Episode 5

Shane Mercer [00:00:11]:

Hello and welcome to Behind The Lines, the sports betting podcast that doesn't offer you any picks, predictions or parlays. We're not peering into crystal balls over here. No, we are here to help you become a better bettor by exposing the sports books, their tactics, their strategies, and all the ways that they try to take your money. And by doing so, we hope that you'll be able to counter those tactics, come up with some ways to make a little bit of money. And with that, I'm your host. Shane Mercer. Journalist. He is Andrew Pace, founder of inplayLIVE, a sophisticated sports betting community, probably the greatest in the world. Pace, how you doing, man? Good to see you again.

Andrew Pace [00:00:54]:

The self proclaimed greatest sports betting community on the planet. But I do stand by it.

Shane Mercer [00:01:00]:

You know what? You stand by it, but I think I could probably point to at least 500 other people who stand by it. It's a massive community and it's awesome to be a part of. And so with that, I want to mention, remember, if you like this podcast, you're finding it valuable. This is our fifth episode and we're going to dive into the topic in just a couple of minutes. But before we do that, just want to remind everybody to like subscribe, download, follow us on all the socials where you can engage with us. We will respond to you and get back to you. And if you want to join inplayLIVE, we have a promo code for you. ‘BEHINDTHELINES’ is the promo and you will get the very best possible pricing you can get. And on top of all of the valuable information that you'll gain about sports betting and really valuable strategies for just about every sport and league out there, on top of all of that, you get access to an incredible community of like minded sports bettors who are all working together to beat the books. It's an incredible group of people. And what makes it so remarkable is that everyone in the community is interested in the success of others. Everybody in the community wants to see everyone else do well and they are very heavily invested in that. So with that being said, if you sign up for inplayLIVE using the ‘BEHINDTHELINES’ promo code, I also want to mention that you can reach out to me anytime you want. I will absolutely get back to you and help you along your journey in whatever way I possibly can. And I know that Andrew does the same and he gets back to a lot of people. He fields a lot of emails and texts and calls and all kinds of communications and he's always available. So with that, Andrew, this week we are talking about celebrity sports bettors. So right off the bat, I got to ask you, who are some of your favorite celebrity sports bettors?

Andrew Pace [00:03:01]:

Jeez, that's a tough question. Well, I think one of the things that we'll probably talk about in this episode is who is actually betting and who isn't. So when you ask me that question, I think about all the celebrities that I've seen in the betting world, and then I think, okay, is that celebrity a celebrity sports bettor, or is he or she just posing as one that isn't actually necessarily making the wagers, him or herself? But, I mean, there's a lot of great ones out there. I think some of my favorite ads that I've seen from the celebrities, Kevin Hart, I love. I don't know how much he's betting, but that the team overdog at Underdog Price. I don't even love that ad. I just love him. And then, like a lot of the athletes I've been fans of over the days, I love McDavid. We call him McGees, or sometimes we have other nicknames for him at inplayLIVE that might give away some of our strategies. I won't say it. I think we called him Mick power play the other day.

Andrew Pace [00:04:09]:

Or Mick Penalty shot. Yeah, he hit the penalty shot. We were calling him MC. Penalty shot. But I mean, a lot of these celebrities that are on there love Gretzky, love McDavid, love Kevin Hart. Yeah, there's a big list.

Shane Mercer [00:04:24]:

There are so many of them. And it's hard not to like the people themselves. I mean, we love their work, right. And we really kind of enjoy the movies they're in or the sports they play, at least how they played the game. And there's also a lot of musicians out there, especially rappers. And so that brings me to a guy who could be very polarizing, whether you're talking about his music or his betting, and that would be Drake. And love him or hate him, he makes a lot of wagers, and it's hard to know how much of that money is actually his and how much of it isn't. But I just want to sort of go through a couple of articles. And this one here on Casino.org, which is really interesting because Casino.org this gets back to the episode we did last week on affiliate websites, which was really kind of about media literacy and how to know which kind of websites are helping you and which art. Well, this is obviously one meant to prop up the casino business. And so they did this whole article here. Drake stakes the Canadian rapper who wagered a billion dollars in two months. Drake is worth about $250,000,000. So I'm not sure that this number is totally accurate, but it really kind of outlines a lot of his betting. And one of the points they make in it, too, is that he has done better in the casino wagering area than he has in the sports betting area, which I thought was just kind of funny given that it's coming from casino.org. Right, exactly. That's awesome, right? Yeah. He does better on roulette apparently than he does betting on sports. Which, I mean, who knows? I don't know, maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, it's hard to say. But who are we to jump exactly, right? But he is definitely one of the most prominent celebrity sports bettors out there. So give me a little bit of your take on Drake and his relationship with Steak.

