Episode 32

Andrew Pace [00:00:00]:

Shane. It made you feel stupid, didn't it?

Shane Mercer [00:00:02]:

Well, you know what it made me be like? Oh, yeah, I mean, of course, you know, I do this all the time. Welcome to another episode of behind the Lines, the only podcast purifying the sports betting industry stream. What does that mean exactly? Well, we are giving you the average recreational sports bettor all the tools you need to succeed in this arena, which is really designed for you to fail. All right, if you're following the show and you've been following us for a little while, remember to like, download, subscribe. If you're new to the show, like, download and subscribe and you can follow us on all the socials at inplayLIVE. And if you want to see what inplayLIVE is all about behind the scenes, we've got a promo code for you for you to join that is 'BEHINDTHELINES'. All caps. All right, Pace, we are going to be oh, I should introduce Pace Andrew Pace, the founder of In inplayLIVE with me as usual.

Shane Mercer [00:01:04]:

All right, Pace, with all of that stuff out of the way, our topic today is resulting, and I'm really interested and sort of intrigued by this whole topic of resulting. I don't think a lot of people out there know exactly what it means and we will get to that in a moment. But first we have to talk about barstool and score bet and this whole debacle that has taken place over the weekend. And now here we are recording this on Tuesday. It is still unresolved, pace, this is the hottest topic in inplayLIVE sort of in the community itself right now.

Andrew Pace [00:01:45]:

Please don't say that. Please don't say that.

Shane Mercer [00:01:48]:

I mean, this is what everybody's talking about. All right, so for everybody who's not in the community and has no idea why we're talking about barstool and score bet again, because it seems like this sports book comes up very often here on this podcast, explain to the people what transpired this weekend.

Andrew Pace [00:02:07]:

The first thing I have to say is I don't have direct experience with it, but one of the things that I found to be very cool is the lens that we have at inplayLIVE. So obviously the scope of how different sportsbooks are handling different things at different times, but also in different locations. So seeing a sports book settle something in Colorado that was actually voided across Canada, settling it correctly in Colorado or New Jersey, so we've seen stuff like that over the course of time. And I'm glad we're talking about resulting right now because what happened with barstool and the score is kind of, in a way, resulting.

Shane Mercer [00:02:45]:

That's exactly what it is.

Andrew Pace [00:02:47]:

Where the result is already known and then basing your decision off of the result already being known. So essentially what happened was, and we've seen this happen a lot, so I think this is probably the time that I have seen it where the most people have been involved with it. So there was an incident last college football season where a few different sports books left bad lines up and a bad line could range anything from something where the outcome has already occurred. And in theory, you're placing no risk on the wager if you know what the winning side was to a line that maybe has an advantage because they left it up too long, or they left it up after something had occurred, but it hasn't won yet. And you're just simply getting an advantage over that line because it's still available. And interestingly enough, Shane, I think we had a discussion about how when new sports books do come out and I think we discussed about this specifically in the context of Barstool and the score, they can make mistakes and they're more prone to making mistakes. And we did a whole episode on odds providers and interestingly enough, about three years ago, I was very involved privately in my own research of Kambi, the Kambi odds provider, and what their services were and how sort of prevalent they were in the industry. And this was around the time when there was only a few states legalized and Kambi was being used by Barstool.

Andrew Pace [00:04:37]:

Barstool actually wasn't even out yet, but when they came out, Kambi was being used by Barstool, but they're also being used by Eight Eight, eight Sport at the time, which was a pretty big sports book in New Jersey and definitely in the UK and across Canada. And they were also being used by DraftKings. And when I was doing that research, one of their big discussions that they put out there into the world of sports betting was that if you go out and do this on your own and you don't use someone that has this experience and overall understanding of the sports betting landscape and marketplace, you're going to be exposed to significant risk. And they were pretty adamant about that. And I think that that was one of their arguments in reference to DraftKings leaving them. And the reason why they said that was because they had seen over their history, they've been in business since, I think the late 90s, early 2000s for sure, seen odds providers or sports books leave them, try to do their own thing and then actually come back to them. And here we are now with Winbet, more or less closed, and Fox Bet more or Less Closed, two books that couldn't handle the risk of their bad lines. So they're not a major, major sports book that people were using as their primary option.

