. I specifically did not say “changing”. Once you have identified something that works you have to exploit it, but as you are looking for edges the books are looking to close them so you need to be constantly be tweaking to stay ahead of the books.
Remember the scientific method the best problem solving device that us humans have ever developed and it warns us from assuming we are right with our hypotheses. In fact, it says that once you have a hypothesis you should assume it is wrong and prove it! That is what you should do with your betting “systems”, especially when they are seemingly successful! It is easy to be happy when things are going well, but you cannot rest on your laurels. You have to continue to push. Do not be like Kodak15!
What not to do
Being successful as a gambler is as much about what you do as it is what you do not do. I know that sounds funny, but not making a losing bet is just as good as making a winning one.
Here is a list of some things that I have done or seen others do that prevent or diminish long term success:
Forget to shop for the best lines - Like many things in the world, the difference between being successful vs losing can be pretty thin so you need to make sure you aren’t giving away anything at the margins. This means getting -3 vs -3.5 or getting -3 -110 vs -3 -115. Let’s talk math. At -110 a bettor has to win ~52.3% of their bets to break even. At -115 a bettor has to get to ~53.4%. That means if you give up those 5 cents on the line you have to win 1 more bet out of every 100 to be profitable. That might not seem like a ton but over the long run that will add up on you.16
Go on Tilt or chase bets - Tilt is a poker term for when someone loses a hand, gets emotional, and starts to go off the rails. If you feel yourself starting to get that way you need to find a way to get yourself to either calm down or walk away from whatever betting you are doing. While chasing may work in the short run, it will not work long term and will result in you going broke so pleasssssse do not chase bets.
Have an inappropriate relationship with gambling - The sister to the tilt/ chase on - As The Sharp Plays put in his June 6th post “if you are getting emotional for any reason in betting…there is likely a problem within your betting that is worth you stepping back and reviewing. Sure you might get emotional after a bad beat or tough loss. However, if that doesn’t go away within 5 minutes, then it means you should spend the next 5 minutes assessing why.” (My note: it can be longer than 5 minutes, but not too much longer)
Giving into FOMO - Look, I am human and I absolutely have the “fear of missing out” and experience it with my gambling friends all the time, but giving in to it will lead you to making ill advised bets to try and catch up which will almost certainly set you back and will also usually require you to violate your bankroll management principles. Do not give into FOMO!! As we learned during a global pandemic there will ALWAYS be more sporting events to bet, even if it is horse racing in Oklahoma or ping pong in China.
Caring about other’s results more than your own - The only person it is fair of you to truly compare yourself with is you yesterday, last month, last year as that is the only person ever to have the same exact experiences17 as you. If you see someone doing well, that is great for them, but you do not know how they got there. If you find someone who does well that is willing to help you out by teaching / discussing things with you, awesome!!
Getting sucked in by what you see on social media - haha this works for all of life, but for gambling if you see someone post a huge winning ticket, do not get drawn offsides. You do not know how many bets they placed to get there. For example - I find it hilarious when I see sets of futures tickets for things like golf, tennis, soccer tournaments, that when you do the actual math there is actually no way to profit. They likely just want to tell everyone on Twitter they hit the winning ticket but not show that they lost money getting it.
Betting things you do not understand for large amounts - I believe in being an informed bettor so to me it is important that you understand the action you are placing including how the actual bet works, what will win / lose, and what is a profitable outcome vs not. For example, the World Cup is coming this winter and if you do not understand what “Qatar +2.25” means you should be wary of tailing it for 10u (bomb emoji). Another example is every time I put out horse picks I get a slew of questions about the mechanics of my wagers. I am more than happy to explain and I am all for teaching folks and helping them learn, but I get concerned with some of the questions. If you have questions about things I put out PLEASE ask me BEFORE you bet - I am pretty nice and will happily explain and trust me, you are better off missing a bet or two than you are betting things you do not understand.
Gambling will get you rich quick - Get rich quick schemes do not work and gambling is much more likely to get you broke quickly than it is to get you rich quickly. I do not care how many times you see someone on twitter claim they bet $5 and turned it into over $1 million. Successful gambling does not work that way long term. If you do that enough all you will do is eat away at your bankroll $5 at a time. Remember, if something looks too good to be true it is so make sure you have the right expectations for what your results will look like.
Trust someone who won’t show you full tickets - It is not possible to win every bet and I see tons of folks claiming outlandish results. Especially be weary if you see tickets posted with anything other than the ref number obscured18.
