💸 5 Approaches That Make For A Winning Bettor (Plus Free +EV Bets)

The NFL season is over, the NBA is in All-Star Weekend mode, and — for some reason — the NHL decided to play just one game today. Options are SPARSE for quality +EV betting opportunities as of Friday afternoon (particularly ones good enough to help us go 6-3, +3.3u like we did in this email last week).

So, in lieu of our usual setup, let’s just talk about some important lessons for betting, in the hopes we can all reset our brains as we gear up for more betting opportunities in non-NFL sports.

Here are FIVE APPROACHES THAT MAKE FOR A WINNING BETTOR:

1. Bet at the best available odds — The easiest, most obvious one we’ll hit first. In a perfect world, you’d always take the best available odds on the sportsbook app providing them. With Probly, we recognize that’s not possible and not everyone — myself included — wants to be on every app your state has to offer with money in the account.
   
   That’s why we focus our data on the sportsbook apps with the most market penetration and automatically remove stale lines as quickly as possible. I don’t expect everyone to have a BetRivers account or a Tipico or a Unibet. But if the best available odds are +110 at DraftKings, you’ll likely find it everywhere. A flip of +110 to -110 is like a 20% charge to yourself relative to probabilities and that’s a charge people take frequently without a care in the world.
   
   Over the course of a singular bet, it may not matter whether you bet at the best available odds (even if it costs you slightly more money whether you win or lose). Over the course of a day, year, or lifetime betting, it matters exponentially as it relates to being profitable.

2. Be aware of probabilities — Everything in life is a probability. Fantasy projections are a probability that reflects a median outcome of a performance better than that projection or worse than it half the time. Win probability of how likely a team is to score when they get down to the five yard line reflects data from thousands of previous games and teams having been in that situation.
   
   Using market-based probabilities — whether they be a general market consensus or a more elaborate success-weighted formula like ours — allows you to properly price bets to see how things line up. A 50/50 bet at +110 is great. A bet with a 30% chance of happening at +110 is not.

3. Bet agnostically — This is the one that is hardest for casual bettors sometimes. And this is where the “betting for fun” versus “finding fun in making money” part goes. But in a perfect world, again, you’d only take +EV bets and never bet on stars, teams you like (especially public ones like the Cowboys) or Michigan, or local teams.
   
   Every single day I do NBA betting content for Probly, we find +EV bets on star players’ unders. The reason? They end up priced more aggressively because of how frequently “fan bettors” drive the over. The NBA is a star and usage league, so I get it. But people bet for players they want to root for, rather than rooting for good bets.
   
   Can you find a middle ground? Absolutely. You can find some +EV bets for any team typically with our data. Should you take those bets over other more mathematically profitable ones? Probably not but that is the sliding scale of fun/enjoyment versus profitability we always try to be mindful of here.

4. Don’t live off of parlays — I once was a parlay chaser. Back in college, I was in desperate need of money because I broke up with a live-in girlfriend after she insisted we upgrade to a larger, more expensive apartment. I was facing down late rent bills and didn’t want to tap in my parents or grandparents for co-signing on additional loans.
   
   After grinding and taking some losses for days, I hit an impossibly long odds $7k parlay built off of some of the least informed takes possible. I knew then I’d never be able to replicate that and, rather than give it back, put it towards the rest of that lease and survived my junior year.
   
   Point being: I get both the upside AND the fun of parlays. They pay huge, they are a fun sweat, etc. But they can kill your bankroll if not approached with an equal awareness of probabilities.
   
   For example: The implied probability per leg of a PrizePicks or Underdog five-pick parlay is at 54.9%. If you pick star players and guys off your gut (let alone do that PLUS not be taking bets at best odds), you are going to get buried under the collective weight of -EV.
   
   We’ve had some of our earliest signups crush on parlays so you can win on them. I’d just advocate being mindful of what that means, specifically as it relates to the +EV of racking up mathematically profitable straight bets.

5. Take 50/50 bets at plus-money odds — This is the most important one. I try to mention this in every piece of video content I do but I truly believe it is the most important angle to always attack in betting. Typically, if a sportsbook views a bet as a 50/50 probability, it will make the odds -110 to give themselves a 10% payout on both sides of the outcome.
   