Andrew Pace [00:06:15]:

And where does that leave you? That leaves you with Sharp bettors coming and finding you and exposing you for your flaws and then as a result, your profitability is really challenging, especially when you're giving those players a long leash because of the fact that you're trying to be competitive. So the score got caught with the score in Barstool switched over completely to their own odds provider after this transition away from Dave Portnoy and Barstool, the company, even though they're still called Barstool Sportsbook, and they got caught with their pants down in a big way on the weekend where they left all these lines up. And not only that, if you bet on the line, it was paying out. So if you had one dollars in your account, you would turn it into $2. And then if you bet $2 on the next bet, it would turn into $4 and then $8. So people didn't need to deposit. It was kind of like this little infinite money glitch, and people ran up tens and tens and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, what's crazy about this is I don't know what the figure is, but I'm going to say if you withdrew less than $5,000 because some people, the way different people figure out how to best handle these situations, I find always has some discrepancies.

Andrew Pace [00:07:46]:

So you might get one person who goes, can we parlay all these and can we do this and can we do that? And they're getting paid out in a whole bunch of different ways. Whereas another person who just goes all in on one bet and then doesn't get paid right away, potentially and didn't do any sort of rollover, but if you had $5,000 or less and this is crazy. And this is something that I never expected to change in the betting industry that has with some of these major sports books automated payouts and ones that pay out fast. So my experience in this industry has been that it is hard to get your money and it certainly takes at least 24 hours. And there are people who did this that cashed out and have the money in their bank account. They'll lose their accounts, of course, like their barstool and score accounts, but they actually have their money in their bank account. But then the other side is what happened to everyone else, which is they did this. They tried to get as much money as they could.

Andrew Pace [00:08:49]:

Maybe they tried to withdraw, maybe they didn't. Maybe you tried to withdraw over $5,000 and it didn't go through an automated process. It needs some sort of manual review. And what they did is they basically suspended more or less, every single person's account in North America and claimed to have it resolved by now. And here we are shooting this on Tuesday. This all happened on Sunday, and there's been no resolve and really no communication either.

Shane Mercer [00:09:19]:

Yeah, very little communication. So I am directly involved with this. I'm glad you referenced the idea of an advantage line versus a broken line. And so I got my money in on an advantage line. It was Daniel Jones, over 20 and a half rushing yards, and I took that line before he had 20 and a half rushing yards. So I got my wager in, felt good about it, and then he passes 20 and a half rushing yards and it's still open. And I think that's when everybody started to realize, wait a minute. All of these lines are still open.

Shane Mercer [00:10:04]:

And there were a whole host of them player props that had already won other wagers that had already won. And then people were getting you kind of explained it. After that, they were just adding money in getting wins right away because I took a player prop. I wasn't able to get paid right away. I had to wait for the game to finish, and the game did finish, and they paid it out, and about an hour later, they took it all back and put it back into a sort of suspension. Not my account being suspended, but the wager kind of in a limbo zone of still being open and grayed out and not paid out and that kind of thing. And there's been absolutely no communication whatsoever from the sports book just saying, hey, we're still working out this wager, trying to figure out what happened here, nothing like that. They haven't done anything proactively.

Shane Mercer [00:10:56]:

So I find that to be a bit of just poor PR, poor communication, poor customer service, right. If you know that you have a problem, send an email, send a mass email out and say, hey, this event, New York Giants, Arizona Cardinals, wagers from this event are under review. We hope to have it resolved within X amount of time. But there's been nothing, right? Nothing, not a peep from them. And I know many people have tried to reach out to them, and they're basically being told, yeah, we don't know, we're hoping to get it resolved. And so that's really unfortunate. Now, you also referenced Kambi in there, which I just want to point out, I think Kambi famously has also had its own issues with broken lines going up, and they pay it out every time.

Andrew Pace [00:11:49]:

Pay them.