Trust someone who says things that don’t make sense - Look, I can’t force you or teach you to have common sense but somethings should be relatively straight forward. For example, I saw someone recently claim that they clear over 70u of profit per day. If that were true do we really think he would need to sell his gambling info on Twitter? Similar to people who claim that they are up hundreds of units per year. If they were soooooo unbelievable at gambling would they really be selling their picks to you on Twitter, Telegram or IG? No, they would not. They would be professionally gambling and / or part of a gambling syndicate. There are many people with deep pockets who are more than happy to buy someone and their methods if it would make them money19.
Looking at your losses as bad beats - Look there are DEFINITELY bad beats, but we as bettors can be wayyyyy too quick to chalk up a loss as a bad beat. Easy example was a few weeks ago when Doug Ghim shot a +7 in the final round of the 3M Open, including a double bogey on the final hole to screw up my +800 T10 ticket. Yes that hurt, but let’s remember that Doug Ghim is 193rd in the world (as of 7/31/22) for a reason. Him scoring poorly is very much in the realm of realistic possibilities and one of the main reasons we were getting the odds we got.
Gambling Lessons Learned Part 4 was published on August 9, 2023.
I hope you have found this series helpful. My DMs and my email (titanic.gambler@gmail.com) are always open for folks who have questions, want to chat or discuss my picks, betting strategy, their picks, or really anything.
Think of it from their perspective - if they teach you what they know then at best they are losing a subscriber and at worst they are creating a competitor so they have zero incentive to help you get better
Frankly, that whole tweet thread is amazing and is almost entirely applicable to gambling
Do NOT take this for granted. There is a very well know horse picks service (main service is $90 a month) that has a guy that charges $400 a month for his add on. While he claims to be profitable he actually doesn’t track his results and if you press him about his actual results (a friend of mine spoke to him and showed me the interaction, he then bought the service and tracked his picks for 4 months and the was down over 8,500 BEFORE you take into account his fees). When asked about it this capper will tell you people buy his picks for entertainment and not to make money and then some how tries to take into account rebates certain websites provide.
I would make sure this person is able to produce results for you very quickly, have at least 18-24 months of track record. Many twitter folks do not have any track record this long because they are in this to make a quick buck and likely are full of it.
Some of this stuff is interesting and would be notable if you weren’t already too late (if Sharps hammered Dolphins +7, but the line is now +4 most of that value may be gone), some of this is reasonable but you need to understand the nuances (the public can win and get hot so you need to be wary of solely relying on betting against the public) and some are complete nonsense (like reverse line movement).
Beware of anyone who says “a local” as that means it is likely that is a line you won’t be able to verify or get yourself.
I honestly didn’t love this book. It is a fine book, but I think it glosses over some important things and is really written for new comers to gambling.
Make sure you are using the absolute value of X
Okay, this might be me shoe horning it in here but I am going to go off for a minute….but Darren Rovell is an absolute clown who should not be trusted. Believing that if you read anything he puts out will help you get better at gambling then you also likely believe eating McDonald’s will help you get in shape. He has been found to push fake tickets and then there was this whopper that violates all that is holy in betting:
Give TSP a follow. He gives TONS of great information and a lot of it is free
Make sure to give Pam a follow on twitter and read her articles. She is fantastic.
If you do not know how to do this, email me - Titanic.Gambler@gmail.com. I have created a tracking spreadsheet I am happy to send to you. You can also use ActionNetwork (they have a pay and free product) that can allow you to track your action.
As I mentioned in Part 2 - Often times on Twitter you will see this referred to as “+EV” aka positive expected value. For example, if you had a parlay that paid 20-1, but you believe the true odds are 15-1, then you should bet that every single day because over time you will be profitable.
For those of us of a certain age, Kodak was the KING of all things photography. Yes, this was back in the stone ages when we had actual cameras and you didn’t know if your pictures were good until they were developed. Anyway, Kodak was far and away from the leader and they thought no one could knock them from their perch. They actually created the first digital camera in the 70s but feared it would hurt their main business so they didn’t continue to innovate and they couldn’t imagine a world without physical film. Sadly for their employees, shareholders, and the city of Rochester NY they were wrong.
Todd Fuhrman had a great tweet on this topic that shows the math of what your profit will look like at different records at -110 odds (the pic shows more than what the preview here shows)
This is a concept popularized by the controversial Dr. Jordan B Peterson. While he does promote many things I do not agree with, this is something that is VERY poignant.
My favorite one of these is someone posting their 400-1 parlays that they hit but obscuring how much they wagered. The reason this is important is what this person is likely doing is stealing someone else’s ticket they saw posted online or wagering 25 cents on a whole bunch of these things hoping to hit one so they can post it.
Those who have been long time Twitter subscribers of mine will know I have personally done this with some folks in the past