Andrew Pace [00:06:34]:

Well, I think the first thing here is that we've done an episode on advertising, we've done an episode on affiliates, and we've done an episode on celebrities. Well, if you actually tie them all together, that brings us to today's episode where you look at celebrities who are betting, but little do we know they are affiliates, right? There is a question of whether or not they're actually placing the bets themselves, or whether it's the casino's money or the sports books money that's being provided to them to place the bets. And then, of course, there's the actual reality of the fact that it is sort of this inadvertent marketing that's being put in front of us, where I don't think that's a bad thing. It's like anything else. Maybe someone grabs a can of Coke in a film that you're watching and you don't realize that coke actually paid millions of dollars for that spot. It's just one of these things where, again, we just keep saying that information is power. And if we can actually look at Drake or anyone else's picks, calls, wagers, screenshots, whatever the case may be, inplayLIVE included, right? We get a lot of people that question the legitimacy of our screenshots. Even they'll be like, oh, you edited that right. But knowing how it works behind the scenes, behind the lines, just as information is power. So with respect to Drake, we brought up Steak.com in our affiliates episode last week, and again, we fielded a few questions about people saying that those sites actually did provide value to them. And that's something that we obviously touched on. And with today's episode, too, I don't want to take a shit on Drake because he bets on sports. That's not what we're here to do. We're here to give you information about what's going on behind the scenes that we don't necessarily automatically see. So Drake has a contract with Stake and it is promoted, and that's the only sports book he'll post tickets from. So there's been things in the sports betting world, like the Drake curse of who he likes, but we've also seen him hit some bets as well. And at inplayLIVE, I have seen not once, not twice, but without question, dozens of times. So multiple dozens of times, someone head into our chat and say, drake has bet this. So even the most educated and as you describe, inplayLIVE, Shane, the most sophisticated sports betting community out there, they still have moments where the COVID goes under their head and they don't realize that Drake didn't necessarily make that wager, or if he did make that wager, he's being paid to make that wager. And the whole mindset behind it is promoting his product. Sorry, promoting stakes product. Now, he has, quote unquote, wagered billions of dollars according to that article. Now, in one month, that's something, a question that we will field at inplayLIVE. Oftentimes they'll be like, oh, bullshit. How did you deposit $1,000, yet you wagered $50,000. It's called rollover, guys. It's when you wager, if you win the bet, let's say you wagered $1,000 and it was your standard -110 or 1.9, and you got $1,900 back and then you wagered $1,000 again, and then you lost and your balance is at $900. Well, you've wagered $2,000 off of the 1000 you deposited. Now, fast forward through a day, a week, a month of inplayLIVE. There's potentially hundreds of wagers in one day. So we roll money over like crazy in our community. So when Drake wagered that money every time he spins a roulette wheel, he could have four screens open all spinning at the same time. It could be $50 at a time. And you can get into the six figures of rollover from that low number in a relatively short period of time, depending on the volume that you have and whether or not you've kept a bankroll in that book and stayed alive. So there actually is truth potentially to that billion comment because of rollover. But, yeah, I think really the moral of the story is Drake is sponsored by stake. And those wagers that he's placing, he has a contract with them. They have something called Drake Versus Steak where he livestreams roulette. And there was a live stream where his balance started at 10 million roughly, and it ended at zero. And in that time frame of him losing, he gave away a million dollars in tips on the site.

Andrew Pace [00:11:37]:

It's not his money he's giving away, guys. It's all their infrastructure and their marketing that they're doing and going back to the TV spots and the advertising. This one's crazy. Like, I was at Levi Stadium for the Rams Niners this past NFL season, and they've got sports books plastered all over the stadium. It's in California where sports betting at the time we're making this podcast is not legal. So they've got draft kings and FanDuel it's plastered all over the stadium and it's not legal. You know how much it costs to plaster your ads all over Levi Stadium and then multiply that by every stadium basically across North America because that's what's being spent right now. So if you can get champagne, poppy, the billion dollar, quarter billion dollar hip hop artist, to chuck a million bucks on a table for you and you're getting a similar reach from that same money, your money's going way further. And people will be like, is that the sports folks money? Well, that's too much. No, that's the cheapest form of marketing you could possibly have. But I will say, I know this, drake loves gambling, right? So he actually does gamble quite a bit, and he definitely does risk his own money at certain times in certain situations. But regardless, you got to know that the whole system is designed for you to bet on their site.

Shane Mercer [00:13:07]:

Yeah, you mentioned the value of influencer marketing, which is essentially kind of what we're touching on here. And yeah, these sports books are paying to advertise in stadiums and on TV. But when you go and you get an influencer like Drake, who has tens, if not hundreds of millions of followers worldwide through all of his different social media platforms, and you're only spending a million dollars, your ROI is just huge compared to if you were spending tens or hundreds of millions on billboards and stadiums and only reaching a certain audience within a city or even a country or even through the TV broadcast as well. And it lives online and it gets shared and repeated and like you brought up, mentioned in forums or in groups like inplayLIVE, where other people are just sharing it. And they might be sharing it just out of pure entertainment purposes, but there it is, and it's in front of people who could potentially be using that particular betting site.