Shane Mercer [00:11:49]:

Right. They just pay them out, and I think they move on. And your account could potentially get limited after that if you did take a broken line. But for the most part, they pay it out, they move on, and that's the end of it, right?

Andrew Pace [00:12:03]:

Yeah, exactly. And how each book handles that is up to them, of course. And there's a good chance that the score in Barstool made a decision that they were going to be the reputable ones in the business, and now, because of the liability that they've created, that's why they're taking so long in figuring out how they're going to handle it. And not to mention that all the revenue then they missed on the Monday night doubleheader and baseball throughout the week, and then Champions League, all that.

Shane Mercer [00:12:34]:

Yeah, I actually thought that they would have it sorted before the Monday night doubleheader. I thought that okay, this sports book wants to resolve this before Monday night. And either void the bets and people will have their cash back in their accounts to wager again for Monday night with the hopes that people will go and lose the money or pay the bets out completely. And again hope that people will go and bet on Monday Night Football and lose their money. But Monday night came and went and nothing from them. And now, yeah, here we are, Tuesday, midday Tuesday, and still nothing. How long do you think that this could possibly go on for?

Andrew Pace [00:13:16]:

Well, so all I can speak to is my experience, and I've told this story a couple of times throughout the in inplayLIVE community and there's a number of members that are local here with me in BC that went through this issue on this particular day. But we had a day where one of the local sports books here was and the odds provider for this sports book is Scientific Gaming. And they did a similar thing to what the score did that day. The difference here being that it was all day, it was a Saturday, and mostly what it was was getting advantages, not actual direct wins or losses. And I started the day with $80,000 in my betting account. I would call that like a banner account. Personally, I can go through what my best accounts have ever been and there's some pretty crazy numbers. Like I have a 280,000, I have a 330,000.

Andrew Pace [00:14:16]:

After that there's a really big fall off. I have a couple in the 100,000 and then if I could get something to 80, it's not common. Usually 50 is really good. I'm referencing before you get shut down, I had $80,000 in my account and this is PlayNow PlayNow.com for anyone that is familiar with it. And yeah, started the day with 80 and I finished the day with 120. So it wasn't like it's an incredible day, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't like this infinite money glitch kind of thing where they're just paying out, you just keep betting something. Again, because I had so much money in that account, if that was the case, I might have been able to get it to seven figures. So $40,000 in the day.

Andrew Pace [00:14:59]:

At the end of the day, they locked the account and took about two weeks before I could even see my money again. And not only that, they're a government book here in BC and they have commercials online saying that when you're playing through them, you're supporting this old folks home in North Vancouver and all this stuff, trying to almost appeal to your emotions, saying that gambling and losing money is some sort of righteous cause. And then they also have interviews and things like that as ads, but also that have run on the local news channels essentially saying that it's the only legal and safe place to play in BC and everywhere else technically is the wrong thing to be doing. And when you come get into the words where you talk about safe and all that kind of stuff, yeah, they locked my account for two weeks and they were very unreasonable in the process and very difficult to deal with. So again, I started the day with 80, I ended the day with 120. In that $40,000 of profit, there was a whole series of legitimate wagers made that won that were unrelated to a bad or soft line or anything like that. And when I got my account back, they had stripped it from 120,000 down to 57,000. And every single winner from the day they voided, legitimate or not, and every single loser from the day they kept for themselves with no recourse.

Andrew Pace [00:16:42]:

Not only that, the local regulator here, the CEO of the local regulator, ended up needing to get fired because he was actually working with the casinos, which is play now here working with the casinos to ultimately profit behind the scenes. So the regulator was in bed with the sports books in a big way and there was no recourse whatsoever. They also shut my account down after that. So I lost $23,000 that day and didn't get any of the money. So this is an unpopular opinion and in this particular case, because this fast payout thing where people actually did get life changing money, some people might view that as like, oh my god, that's stealing, or whatever the case may be. Well, there's another angle to it, and this is kind of why inflay Live exists. It's hitting the books when and where you can, and for good reason, based on their practices within the industry and a lot of the things that I've seen throughout the industry. Now, do Barstool and the Score deserve to have that approach taken to them? Because they're a brand new sports book and they could be reputable and they haven't been around for a long time.

