I like to win.

That’s the short answer, anyway.

I don’t play casino games. I don’t play the lottery. And while there are people who can beat sports betting, slots, and the lottery, I’m not one of them (at least right now).

Nobody asks me if I play the lottery, though. On the other hand, I get asked a lot if I sports bet. I like sports, I play fantasy football, I like data, I worked for a casino, I play poker, a lot of the pieces are there. I get that it’s easy to assume I’d also sports bet.

Here’s why I don’t.

It’s hard to win

Very few sports bettors are profitable. Citing a public number here, let’s say fewer than 5%.

Why do such few bettors win? If you’re picking the winner of a football game, isn’t it 50/50?

Like any game you’d see at a casino, the sportsbook sets lines with a built-in house edge. That’s why you may see odds like -110. -110 explained in human terms is that you’d need to bet $110 to get $100 profit back from the sportsbook if your bet wins.

A 50/50 bet would be +100. You bet $100 to profit $100 if you win. Going from +100 to -110 may not seem like much, but it makes a big difference in the long-term profitability of most sports bettors. If you’re making all your bets at -110 odds, you don’t just need to be right more than half the time, you need to be right more than 52.4% of the time.

A lot of people think they can beat 52.4%. But the best sports bettors are winning in the mid-to-high 50s. And some have plotted out the quick napkin math as to how much of an outlier a big winner is.

I know the odds are against me. I’d need to have reason to believe I can be that much better than everybody else.

The habits of winners

I was fortunate to be able to chat with some professional sportsbook operators when I worked in the industry. I learned a lot from those conversations.

Winners place their bets at the right time

Usually this means right when lines are released. Some winners had very advanced predictive models, which helped them identify good bets quickly. Most NFL lines are set Sunday nights, a week before the games. A bunch of bets from sharp bettors come in, the sportsbooks move their lines to something more in line with what the top bettors think it should be. If you are betting on an NFL game the morning of kickoff, the line is probably much more efficient (and harder to have an edge on).

Winners beat the closing lines

Kind of related to the last paragraph. If you pick an NFL game to go over 50 points and the total shifts from 50 to 54, you’re feeling really good about your bet. That’s because you got four points of what’s called “closing line value”. Someone may bet over 54 points at the same odds you did. It’s the same odds but a much worse bet — because it’s more likely the game goes over 50 points than over 54 points. 

Winners shop the lines

Different sportsbooks ma offer different odds on the same bet. So the best bettors place their bet at the better odds. It’s burdensome to do, but as we saw earlier, small odds changes compound over time.

Winners will bet on markets where they may know more than the sportsbook

It’s probably not as much the case anymore, but WNBA was an example of a sport where some bettors who knew their stuff were consistently able to win. The sportsbooks didn’t set optimal lines because not enough action was coming in for it to be a top priority. NFL markets are very efficient by Sundays because so much money moves through them that the sportsbooks learn where lines should be.

On that same thread, winners might bet in popular sports, but on things that didn’t get much attention, like a 2nd half total (how many points would be scored in the 2nd half of a game).

Most bettors do none of these things. They didn’t sound appealing to me, either. Player props might be an exception, though for season-long bets like Super Bowl Champion, you’re giving the casino an interest-free loan and would often be better just investing the bet into an index fund.

The no-win situation

While we think of sportsbooks as wanting to get even action on both sides of a bet so they can guarantee themselves a profit, not all sportsbooks actually optimize towards that.

We talked about how the top offshore sportsbooks welcome action from sharp bettors. Many sportsbooks operating in the United States try to target “squares” (non-sharp bettors), and actually will not accept bets from winning bettors. Usually this is in the form of “limiting”, in which a player’s maximum bet amount is reduced to the extent it wouldn’t be worth their while to go through the effort of placing a bet.

When sportsbooks are doing this, it sucks a lot of the aspiration out of things. Either you’ll lose, or you’ll win a little bit and get limited by the sportsbook.

Conclusion

We’re past the peak time for this, but the easiest way to make money in sports betting is to sign up, get a generous bonus (you might need to place a bet to unlock it), and withdraw your money.

It’s very disappointing how legalized sports betting has turned out. I liked the idea of it before. But that opinion aged poorly. I probably should’ve expected that with how badly DraftKings and Fanduel botched the daily fantasy sports hype cycle. Sports betting ads are everywhere, integrated into everything, it feels. A lot of people are developing gambling problems. And it’s messing with the integrity of the sports themselves.

So that’s why I don’t sports bet.