Andrew Pace [00:14:17]:

And the thing is, with this style of marketing, where you are a sports bettor and you send it to your buddy or your group or your forum, that is a sports bettor or a sports betting arena, you don't choose to look at it. It's been put in front of you. When TV ads come on, everyone knows this. It's a form of marketing that was largely from a generation of technology that no longer is relevant. People PVR their shows, they fast forward through their TV ads, right? If you're watching a game, you tune out, you check your phone, you do whatever it is that you do. You go to the bathroom, you grab a refill, whatever the case may be during those ads, that's the time to do it. So you're so much more tuned out to a TV ad or a billboard versus, I just received a notification on my phone that has actually given me a bet slip of someone that placed huge money on something. And we haven't gotten to this yet, which is something that we can definitely get to and might be more relevant to a celebrity like Dave Portnoy. But the books love when Drake pops one of those bets in and a bunch of people tail him. They love it. Absolutely.

Shane Mercer [00:15:41]:

And these are almost always pregame bets as well, right, and often parlays, which is that's money to their ears when we talk about those two pregame and parlay, and you put them together and it's like, yes, perfect. Right?

Andrew Pace [00:15:56]:

Yeah. I want to share something about Drake before we move on from here. It's actually the same article that you brought up, but since you brought it up, I just want to bring this image up here. So this is interesting here. I mean, Shane, tell me what you see when you look at this picture.

Shane Mercer [00:16:17]:

Yeah, well, you see quite a few large stacks of chips on the table, that's for sure. You know that there's a lot of money getting tossed around here. But you see Drake and he's looking very business like a very sort of, I guess Drake's kind of higher level persona. He just looks very professional and he looks like he could be the owner of one of these sports books.

Andrew Pace [00:16:49]:

So for those of you that are not watching us on YouTube right now, and you're listening to just the audio and you can't see this image, it's Drake. He's at the high stakes room at the Aria, which is very clearly illustrated twice in the photo, both on the felt of the roulette wheel and on the screen. I've played at this table. This is a great spot. So we are not sponsored by Aria. This is a great spot to go have some fun and lose a shitload of money, but it's a lot of fun if you're doing it responsibly. He's got hundreds of thousands of dollars on one spin. For some reason, he's got a straw in his old fashioned. Don't know what that's all about, but he's got the business suit on and all that kind of stuff. Now to the untrained eye, you look and you go, holy shit. Like Drake plays for big money and he might win big money based on this article. This article saying that he makes more money from casino playing than he does sports betting. I don't know if that's saying that he's just that bad of a sports bettor.

Andrew Pace [00:17:58]:

Or if it's actually true, but they're advertising the Aria here, which if you actually think about this critically as opposed to just scrolling through it. So let's think about it critically. The Aria is advertised in this photo. It's a staged photo. Yet for anyone that's played in any casino in Vegas and pretty much all around the world for that matter, you are never under any circumstance allowed to take a picture of the action on the table. They will kick you out. So why is this posted on a casino article? And then once you think about that a little bit more, that's where you recognize that there is a very real chance that the Aria has paid for this shot and potentially paid for a portion or all of the chips that are on the table. And that's where you can start to question, was this wager actually ever even made? And that's the kind of thinking that I think is very important for people to have with respect to this industry. And you could apply those same questions to our group as well. And I think one of the differences with us is you can quickly uncover the legitimacy of what it is that we're doing. But regardless, that's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm just wanting people to go into the arena that they're going into with the most information they possibly can.

Shane Mercer [00:19:30]:

That was a great point there. I didn't know that you can take pictures of the action on the table knowing that now then. Yeah, I mean, clearly this is a staged photo. Clearly Arya is happy with it and happy that it's going out there. And on top of it, it does raise that very big question of is there any actual gambling taking place in this photo? I would say based on that knowledge, I'm going to say probably not. But again, we're just speculating. Who knows, maybe he did.

Andrew Pace [00:19:59]:

Is the ball spinning?

Shane Mercer [00:20:00]:

Yeah. Is it even in there? Right? Hey, there's nobody there actually doing the spinning. Right. All we see is Drake. So who knows? And I guess on that topic of critical thinking and kind of where these sports books are coming from, you brought up Dave Portnoy. For, for those who don't know, he's the owner of, of Barstool Sports, which is just being very recently bought out by a company called Penn Entertainment. But he really built this up and as part of building it up, he also has a sports book, Barstool Sports Book, to go with it. And he's making his own bets and telling everybody, here's what I'm betting and go make these wagers on my sports book. The untrained Bettor might just sort of be jumping on it and they get caught up in the hype of a show, a bar stool sports podcast or something like that, where they're making picks and parlays. And we know that there's lots of that out there, which is part of the reason we're not doing it, just one reason why we're not doing it. But there's so much of that out there and I don't know that vetters are necessarily even making that connection that, hey, the guy who owns the sports book is telling me to bet this and he's going to make a profit off of me when it loses, if it loses. And maybe he's not even placing a wager at all to begin with.

Andrew Pace [00:21:20]:

Right?