Andrew Pace [00:17:58]:

That's for you to decide, not me. But my unpopular opinion is that I don't believe that sports books need to pay out palps. I don't think it's fair. But in the grand scheme of what I'm trying to do in this industry, if a broken line after the result is known gets voided and pulled back, I personally don't view that as the end of the world. Should it have been posted? No. Should you be able to bet on it and get paid? Yes. But those aren't make or break things in my eyes long term. If you hit them for some money and you got your money, great.

Andrew Pace [00:18:35]:

But in ten years, if you're trying to be a successful sports bettor that profits over the long term. Are you going to look back to this one moment as this make or break situation? Probably not. So I don't believe that books need to pay those out. They can void those in my eyes. And my advice to everyone except for this automated payout thing I'm just not familiar with that is just don't touch them. Just stay away from it all. Keep away from the mess. It tends to lead to losses and lost accounts, in my opinion.

Shane Mercer [00:19:09]:

Yeah. Especially if this is a sports betting account that you're really working on, or you lean on this sports betting account and you've got a sizable bankroll in there that you're trying to grow, I think you kind of nailed it. Just stay away. Is it worth the risk? Right. And chances are it probably isn't. If it's not a sports betting account that you rely on and you just happen to have some money in there and you saw it and you thought you'd give it a try, then great, good on you, right? Have at it. And I think there's definitely that distinction between the advantage line and the broken line. Right.

Shane Mercer [00:19:51]:

And as soon as the line becomes broken, it should really throw up that red flag. That okay. If you're going to bet this, bet it with the knowledge that there's a high likelihood that the wager will be clawed, that it could be voided, or if you're very lucky, it will get paid out. And that's where knowing your odds provider really makes a big difference, because like I said, Kambi always pays them out. So if you know it's a Kambi book, then okay, maybe you're more inclined to go that way, but with something like Score Bet and Barstool, which at least Barstool was Kambi at one point. And now neither of them are Kambi books, and they're sort of newer and kind of in the capacity that they're operating now, perhaps this could be pretty risky, right?

Andrew Pace [00:20:42]:

Yeah. And I come from a world where you would just never get paid. But one of the big things, too, is how the books would handle what you did. And Bet365 is sort of the ultimate they're the ultimate scumbags in so many ways, but they really trained me. So you see with our lens and our scope at inplayLIVE, it's like you see someone that sees a bad line and you see it quickly, odds, are we're going to be on those lines as a group pretty quickly, and it'll be like, oh, Bet365 has this line and it's a broken line. I just right away say, guys, don't take it. If you have some sort of clone or equivalent, they might pay it out. But with Bet365, specifically, what typically will happen is you place the bet, they pull the line.

Andrew Pace [00:21:29]:

They now know what they've done. If the outcome is a loser, they will take your money. If it's a winner, they'll either void it or change the odds to some astronomical price that you would have never wagered on. And then regardless of those two options, they'll limit your account. So you just lost an account and took on risk that has no upside whatsoever. So if you were to paint that picture for every sports book, you'd be an idiot to ever take any of these lines. And that's where again, you said no, your odds provider. So hopefully they resolve this quickly.

Andrew Pace [00:22:08]:

Certainly there's another angle to this for them where there's the liability, but then there's like, what the hell happened and what have we done? Leaving Kambi and using this odds provider that we were not ready to use. And they've put up some competitive markets, like the score in barstool, they had nothing, they were bare bones. Now that football's. Here they have a book where Kambi had everything from next touchdown, score, player, props, result of drive, result of play. Kambi, you could bet on the next play to be a runner, a pass in football. So when you strip all the markets away from your customers, they're going to go, why am I even using this anymore? Generally speaking. So they're trying to remain competitive and they don't have the experience. There's no data, there's no nothing behind their product.

Andrew Pace [00:23:04]:

So these mistakes, they're going to keep happening. So they're still thinking to themselves, how are we going to handle this? Because we're still thinking about the potential for this to now happen again.