   When you use an independent probability source (as Probly does) that grades a bet as a 50/50 probability and you can get + money odds, it’s like the sportsbook paying you vig. At worst, a 50/50 at +100 means they’re not charging you vig; in this coin toss bet, they are giving you $100 if you win, taking $100 if you lose. A 50/50 bet at +110 pays you $110 if you win and costs you $100 if you lose. That’s like a sportsbook paying you $10 for the right to take your bet.
   
   The more you rack up these bets, the better positioned you are to stay ahead of the sportsbook’s cut over the course of your playing career. A .500 day of bets at plus-money would be a profitable day. A .500 day of bets at -110 odds would cost you money.

Reminder: If you enjoy content like this and want to win more in betting, we bring the same process to our product! You should either 1) Check out our 7-day free trial of Probly on the App Store or 2) Get 50% off a month OR year with promo code FIRST at probly.com/subscribe! We are an independent, bootstrapped company started by two lifelong friends who just want to help people make money at betting. Your support goes a long way in helping us grow.

We’ve still got our weekly product update below along with the best bets I can find right now. Here’s your Probly Email for February 16th, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• 💸 Betting On Whatever We Can Find

• 🔓 Probly Updates: A Great Week On TikTok

Now I have to admit: I am shocked at how few sports there are going on right now, when the sporting public is most vulnerable following the end of football season. One hockey game, a smattering of meh college basketball games, UFC priced shockingly efficiently, and NBA All-Star Weekend giving you not much to bet on that isn’t juiced to the gills and hard to project.

But we dig deep, deep enough that Ryan Reynolds representing Wrexham makes the thumbnail!

With no NFL to read into betting markets on and no great sports, I want to give you guys something useful here. And we’ve had back-to-back winning weeks in the email with NBA bets and crushed it this week in content on YouTube and TikTok so let’s keep that theme going. Here’s some of our Top +EV bets as of 1:55 Eastern. with a variety of likelihoods from soccer, college hoops, UFC, and women’s tennis (I KNOW YOU’VE BEEN WAITING!).

We backtested a 12-20% ROI for all of these sports before so, even though these are not sports you and I know like the back of our hands as much as NFL or NBA, they are worth betting if you’re willing to take the leap (as always, I bet them all myself).

First of all: Thanks to those of you who may have given the product a shot recently. We’ve seen more trials and conversions lately and — while there is a LONG way to go for us to get to break even with our data and tech costs, let alone paying ourselves or hiring — every single one of you who gives the product a shot gets us closer to doing that or to find the funding to help us get closer.

So get a 7-day free trial through the App Store OR save 50% with promo code FIRST on any monthly OR yearly package at Probly.com/subscribe.

One change to our App Store giveaway for those of you paying close attention here too. I will literally give YOU a free month of Probly+ if you leave us five stars AND a review on the App Store. Just leave your Probly username in there so I know it’s you and I will reach out and give you a free month on your account. It’s that easy to get a $19.99 value for $0 to show our love for you supporting us.

Some other general Probly updates:

-Traffic on the site has been doing well, including our first time with over 1,000 active users on the app in a 30-day span.

-We also have now grossed more in February than we have in any other month so far, which — while admittedly not a gamechanger as it relates to costs — is another positive that makes us feel like we’re moving in the right direction.

-Besides that, we’ve been working on the next wave of big improvements, specifically allowing you to filter by custom ranges for Profitability (PROBLY Score), Probability, and Last Updated. We anticipate that should be ready for release relatively soon.

-We’ve also been attempting to really tighten up our search functions so that we can integrate it on the main Probly markets page as another filtering option. It’s highlighted some issues we know exist with our DynamoDB/no-SQL setup in terms of surfacing EVERYTHING within a query so we’re trying to see if there is some way to solve for that.

Either way, our search functions on probly.com/search are improved now but the results can be somewhat incomplete. When we get that search fully functional, expect to see it integrated more in a variety of places.

-If you missed it last week and have some extra time due to lack of football and NBA, check out my appearance on the Betting Startups Podcast too.

If you guys encounter any issues not covered here or want to provide feedback, you can email me [email protected].

Despite the lack of football, hopefully this email remained a useful and enjoyable read! We appreciate all of you guys who open this email weekly since we’ve kept a phenomenal open rate, even with more emails getting added to the list weekly, so I always want to make sure this email is a worthwhile piece of content.

As always, thanks to all of you who read all the way down here. Get your free seven-day trial of Probly+ on the App Store or use promo code FIRST to get 50% off at Probly.com/subscribe and I’ll see you guys next week!