Shane Mercer [00:21:21]:

Yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:21:21]:

I mean, with Portnoy, again, this isn't something where I'm thinking like, oh, the guy needs a target on his back, he's corrupt, he's this, that. No, that's not what we're saying at all. I think, again, it just goes back to us just having as much information as we can. This is a totally different type of celebrity bettor now. Right. We just talked about Drake, who is endorsed by Stake, and based on that photo, we don't know, but potentially got paid by Aria for that shoot. And we have no evidence that happened specifically. But with Stake, we know he's actually sponsored. Now we're talking about Dave Portnoy, who is a celebrity who was very open about his sports betting and a whole sort of social and online presence relating to sports. At least it was relating to sports. Man, they've gotten away. Man, have they ever gotten away from sports. Following them on socials. I can't even believe some of the stuff that I am subject to on there now. Definitely a lot of it is not about sports. But then he wants to expand penn national gaming and barstool. There's a buyout, and now barstool has become barstool sports book, and there's Barstool casinos and sports betting kiosks and all that kind of stuff. One of the episodes that we will absolutely do in the future will be betting odds providers. So that's a phenomenal behind the lines, true thing that's going on and how that all works, the different odds providers and the different faces that they then become behind the sports books. So barstool then signed a contract with an odds provider called cambie, K-A-M-B-I. They're based out of Sweden and then created their their sports book and their product. So in Portnoy's case, he was betting, and there was an element of it that was total legitimate bets. And then he's just kind of expanded his sort of empire through the sports betting landscape. But regardless, and he certainly does not hide that he's the owner, right? And I think that that's something that's that that I respect the hell out of the guy in a lot of different ways. Say what you want about him, he's a very polarizing person as well. I respect the hell out of the guy in a lot of different ways, having not ever met him, of course. But he he does not hide that he's the owner of the sports book. But it is so important for the public to understand if you have Dave's parlay or they have like a pick service with three or four of their guys where they go on a panel and they're in like a newsroom, and it's really intentionally cheesy, but they list off their picks, their parlays, all that kind of stuff. And people want to hit the bet with Dave and be able to comment under his instagram or his twitter or whatever and send him his screenshot and say they tailed and made money with him. People want to do that. They want to be recognized by him. They want to belong as a part of his sort of online presence that he's a part of. They want to support him in a lot of the different businesses and things that he's done right. So he's a big part of high noon. He started a watch company, obviously, barstool sportsbook. They do a lot of really interesting promotions that a lot of other sports books haven't done. Bet $100 on this game and we'll send you this barstool hoodie, and it'll be related to the fanship of the game that they bet on. So perhaps you bet on the New England Patriots. And if you bet on the Patriots in that game, they would then send you some sort of belichick hoodie or something like that with the Barstool logo where the hoodie might have cost close to $100. So it's almost like placing the bet itself was purchasing the product with the chance of winning. So you can look at it from that side, or you can look at it from the side where you go, okay, now they've got you in their ecosystem. Now they're training you to wager on their promotional material. And the flip side to all of that is what's behind the lines. And that is when you get the public on a greater percentage of one side of a wager, the upside to the sports books is enormous. So I'll give you an example. The scheme was in 2019, the Dallas Stars, or, sorry, the Dallas Stars. The Dallas Cowboys took on 90% of the action against the New York Jets. Yeah. And the over took a lot of action, and the Dallas Cowboys took a lot of action, and something like 90% of the money was on Dallas Cowboys. The game ended twelve nine. I believe it was all field goals. I could be wrong. The jets won by three. It was one of the biggest sports books and casino paydays in one game ever because of that 90% public. Now, this isn't super common, but one of the things that the sports books will do in these circumstances where they start seeing a bunch of public money come in on one side, what's typical is to balance your action. So a lot of the money that's coming in on the public side, they'll make that line worse, presenting theoretical value on the opposite side of that. So let's say that the Dallas Cowboys opened at minus nine and a half. They might move the line to minus ten or minus ten and a half to then encourage bettors to bet on the other side. And like I said, balance out their action. What they might actually do is do a reverse line movement where the line becomes minus eight and a half or even minus seven and a half. And they do that because they're sitting there going, okay, we can afford to pay out our customers because that's the business that we're in. But we really like the upside of hitting this spread at nine to one odds with 90% of the public on one side of the game. So when you promote something through a channel, like Dave Portnoy's, instagram through a channel, like Champagne poppy's, instagram through a channel, like anything through barstool, sports, and that promotion gets inundated and dumped on you. So much so that when you even log into the online sports book, the first thing you see is a banner of Dave Portnoy, like, all excited and fired up to hit this bet with you, you don't even need to make the bet. You don't even need to go find the game. You just click the button and boom it's on your bet slip and you place it. Do the books lose those bets sometimes? Absolutely. But they're getting remarkable upside if you lose because of the fact that the implied odds of the public percentage on the one side creates ridiculous long term value on the bets that they create in those sort of promotional landscapes. So that's something that we need to be hugely aware of as sports bettors from the standpoint of the promotions that were being offered and the trap that's potentially laid in that circumstance.