Shane Mercer [00:23:17]:

Yeah, exactly. First things first, how do we handle and fix what happened on Sunday? Right? And then they've got to tackle the much, much bigger problem of how do we stop this from ever happening again? And that'll be up to them and a lot of sort of cost benefit analysis and risk analysis and that kind of thing. Okay, I think we've covered this pretty extensively here. Pace, I want to move on to our main topic now and like you said, it kind of does stem from this whole idea of sort of making decisions after the outcome is known, or at least going back and looking at your decisions having already known the outcome. And it is this term called resulting. And Pace, I've got to admit I never heard this term before. I think you were probably the first person to say it. And as soon as you said it, I feel like I immediately and intuitively knew exactly what it meant.

Andrew Pace [00:24:16]:

Because Shane, it made you feel stupid, didn't it?

Shane Mercer [00:24:20]:

Well, you know what? It made me be like, oh yeah, I mean of know, I do this all the time obviously, right? Especially if you're a rec bettor or you're early on in your kind of learning journey of the sports betting place. Because it's like, yeah, you make a bet, right, it wins. It was a great bet. Obviously it won. It must have been amazing what a great bet I made, right? And the bet loses and you look back and go, what a terrible fucking bet, why did I do this? Because it lost. But that's not the way to approach it. Right, Pace, but give me your sense of how you would explain to our audience what does resulting mean?

Andrew Pace [00:25:00]:

Yeah, I think this analogy has been brought up a bunch, but you can take a six sided dice. You could take a coin flip, whatever the case may be. And I'll try to make it quick, because a lot of our viewers are members and they've heard this probably a few too many times. But if you and I were to flip a coin together and we both bet $100 on a successful outcome and whoever wins the bet returns $200. You had a 50% probability of hitting heads or tails, and you got a 100% return on your initial investment. That's a fair wager. Where if we were to do that 10,000 times, theoretically speaking, we would come out even. Right? Obviously, the sports books have a vig, which is the cut that they take to place your wagers and that they profit off of over the long term.

Andrew Pace [00:25:42]:

So a typical example of a coin flip with a vig is a spread and oftentimes you'll see -110 on both sides of a spread and if you're a new viewer and you ever see -120 on both sides of a spread that's heavy vague or heavy juice. So that means that that particular wager is one that the sports books either juice up to because they've been getting beat on it and don't know how to handle it, or they're just scumbags that charge more juice than other books. And I've seen crazy lines before. Where you can get like -140 or -150 on both sides of a wager right and we've covered some of that stuff on our socials and things like that. But if we take the coin flip example, it would be Shane and I flipping. But instead, someone's charging us to flip the coin. And instead of returning that $200, you'd return $190. And theoretically speaking, you do that 10,000 times.

Andrew Pace [00:26:34]:

Shane and I are both going to lose money regardless of the outcome. And whoever's charging us is going to be lining their pockets, right? So when we talk about resulting, let's say that Shane and I flipped a coin at Even Money 2.0 with no vig. And I won. Shane didn't make a bad bet. And I didn't make a good bet. So you could look at the I called heads. I won. You could look at me and say, wow, you're the best.

Andrew Pace [00:27:01]:

You made such a great decision to choose heads. Well, the decision was actually made correctly or incorrectly before the coin was flipped. So in both cases, in that example Shane and I made, we didn't make a good decision or a bad know. And then if you factor in time cost, you could say we made a bad decision, but we made a fair decision. Right? And then the second example being where that vigorous is there let's say I win again. So I call heads in the air and I win. And I collected $190 back on my $100 and sports book down here got the $10 vigorous and they returned the $10. What the typical sports bettor will do is they'll look at that coin flip example, but they'll look at it in context of any given sporting event.

