My Sports Betting Year

 

Before I get into this, a little background on my history as a gambler.

I never was one.  I would take note of point spreads purely academically as they might have related to This or That particular game.  I never bet with a bookie, and may have made a friendly five dollar wager with a friend on the World Series or Super Bowl over the years, but that was pretty much it.  I made my first legal sports bet in 2002 when Marilyn and I made our first visit to Las Vegas.  When the Sportsbook opened at the Rivers Casino here in town, I made sports wagers there, never for more than five or ten bucks, but I vowed that I would never get a sports betting app on my phone because I didn't want it to be "easy" to make bets.  So, I was content to make a visit to the Rivers every four or six weeks, play a little black jack and make one or two five or ten dollar sports bets.

Then in 2020, the pandemic arrived and everything closed down, and I could no longer go to the Casino.  I relented and opened a $150 account with Fan Duel, and a Sportsbook was now, literally, in the palm of my hands.

I began betting more frequently.  I made small wagers.  A five dollar bet was an extravagance.  I also began keeping track of what I made at Marilyn's urgings.  Her theory was that if I didn't keep track of wins and losses, I would never know just exactly how well I was doing, and that I would be in danger of needlessly just pissing away money.  The making of bets and the tracking of them on a spreadsheet became a hobby of sorts.  It also served as a distraction for me throughout the final two years of Marilyn's illness.  It was therapy, although I know that most licensed therapists would hardly recommend  "gambling" as a way to cure your ills.

So here I am, and how did I do this year?  First off,  a definition:  The gambling "fiscal year" for me runs from the Monday after the Super Bowl and it ends on Super Bowl Sunday. so this past Sunday served as the final day of my 2022 Gambling Year.   The Results:

• Total # of Wagers Made - 1,037
• Total Amount Wagered - $3,980.71
• Total Amount Returned - $4,512.35
• Total Profit - $531.64
• Return on Investment - 13.4%

I will save you the trouble of doing the arithmetic and tell you that my average amount bet per wager amounted to all of $3.83.  This makes me far from being a High Roller, and, I think, keeps my little venture into sports wagering well within the parameters of being a harmless hobby.   I am quite pleased that I was able to write this little summary with black rather than red ink.  It's always more fun to win than it is to lose, but I am more proud of the fact that I have been able to maintain a degree of self-discipline that has kept my wagering on a small level, where I never bet more than I was willing to lose.  I do know that the lack of such discipline, combined with other addictive behaviors, can lead to real and very dangerous problems in a person's life, and in fact, I have known such people.   A gambling addiction can be a very serious problem.

On Monday morning of this week, the first day of the 2023 Gambling Year, I opened up a brand new spreadsheet to track my wins and losses.  So far, I have made four wagers for a total of $19.60 and collected $22.60, a three dollar profit and a ROI of 15.3%.  Would love to maintain that for the year.  Of course, my average wager amount per wager was $4.90, so I am going to have to rein in on that a bit.

Let me close with this tribute to all tin horn gamblers everywhere.

The Timberwolves Experiment

I am hoping that people who are more serious and more seasoned gamblers that I will read this entry and offer their comments and advice after doing so. 

This whole thing started a couple of weeks back when my buddy Dan said to me, Hey, if you take a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates, who everyone knows is going to stink, and will struggle to avoid losing 100 games in 2021, if you bet on them to lose every game on the Money Line, will you end up winning money over the course of 162 games?

Seems simple, yet something that seems so simple is probably too good to be true, so I thought I would give it a test.  I would take the team with the worst record in the NBA at the time, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and I would bet $1 on them to lose (actually, you are betting on their opponents to win, but the get the idea) each of their next ten games.  This was the result, and yes, I know that ten games is a ridiculously small sample size.

	T’Wolves Opponent	Bet	Won	Lost	Net
1/31	Cleveland	1.00	0	1.00	(1.00)
2/1	Cleveland	1.00	1.47	0	0.47
2/3	San Antonio	1.00	1.30	0	0.30
2/5	OKC	1.00	0	1.00	(1.00)
2/6	OKC	1.00	1.86	0	0.86
2/8	Dallas	1.00	1.25	0	0.25
2/10	LAC	1.00	1.50	0	0.50
2/12	Charlotte	1.00	1.57	0	0.57
2/14	Toronto	1.00	0	1.00	(1.00)
2/16	LAL	1.00	1.31	0	0.31
10 Game Totals		10.00	10.26	3	0.26

As you can see, the T'Wolves went 3-7 in that stretch, and I actually DID make money: $.26, or 2.6% of the amount invested.  Of the seven games that their opponents won, the yield totaled $10.26, or an average of $.47 per win.  To answer Dan's question, and using the same math just for arguments sake, the answer is NO, you can't make money in the way that he proposed over the course of a long season.

Let's say that the Pirates will go 62-100 this coming season, and you bet $1 (or $5 or $10 or $100) on every game, you have invested $162.  Take off $62 for the games that the Pirates will win.  If the average yield for each Pirate loss nets you $.47 (as it did in the T'Wolves grid), you will have collected a total of $147 from your bookmaker, and will have lost a total of $15 (162-146) over the course of the season.

Where you can make money is if you  manipulate your bets, and bet more on games where the yield (i.e., the odds) is greater.  The biggest yields above were games when Minnesota played poorer teams, more comparable to themselves, $.86 against OKC, $.57 against Charlotte. Had you bet $1.50 on those games the yields would have been $1.29 and $.80 , respectively.  In the Pirates example, that would be when they played teams like the Rockies or the Giants.  That takes a little more of an investment of time on your part, and then there's the risk.  You will notice, that the biggest payoff for the T'wolves was $.86 against the Thunder, and you will also notice that the T'Wolves actually defeated OKC in the other game they played against them.  And you will have to say the course.  Even teams like the Pirates will have a streak where they might win six of eight or eight of eleven games.  That's baseball, that's why they call it gambling.

So, it turns out that Dan's initial proposal - making the same bet on every single game - was flawed, but it also showed that with a little work and effort, you can - probably - make some dough by betting against a lousy team over the course of a season.

As for me, I am going to continue The Timberwolves Experiment for ten more games, and maybe try to work it a little better, upping some bets, perhaps lowering others, just to see where it takes me.