Shane Mercer [00:28:31]:

I think you touched on something really interesting there about this idea of being trained to behave a certain way and it happens in such a subconscious way. It isn't something that's overt. It's not clear that this is the goal, this is the long term plan, this is what they want you to do over time. You think it's just that moment in that particular offer, promotion, wager that you're considering. You don't really stop and think, wait a minute, is this something I'm going to start doing more habitually? Is this something I might do where, oh, I'm going to look for their promos all the time and we see it a lot from the boosts, right? A lot of those sports book boosts that you see out there where they boost the odds and they tell you that, oh, here, this should really actually be two to one odds, but we're going to give it to you for three to one because we think we just like you so much and we just really want to see you win a bigger bet. And that whole concept of sort of being manipulated in a very subtle way over time and it really sort of just speaks to the overall nature of what the sports books are doing and what they're trying to get at. I guess the question then becomes, though, this is something, it'd be different for all of them, but I'm just sort of putting it out there. Do you think that a lot of these celebrities think about it that way? Or do they think that they just sort of are like, hey, the sports book wants to pay me some money to place a wager. Sure, let's do it. Or they want me to be affiliated with them in some way. Okay, great, they're going to pay me how much? Wonderful. Or do you think that they think about these bigger, broader implications?

Andrew Pace [00:30:23]:

I think some people do, for sure. And I think that that's what makes Port Noy very unique. Is he's the one that actually owns one of the books, right? And again, I'm not, and I'm not there's a couple of things. I'm not saying he's necessarily doing anything wrong. I'm just saying we should be aware of it. And the flip side is some of these promotions from the. Standpoint of profitable betting are phenomenal. You want to capitalize on them for a pro, a lot of these promotions oftentimes present even more of an edge that we can capitalize on, where they're literally giving a pro free money, where we can go, thank you, there's an extra $50, or thank you, there's an extra $1,000, and we can chip away at them a little bit more. That way we don't always win. So sometimes those types of things can help balance out a losing run. Right? And yeah, I think with anything that we bring up on this show, it isn't like it's all bad. There's a lot of positive in those promotions that you can capitalize on more than anything. It's the fact that a recreational bettor doesn't necessarily know or understand what it is that they've been exposed to in that situation. But with respect to the celebrities knowing about the deeper levels of what they're getting into, when they potentially sign a contract or do a shoot or whatever it may be with these books, you got to think that they have PR teams to a certain extent where you go, hey, are you comfortable getting into this arena? This is gambling. Are you comfortable with being that face? And you see a guy like Wayne Gretzky where you maybe go, oh, it's interesting that he kind of crossed over that line. And a guy like Drake, where you'd almost expect and this isn't a shot at Drake at all, it's just the hip hop image. It's very cool to throw big money down on the table. It's almost like a part of it. Whereas Wayne Gretzky, it seems like it's a little bit more unexpected.

Shane Mercer [00:32:14]:

That's an interesting little contrast there. Right. You have one area, one realm of society where it is very much encouraged. It's cool, it's fun, there's an element of prestige to it, right. And then you've got this other element where somebody who has sort of risen the ranks and has become a star in whatever it is that they may do, might look at it like, oh, this is something I like. But I don't want to tell anybody about it or I want to hide it because sports betting and gambling has had that stigma associated with it for so long. And I think that's a really perfect contrast in a guy like Wayne Gretzky. And we've talked a little bit about some of the controversy of his past gambling issues or I guess gambling scandal from over a decade ago contrast with somebody like Drake who's right out there with it all the time. Yeah, it's a really kind of interesting comparison. And I'm not sure where others might fall. It seems like it would be a spectrum. Right. And it all sort of depends on does this fit your brand? Right.

Andrew Pace [00:33:27]:

Does this fit your personal part of it? Yeah. And I think part of what you just said, too, isn't necessarily about an athlete versus a hip hop artist. I think more than anything, what it might be is an era, right? So we might be a little bit more surprised to see Peyton Manning or Tom Brady join a sports book where we might not be so surprised to see Gronk do it. Right.

Shane Mercer [00:33:50]:

Yeah.

Andrew Pace [00:33:54]:

A bit of the younger crew is definitely someone that might be a little bit more susceptible to this, whereas some of the legendary ex athletes of the past you might think are a little bit more unlikely. And that's where that can obviously cause a little bit of a surprise as well.

Shane Mercer [00:34:12]:

Yeah. So I got to ask you, since you're the pro here, right? When you see these celebrities come out with their sports picks and you see it all the time on the different social media and there's so many of them and you got so many athletes that are throwing bets around and that kind of thing, is there an opportunity there for regular recreational average? Bettors to either tail them or fade them? Or is that even something they should be thinking about? Is it all just noise and it should just be ignored?

Andrew Pace [00:34:46]:

Oh, man, that's tricky. When you put it in the context of me being the pro, I just look at it as it's noise. I don't care. Yeah, I don't care. But from the standpoint of being because I bet live and that's why. But if you're a pregame pro, that could really be something that could impact you might see the line movement in real time where you go, hey, Drake just posted and we've seen the line move on stake and from his action and maybe potentially some of the people that have or are tailing him. Yeah. That could present opportunity to fade them, for sure. I wouldn't want to be on the same side of a bet as Drake. I just don't want to be.