Andrew Pace [00:27:51]:

So whether it's a money line, a spread, whatever, the case may be a big parlay. People will be in envy after the fact saying that the person made the right decision. But if you use this coin flip example, even though I won the bet, I made a terrible decision. And if you're basing my decision as a good one based on that successful heads or that successful outcome because the Eagles covered the spread or whoever it may be, then you're resulting, you are justifying your decision based on the outcome of the event and not based on the actual probability of the event. So where a really good decision would be made is we take this example and we go into a third scenario here where Shane, you believe that you're the best at calling tails in the world, and you're saying you put up 100, but I'll put up 200. I'm going to call tails in the air. You Shane, you're going to call tails in the air. We flip the coin, we call tails.

Andrew Pace [00:28:54]:

And you actually did, in fact, win. I would have returned $300 instead of 200 had it have landed on heads. But since it landed on tails, you saying that you made a good decision. But if we did that 10,000 times, the sports books aren't lining their pockets. You're not lining your pockets. I would be lining my pockets because I was getting $300 back for my $100 wager on a 50% probability. So that is where and this is where the industry is so flawed and where a lot of people don't understand where this whole resulting thing comes into the statistical equation. And I'm no statistician.

Andrew Pace [00:29:38]:

I just have a basic understanding of this stuff, and it really helps guide my decision making. So you get all these things on social media, these viral parlays, cash out or let it ride. You get all these big parlays that you see on socials that go viral, where people look back on the outcomes going like, bro is a genius, or can't believe he did that, he's incredible. But the statistical probability of the payout is far less than the payout. So you actually made a bad decision, and the industry is full of people resulting looking at that, thinking that that person did everything right, as if they had some sort of crystal ball. And it's a plague. It's a total plague in the industry. So I'll give you a quick example from Monday Night Football this week.

Andrew Pace [00:30:31]:

We had the Saints minus five and a half in the first half. At the time that we took the wager, they were tied three three, and they were first and goal at the four. The reason why we. Had taken this particular wager was because Carolina was not moving the football. I think at the time, they had like two or three first downs in the entire game. Their one field goal was off of, it was a bomb field goal, but they had really good field position to start their drive. That's why they were able to score. The Saints, on the other hand, were actually moving the ball quite well.

Andrew Pace [00:31:03]:

They just couldn't finish their first drive. They ended up kicking a field goal, first and goal at the four. The statistical probability of scoring a touchdown is like close to 90%. So, sure enough, the Saints ended up not scoring a touchdown. They went backwards from the four and they kicked a field goal. We still had ten minutes left in the half. They ended up getting the ball four more times, and multiple of those times they crossed over half and we lost the bet. Now, with sports betting, it's hard to say, was that a good bet? Well, if you base it off of the outcome, the answer is no, we lost the wager, but Carolina never scored again.

Andrew Pace [00:31:45]:

We had a 90% ish even, call it 70%, it doesn't matter. 70% plus probability from first and goal at the four to go up by six or more points at that spot. But then there's the rest of the half where they completely shut them down on defense. And all they needed to do was get into range one more time, which they had already done on two out of three of their drives. They continued to do that, they just couldn't score. So that's where you could look back and say, I lost the wager. But statistically speaking, that was one that we would win more times than we would lose. And what really helps with this discussion, obviously, is backing all of this with data.

Andrew Pace [00:32:30]:

And in order to back it with data, you have to do wager tracking. And when you track your wagers and you look back historically over similar situations and similar markets, you can then see, hey, this particular sports bettor when calling this type of wager has returned x percent, has x ROI, and has x record in this spot at an average price of X -110 1.9 plus 120. Whatever the case may be. And that's where you begin to identify these opportunities within the game that can return long term profits, where you're making decisions not based on the outcome, based on what's actually transpiring in front of you in real time.

Shane Mercer [00:33:17]:

Yeah, right. We always talk about, look, we don't have any crystal balls here, we're not making any picks, predictions or anything like that, because we don't know what the outcome is going to be and nobody knows what the outcome is going to be. All you can do is take advantage of statistical implications like you kind of got at there with New Orleans at first and goal or on the four yard line or wherever they were. Right? I mean the chances of them scoring are extremely high and then on top of that you have more opportunities for them to score and it didn't happen. Right? But it can be pretty easy I think. And I think even for people who may not be a veteran sports bettor, like yourself, Pace, but are still a professional or an aspiring professional to go back and just base their decisions or at least evaluate their decisions whether it was good or bad based on the result, did it win or did it lose? What are some of the negative impacts of doing know? I'm thinking about the psychological impacts of Know and I'm just sort of getting pulled back to last week. And I think it was John Wilson on here, and him and I kind of going back and forth Know how. You know immediately when you placed a bad wager.

