Another week here in the Probly email and, as we adjust to our post-NFL world, I’m going to try to give you guys different intel on the world of betting in each email. Last week featured 5 secrets on how to be a winning bettor and I appreciate the positive feedback on that one since the difference in your game, really, is sometimes as simple as we laid out there.

This week is a big one: The biggest mistake THOUSANDS of people make daily in sports betting.

Now I have to be candid up front: We consider apps like Props.cash and Outlier to be competitors, simply because they are category leaders in terms of downloads and revenue earned. They have created tremendous market penetration with their products and deserve kudos for that.

That said, their market penetration is — unequivocally — resulting in ungodly amount of losses for one simple reason (that I’m going to put in big annoying text because it’s that important):

You cannot outresearch a sportsbook, particularly on a popular sport.

Can your knowledge or assessment of a situation lead to profits? Absolutely, when used judiciously by someone with true expertise (and especially in a lesser trafficked sport, like tennis or lower level basketball).

However: Any tool that encourages you to look at the last 10 games of data or something like “How Kyrie Irving performs without Luka Doncic” is baiting a user into double-counting information that a sportsbook already knows.

I’ve built my own NBA projections for years. When I started working at Stokastic (then Awesemo), I was deadset on learning everything I could from their team of DFS and sports betting pros who’ve won millions. It began my obsession with Excel and, eventually, wanting to see how the "player projection” sausage was made.

I went on to create a basketball projection system — built off of Stokastic’s minutes projections but infused entirely with my own data from public sources — that would win me over $100,000 in the course of one beautiful Spring/Summer two years ago.

Even my projection system — which, while good, is not anything close to a sportsbook’s data ingestion processes — automatically accounts for the loss of a player or a change in pace/opponent as part of its baseline. I can then tweak it accordingly based off publicly accessible rate data (usage, rebounds, assists in particular), all within seconds.

Again: If I, a moderately resourced independent person, can do this, why would you think a sportsbook wouldn’t?

So not only do they have advanced projection tools, they also have multiple sources of information that tells them if that already well-projected line is efficient or not.

1) They all check — either automatically or manually — leading oddsmakers at Pinnacle or BetCris, perhaps even a Circa in the US.

2) They receive hundreds to thousands of data inputs in the form of customers wagering money — each with additional layers of wagering and win-rates — to inform the sportsbook of what the correct projection and price should be.

You fumbling through an app made by someone without domain expertise to understand that — or worse, the domain expertise to understand that and still sell it as though it provides an advantage in betting — when the sportsbook has had the time to refine their odds infinitely faster is a fool’s errand.

It is THE biggest mistake people make daily. It is likely collectively costing them tens of thousands daily, much more by the week and month.

In a perfect world, you combine personal knowledge with mathematically profitable bets based off market data or true probability sources (i.e. a projection modeling system or statistical standard deviation model for team scoring) to make every bet. That’s the ONLY way to profit over time. Anything else is just misdirection.

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 23rd, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• 💸 THE NBA IS BACK, THANK GOD

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Another Run At Seeking Investors Plus Other Ongoing Changes

We had a few nice wins without the NBA over the last week — in particular, I really encourage you guys to check out our college basketball data since I even hit a +1000 this week on a Southern Indiana upset — but the volatility and juice on NHL was like betting anytime touchdowns for everything in a way I did not enjoy.

Here’s our Top 10 bets for the day in video form:

And here’s they are in text too since they’re in my Google Sheet of results:

Since these are from the AM (they should still mostly be available based on what I’m seeing as of 2PM Eastern), here’s a few bonus ones I just hit too:

Kyle Anderson under 3.5 ast, +105 odds and 51% probability = 4.2 PROBLY Score
Rui Hachimura over 18.5 PRAs, +100 odds and 52% probability = 4.5 PROBLY Score
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander over 1.5 3pts, +210 odds and 33% probability = 3.4 PROBLY Score

Of course they’re always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store (leave a review with your Probly username and get a free month of Probly+)!

Traffic continues to move positively, especially now that NBA is back from All-Star Break, so we feel good there. If you don’t do it yet, it’s worth a quick scan of Probly a couple times of day to see if any bets strike your fancy — especially if you’re a paying member.

I’m currently putting our toes back in the waters to try to find investment for Probly. We feel like we’ve achieved a good amount of traction — albeit not the tens of thousands of dollars in revenue most investors want to see — and the growth trajectory has been there for traffic, subscribers, and revenue generally. So that’s a big part of my focus currently in the hopes we can start to actually get support here.

Besides that, we remain focused on getting the change to our filtering done and out. There have been some hurdles since it requires re-doing how some of the frontend operates — in particular, you’ll now have to Submit your filtering via a click rather than it doing it automatically — but we expect we should have this pushed soon.

If you’ve missed previous emails, we are currently creating specific filtering for our Profitability, Probability, and Last Updated timeframes as well as a toggle for Live events to filter in parallel. This will allow you to, say, find only bets with a PROBLY Score over 10 that have been updated within the last hour and have a probability over 50%.

We think this is going to be a gamechanger for those of you who want more security and choice in your bets — as well as the PrizePicks and Underdog aficionados who just need bets with a 54.9% probability or better per leg — so we’re pushing on it until it’s good to go.

After that, we expect to make one more crack at meaningfully improving search before considering changes we may have to make to our NoSQL environment to make our ambitions there more functional. We have some other cool stuff we want to get to as well — in addition to less cool stuff like better landing pages and improvements to our Subscribe page — so that’s the current immediate roadmap.

I had to pay our unfortunately growing OddsJam bill today so your support is needed now more than ever (especially since we’d like to be able to pay for more features for improvements, including ones that’d allow you to place bets directly from the app).

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.

I also 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.

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

Thanks again for everyone reading these emails still as we make the shift from NFL season. I’ll do my best to make it a useful or entertaining read with some +EV bets sprinkled in no matter what time of year in our undying quest to keep your supports.

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 (under $100 for a first year or under $10 for a first month) and I’ll see you guys next week!