Shane Mercer [00:35:30]:

And is that because you think it's going to lose or is that because you just don't like Drake?

Andrew Pace [00:35:37]:

I have nothing against Drake at all. I think he's great. I think he's a great artist.

Shane Mercer [00:35:40]:

You like his music.

Andrew Pace [00:35:42]:

When you're a pro bettor, you learn to run away from anywhere that the crowd runs. Right.

Shane Mercer [00:35:48]:

And I guess that's where these celebrities are trying to get people to run to. Right? That's exactly the whole purpose, is that they are trying to draw the crowd, they are trying to bring people into their sphere and bet with them and sort of have fun with them. So I suppose then for the average bettor, the wreck bettor out there, if you are going to pay attention to these wagers that these celebrities are making, your best option is to probably think about or consider fading them.

Andrew Pace [00:36:25]:

Yeah. When it comes to sports, there's this thing called chaos that occurs. And it isn't that it doesn't occur sometimes and other times it does occur. It always occurs. And going back to that Cowboys game, it was the most profitable game I think I've ever had in my life. I didn't bet it pregame, and the public could have just as easily been right. And the Cowboys could have run away with the game. It's just not how I bet.

Shane Mercer [00:36:56]:

You still would have made money.

Andrew Pace [00:36:59]:

Potentially. Potentially. Potentially. But did I make money betting on the jets throughout the game? Hell yeah. Big time, right? But that was once I'd already seen sort of how the game was being played and the fact that the Cowboys were really struggling offensively in that game. They only scored nine points.

Shane Mercer [00:37:16]:

I haven't seen a lot of this out there myself, and I'm not sure that it exists, but I don't see a lot of celebrity sports bettors betting live and live tweeting out their bets during the event or during the action. Is that something you've seen? I don't know. Personally, I'm not looking for it either. So that could be part of it.

Andrew Pace [00:37:37]:

Right. I know there are some channels that do some stuff on their socials where they'll go live for the game, going back to barstool and portnoy. They do a ton of they have live streams going where they're watching the people's reactions and they're making some bets and things like that in real time. There's a lot of really somber moments on those streams, and the room is very divided all the time. Right. And that is the nature of betting. If you picture yourself with your buddies on an NFL Sunday, oftentimes people will be on different things and not disclose what they have and things like that. The biggest sort of advertising I've seen for that is obviously the ads that talk about live betting, but it isn't actually calling bets while the game is actually on.

Shane Mercer [00:38:23]:

No, right now there's another sort of way to, I guess, become a celebrity sports bettor, and I think nobody has done it better than perhaps this one guy. And I'm going to share just a little article that's out there right now from Forbes on him. And many of you who are sports fans out there have definitely heard of him. His name is Mattress Mack, and there he is right there. This guy places huge bets, typically on the World Series. He loves baseball. He bets on baseball all the time, and he makes enormous bets. And what he does is that he sort of offsets it by offering huge discounts to customers if he wins. And so if he wins and he offers these massive discounts to customers, and if he loses, he looks at it like, well, I got a huge promotional element out of this bet because the media covers him extensively every time he makes his bets. And I don't know if that's because it sort of was a novel idea to use betting as a promotional tool for such a long time. And you can see he's not exactly a young person. He's of an older generation. So he would have grown up with that stigma. And in fact, this whole article is about him actually opposing legalized sports gambling in Texas. And sort of his argument is that it will lead to addiction, which we know that gambling absolutely can. And we're not here to say that that does not exist. That absolutely exists. And that's something that needs to be recognized and dealt with. And we have talked about responsible gambling a couple of episodes ago, and I encourage all of you to go out there and listen to that episode where we talk about real responsible gambling versus responsible gambling as portrayed by the sports books because they are very, very different ideas. And so I think that was episode three. I encourage all of you to go back and have a listen to that, if you haven't already. But on that, here he is a guy who has made this sort of celebrity aspect of himself. He's a business owner. He owns a mattress and furniture place. And he's made this whole business, or this whole sort of persona as a sports bettor, and he's really leveraged it to create a business for himself. What do you think about mattress, Mac? What do you think about his bets? And do you think that he sort of used it effectively?