Shane Mercer [00:34:44]:

It's almost like you click the button and the second later you're like, oh, wait. That wasn't a good wager. I shouldn't have done know. But I think for a lot of people especially early on they don't have that ability to recognize in the moment whether a wager was good or bad and it takes some practice, right?

Andrew Pace [00:35:04]:

Yeah I think it takes more than practice. I think it takes a significant mindset shift. I'll give you a quick example. So said team was said price said year at said time and the gambler says this team is going to win today. Right? And the sports value analyst sharp, bettor pro, whatever you want to call them says they're probably going to win but the odds aren't there in a fashion that are going to provide long term value. And the gambler responds well what does it matter if they're going to win anyways? What does the number matter? And the sports value analyst says well it's everything. It's what dictates our action. And the gambler adds it to his bet slip and places it as a part of his four leg, six leg parlay.

Andrew Pace [00:36:01]:

The gambler then sees that win come through on his bet slip and says I told you so, justifying his decision and making it seem as though he is smarter or better than the person who is making a living on this while he's been stacking losses. And this philosophical or hypothetical story is one that I've been a part of in real life many many times and they base everything off the outcome. What does the number matter if they're going to win anyways? So I can give you a couple of really quick examples. The first one was someone I knew that would make a whole series of parlays that were these long shot parlays that were day to day parlays with big futures attached at the end of them and he would wait for big favorites to get the lead to give him more confidence to add them to his bet slip. So a good example of that would be let's say the dodgers are -300 today he wouldn't bet them at -300 he'd wait for them to go up one or two runs and then he'd bet them at like minus five or 600 to start building his parlays. So the game transpiring and getting going in the way that he had hoped it to go before it started gave him confidence that that one wouldn't be the game that would burn him. So you have a statistically losing wager that's now been pumped further with more vig. That's being sort of your reason to justify those wagers and take them.

Andrew Pace [00:37:45]:

That would be the first example. The second example would be where you have theoretical value in a game. So you do like, let's just say the Giants are minus five favorites at home, and you've identified that as a theoretical edge. Pregame and they go up seven nothing, and you're now getting minus six and a half. Or maybe you're getting minus seven and a half at that point and then betting on that line because you've been told this information, thinking that it's the same thing. And then in all of these cases, let's say that the gamblers all win. Then of course, like I said, justifying those decisions based on the outcome entirely. It is an absolute plague in this industry.

Shane Mercer [00:38:34]:

Okay? There's a lot of people out there who are thinking to themselves, well, how do I stop doing this? How do I know if my bet is good or bad? Then if not because of the result? And I'm not a statistician and I can't calculate probability on the fly while we're betting live. I'm thinking that pace, there's a lot of people who join inplayLIVE around this time of year, right? And there's a lot of people out there who might be listening and watching who are thinking about joining. What are some best practices to avoid resulting to avoid getting into this kind of headspace where your decisions are entirely I guess the quality of your decisions are entirely based on the outcome. How do we move away from that?

Andrew Pace [00:39:32]:

Well, I think the first thing is that shift in mindset. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking that I'm an idiot, well, then you haven't had that shift in mindset. But if you're thinking to yourself, okay, I am guilty of this, how do I stop? That would be step one. Because now you're starting to have a shift in mindset. So that means that you have to change a habit. And the next time that you're looking at your sports betting lines, you never say this will happen. You don't even say I think this will happen, even though I'm okay with that term. You only look at it from the standpoint of will this happen? X percent versus what the odds are implying.

Andrew Pace [00:40:15]:

Right? So if it's a typical spread, it's like 52.8% or something like that to be a fair wager that you need to hit at. So you have to ask yourself, will this happen 55% of the time? If the answer is no, then maybe you found some value. If the answer is sorry, you've probably avoided a bad bet. If the answer is no, if the answer is yes, there's a good chance that that is an opportunity that you can start digging into a little bit more then the second would be tracking. So you take that mindset and that overall statistical approach to what it is that you're doing and then of course tracking the wager. So let's say that you won that first bet and you're like, oh my God, I'm a genius. Well guess what, you have to do that hundreds of more times to actually determine whether or not what you're doing is working over the long term. Chances are it's not going to work.

Andrew Pace [00:41:09]:

So you really do have to have that tracking behind you. One thing that's nice is you can obviously jump into inplayLIVE and we're going to help with all that kind of stuff, but obviously we give you strategies that do work. But I think maybe the most important part of all of this, once you've kind of entered into this overall mindset and change of how you're approaching things, would be understanding that there is no blanket strategy. There's going to be outliers to every strategy from the standpoint, number one, of coaching motivations and how different teams handle different situations based on their own training, analytics and everything that they do in those spots. And then there's the human and chaotic element that what they typically do still isn't what they will do and we never know that. So when you apply a blanket strategy to a situation or a league, chances are you're probably going to lose money on that strategy or break even maybe because of these outlying situations or outlying motivations and things like that that are very important to understand. So if you do think that you found some sort of scenario of value and then you start applying it to the whole league other leagues, that's where things can really bite you. So yeah, I would say mindset shift, statistical approach, tracking and openness to no blanket solution or scenarios would be the four sort of steps to succeed with all that kind of stuff.

Shane Mercer [00:42:54]:

Yeah, I love the tracking. Of course I'm a huge proponent of tracking. Tracking has changed my betting life significantly. But I also want to reference and mention that if you miss a stream or you miss a session of betting, say a Sunday afternoon of NFL football betting and you don't have the opportunity to track it yourself pace you are tracking and you are posting everything that is getting called on the live streams. And so there is a tracker available for you to go and look at for anybody who's in inplayLIVE to go and look at have a look at what happened on that Sunday. You're not tracking the bets because you didn't take them, but the tracker is there for you to go and look at it, and you can see yourself what was working, what wasn't working. And over time, you can look at each individual tracker for every Sunday for the next 17 weeks and go back and have a full look at what worked and what didn't work. So I think that that's something that is extremely valuable for the group out there.

Shane Mercer [00:43:58]:

So appreciate that, Pace. Appreciate that you're posting that. Because even for myself, I missed Saturday's NCAA college football slate. I was able to go back and look and say, oh, well, this was working. Look at this. They hit this, this, they hit it again. They hit the same type of bet over and over and over again. And they had a few losers in there, and there were some similarities in those losers.

Shane Mercer [00:44:20]:

It's really valuable. So I appreciate that.

Andrew Pace [00:44:22]:

Yeah. And I think, too, if you are someone that maybe is in the group and isn't tracking or whatever the case may be, at least at a minimum, you could go look at that and go, wow, I bet way too much on that one call. Or, wow, I bet this at the wrong line. They all won and I didn't. Wow, I did this. Wow, I did that. It gives you just a little bit of that lens where if you do understand value and ROI, you recognize that that Giants example. Minus five is a lot different than minus seven and a half.

Andrew Pace [00:44:54]:

It's a lot different. Right? And when you see everyone in the group win because they had said line and you lose because behind the scenes you were trying to be a part of the party and taking a bad line, thinking that it's the same, it's not.

Shane Mercer [00:45:12]:

And then that's when you know for sure you made a bad bet, regardless of the result or the outcome. Because there's times where, yeah, you'll call minus five and somebody will take minus seven because they do want to be sort of part of the party, as you say, and both bets will win. But that person should know that the minus seven was a bad bet and the minus five was the good. Yeah. All right, Pace, a lot of fun this week. Till next week, buddy. Keep eating those books.

Andrew Pace [00:45:40]:

Cheers.

Shane Mercer [00:45:41]:

Thanks for tuning into another episode of Behind the Lines. Remember to, like, download and subscribe. We are on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and everywhere you get your podcast, have a betting story, or want to be featured.