Andrew Pace [00:41:01]:

Yeah, I think with all this stuff, we could be like, hey, you're promoting betting. You're terrible. Well, I try to look at all this and go, okay, well, what's the positive in all this? What's the upside? How can we learn from this? What can we as bettors or how can we as bettors benefit from someone like this being so sort of influential and prevalent in the bedding industry and how viral he goes with what it is that he's doing? But I think, just foundationally speaking, he runs a freaking furniture shop. Like, it's so boring. That is so not something that's exciting. It's not modern. It's a business that I don't want to say technology has not impacted, but it's a business that's still hanging around. If you're a mom and pop furniture shop, you probably have a better chance than being Blockbuster still being around. And kudos to this guy for being relevant with a boring ass furniture shop. By using betting as a promotion to kind of leverage his brand and his business, he gets great publicity out of his bets. And obviously his bets that he makes are done so with the marketing angle not of the sports books, but of his company, which is so unrelated to the betting world. Now, the flip side, and I promise you guys this, I don't need to have an article that tells me this that says this is Mattress Max contract with X Book. I promise you that if I have been reached out by dozens of sports books for our small little following and our small little community to be an affiliate for these books, that he definitely has some significant affiliate associations, or at least the books have attempted in spades to do that. Also, he does get featured on a lot of betting related material channels, social channels, all that kind of thing, which that in and of itself, people want to hear the story of him hitting $75 million on the Houston Astros, and people followed that whole journey. So if he's actively appearing on a certain channel, there is always some sort of back end that's going on there from the standpoint of him making those bets. Is it like Drake, where he didn't actually make the bet and a book did it for him? I don't want to say didn't actually make the bet. That's not the right term where the money was provided to him, so it was more or less risk free. There is potential for that, but I don't see it as being the same. At least it's not the same on paper.

Shane Mercer [00:43:56]:

Yeah. No, I'm pretty sure he's placing his own wagers, and it's interesting, too, because he will drive across state lines to go place his wagers in Louisiana, and I think he's probably doing it the old fashioned way, where he's got his bet slip in hand at the end of it, and he hangs on to that. Right. Because I've seen him post those bet slips.

Andrew Pace [00:44:15]:

Right. Yeah.

Shane Mercer [00:44:16]:

Right. I forgot about that. And it would be interesting if the sports books and I bet you they have right. They must be approaching the guy and coming to him and saying, hey, let's work together. Let's let's figure something out here. But meanwhile, here he is, openly opposing legalized sports betting in the state in which he lives.

Andrew Pace [00:44:32]:

Yeah, that's really interesting, and I can't quite wrap my brain around that part of it. The only thing I could think is maybe he's hit is he a profitable bettor? We don't know. A lot of what I've seen from him, despite that $75 million win, maybe that put him in black. But a lot of what I've personally seen from him is the style of betting that loses over time. It doesn't mean that I'm not calling him a losing bettor. That's the style of betting that loses over time. So maybe genuinely, someone his age is looking at things and going, I know what I've been through gambling, and I know that I don't want to be a person that's recommending this next generation of people from Texas to do what I'm doing. I don't know. We don't have the answer to that.

Shane Mercer [00:45:23]:

Yeah. He states that he doesn't want it in Texas because of the addiction aspect, and he says that he likes going to Louisiana or having to go to Louisiana because it forces him to control his own impulses. Yeah. So that leads me to think that he recognizes a certain element of addiction in himself and wants to control that, which there's a real sort of commendable element of responsible gambling going on there, right?

Andrew Pace [00:45:53]:

And I mean, there's so many little things that you can look into with things like that. But his generation, I mean, that would be kind of our parent, Shane, or potentially grandparents, depending on how you score it. But I mean, there are a lot of people in that generation that really do struggle with technology. He probably likes the element of, I'm driving to go make my bet. It's a physical ticket. I even like the nostalgia of that. When my business partner, we call him Raj, when we go to Vegas together, the first thing we do is we place a parlay, a losing bet. We never win. We never win. The first thing we do is we go place a parlay to have our physical ticket while we're in Vegas because they give you a couple of free drinks for it and we want to cash that thing and then have a little bit of a stack of cash to start our trip. I shouldn't say we never win. We have won a few, but then we will lose it by the time we leave. And this is where you get into responsible gambling and we're going on a trip where we intend to lose. We take out an amount of money that we go. This will not come home with us that we're comfortable with, and we don't go diving back in, pulling out thousands and thousands of dollars at the ATMs, which some people can't do, like they're not capable of doing that. So there's a huge difference, right? If you're watching this and you're the person that's found yourself going into an ATM to scratch out your last dollar, there is such a massive difference with playing responsibly and playing with a problem, and that should be recognized. You know better than anyone yourself if that's you.

Shane Mercer [00:47:43]:

Yeah, well, that's exactly it. And you need to be able to recognize that within yourself. And I think all sports bettors out there know that there is always this element of addiction that is sort of staring you in the face, and you have to learn how to be responsible and control yourself. And it is an exercise, and it takes practice and it takes a real sort of element of intentionality. It's not something that it just happens one day. You have to work at it and it takes time, and you have to first acknowledge that it's there, definitely. So as we sort of near the end of the episode here, Pace, is there any celebrity sports bettors out there that you might want to tell the audience, you know what? I like this guy, or I like this girl. Give her a follow on Instagram or watch for her bets because they sort of seem to be on the sharp side every once in a while.

Andrew Pace [00:48:40]:

Yeah, if we're talking about a guy, a person or player that wins. You're just talking to the wrong guy. I don't know. My favorite of the celebrity bettor is because of his transparency is Dave Portnoy. He's very transparent about what he's doing, that he owns it, how much money he's worth, what he pays in tax, where he moved to dodge tax. He's very polarizing, but he is transparent. So that would be my first choice. And I like his pizza reviews.

Shane Mercer [00:49:12]:

Yes, well the pizza reviews, I mean, probably one of the best things that he's ever come up with but yes, a very polarizing character. We will not get into his personal details here. You can find all of that elsewhere. We're not here to talk about any of that. No, definitely not. Well, with that pace, I guess until next week. Is there anything coming up this week that you want to tell people about? Anything you want to share?

Andrew Pace [00:49:38]:

Well, as of air date that you're watching this, March Madness has begun. So we have a really cool tool that is live inplaylive.com NCAA. And this is for both the conference tournaments and for the tournament itself. If you're watching this right on time, it's just the conference tournaments right now. So that resource is available to you. I will just quickly share my screen to show you what I'm talking about.

Shane Mercer [00:50:09]:

NCAA, I love this tournament, always have. It's one of the best events in all of sports, one of my favorite. And yeah, I've always placed wagers on it, but I just love the excitement. I love the underdog stories. I love it from a story perspective. It's just so much fun.

Andrew Pace [00:50:27]:

Yeah, I think we'll talk about March Madness next week a little bit more because that will be closer to the time the tournament actually starts. So we can talk about brackets and some recommendations that we have from a betting standpoint. But in the meantime, for both the conference tournaments and the tournaments, we've created this resource. It's really simple. There's a mobile version and a desktop version. All you need to do is click on one of the games and it's going to tell you the time the game starts in Eastern time and the division that it is. So this is the horizon or horizontal division, first round and it has the entire schedule here. Now why is this important?

Shane Mercer [00:51:03]:

Shit, look at this. Yeah, this is awesome. Wow. Okay.

Andrew Pace [00:51:08]:

Shout out to the great Gosu Thune who built this for us. If you're a member of inplayLIVE, you know that he is an actual genius.

Shane Mercer [00:51:15]:

He really is a smart guy. I'm not surprised we put this together. Not seeing it now.

Andrew Pace [00:51:21]:

Yeah. So you might ask yourself, why is this valuable? Well, the first thing is that you've got the games broken down by conference. You've got them broken down by date and broken down by time. If you have a family and you need to do some scheduling, this can really help with that because you're going to know when the busiest times are. If you want to just follow one conference because you're a fan of, say, the Pac Twelve, you can just go through this and just highlight the Pac Twelve and only that will come up. You can do it by round if you only want to focus on the semis or the finals. But this is really cool. So Saturday, March 11, is going to be the biggest day for the Conference tourney finals. So we can just go look at that one particular day. And here's the schedule for the day. So you know the most busy times that are going to come through. Now, if you bet the way we bet it inplayLIVE, there's more information behind this that's really important. Let's say that we get to this big west final game that I have highlighted right now, and one of the two teams has already made the tournament. So if you're watching this, every single conference winner makes the tournament. But then there's other teams that get in without winning their conference tournament. So a team that's already in March Madness in the tournament might not be playing for as much in, say, the quarter final if they're already in, but their opponent is out. So one of the ways that we capitalize and profit on sports betting is based on teams motivations. And in the conference tournaments, do they want to win the conference tournament? Of course they do. But if they're down and out of a game, we might be able to capitalize on their opponent if we know that their opponent is not in the tournament, but they are. So we'll have those details added. And this is a free tool. So it's inplaylive.com NCAA and it's got all of your tournament details. And like I just showed you, it is filterable so that you can look at it however you want to look at it.

Shane Mercer [00:53:27]:

This is amazing. I'm a member of inflay Live. I'm sure for full transparency, I had no idea this existed and this was being worked on. So to me, this is just awesome. But you just mentioned this is free. This is available to everyone out there, the entire general public. Everyone has access to this?

Andrew Pace [00:53:42]:

Yes, sir.

Shane Mercer [00:53:43]:

Wow, what a deal out there, guys. Honestly, I encourage all of you to go and check that out. That looks so cool. I can't wait to go and play with it myself. So, with that, I think we are near the end of the episode. We will remind you all to like subscribe download, follow us on all the socials at inplayLIVE. And if you want to share a story, you have something you want to express, or you want to get a hold of us, or you want to come on the show, you think you have a really great story about the sports books that you want to share and that would raise awareness, please comment, reach out. We would be more than happy to have a conversation with you and potentially bring you on the show. So definitely get a hold of us with that again, too. Also, if you do want to sign up for inplayLIVE, we encourage you to come join this incredible community. And we have that promo code for you ‘BEHINDTHELINES’. You will get the best possible pricing you you possibly can. You get access to all kinds of tools, strategies, and you get to be part of some incredible live streams, especially coming up here with that NCAA tournament. It is so cool. You'd have a lot of fun. All right, Pace, till next week. Think that's it, buddy. Keep beating the books. We'll see you on the streams. Cheers.