🎰 New Grift From DraftKings That Can SLAUGHTER Your Bankroll

It’s another week in the world of sports betting and it’s one with a huge news item with MASSIVE ramifications on the US sports betting industry and, most directly, all of us as consumers.

DraftKings announced it will launch a new 20% surcharge on winning bets next week year in states like New York, Illinois, Vermont, and my begrudging home state of Pennsylvania.

The logic? They’re being taxed so much in these states (something they knew when fighting to get licenses) that they now must pass the charge onto customers.

Even worse, they’re openly rubbing it in the face of bettors who know better, saying this in response to Sportico’s assertion that DraftKings may not want the customers who’d be annoyed by an additional 1/5th charge to transact a bet:

“[T]he vast majority of customers will not be very sensitive to a low- to mid-single digit charge on winnings. And I also think that the types of customers who might be sensitive over the long term are the same types of people who are promo hunting or doing other things, and they’re naturally lower-value customers.”

“Other things” sounds a lot like a code word for “trying to actually win at betting.”

DraftKings’ stock is tanking after the announcement, down 11% currently, perhaps a reflection of market concern over their competitors finding a way to beat them on this point of user experience or, even worse, lead people to bet offshore illegally instead.

I’m not a nit about stuff like this. In fact, I’ve had almost all of my sportsbook action on DraftKings (other than a sweet run on the GENEROUSLY priced markets of FoxBet, RIP) because it’s where my bankroll is. I know that most customers will bet that way, independent of which sportsbook has the best odds, and that allows me to know what they experience when I use Probly.

I’ve dealt with being juiced to death by them before. In Pennsylvania (and quietly in other areas) a few months back, DraftKings began to price 50/50 bets at -115/-115. That’s a 5% swing taking money away from customers who are normally getting -110/-110 odds — all for an additional 2.5% of handle for them.

With this addition to DraftKIngs, we’re now talking a legit base 25% swing in ROI on bets you take on the platform.

It gets worse since they price their odds aggressively and efficiently.

It gets worse since they juice them to the gills — a home run that’s priced at +1100 on Fanatics will often be +800 on DraftKings, another 30% swing in value.

It gets worse since they’ll now tax you on any win so they can profit even more and make up for their own expensive tax licensing agreements – after just turning a profit for a quarter for the first time.

They spend like drunken sailors, including when they purchased VSIN for $70 million — only to flip it back years later for pennies on the dollar.

They acquire things like JackPocket, a lottery app/software business, for hundreds of millions for the express purpose of bilking idiots out of even more money with the lure of big prizes.

If you play on one of their less profitable areas like DFS (where they also regularly increase rake and entry fees), they push you to play their big Best Ball Tournament — which has increased its price from a $5 entry to a $10 entry to a $20 entry over the last three years, even as it requires countless promos to get even close to filling the tournament.

Across each platform, they try to force you into an iCasino ecosystem that yields more profit than everything else — a game where users have the least control, visibility, and are most prone to dopamine-style addictions.

At what point is enough enough? At what point do you as a consumer consider other options?

For me, we’ve reached that point. I plan to move my action to a different main book — maybe finally actually chase EV from book to book like you should if you take this seriously.

Mostly it just makes me weary as someone trying to create a tool that gives people a shot to stay afloat in an industry that wants to make that harder and harder.

To some extent, the game has always been rigged. The hope of researching your way to betting glory isn’t likely to occur for 99% of people when competing against real-time, brilliant odds pricing mathematical algorithms.

But at least there was some theoretical hope. A sense of fairness. A gentleman’s agreement that they won’t screw you over too bad as you try to overcome the odds to actually be profitable.

Now? With a 25% swing or more in your potential profitability? The math just doesn’t add up. It’s more and more like a corrupt carnival game if you play on DraftKings.

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Today, we’re back with a run through the day’s MLB bets and some company/product updates, including an update on our still-in-development Bet Now button. It’s your Probly Email for August 2nd, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• ⚾️ MLB Best Bets

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Still Working On Everything

It’s been a wild run so far post-All Star Break. Monday was one of the best days for bets in content we’ve ever had, racking up +20 units on a day where I did only longshot bets in our daily videos for YouTube and TikTok. We hit three home runs and two other longshot over/unders, even a +1100 homer from Nathaniel Lowe. Since then, it’s been worse than 50/50 with a lot of bets losing to the hook in fairly tilting ways. Still a profitable week but I’d like today to make it better!

With that in mind, here’s today’s Top MLB Bets in YouTube form:

The email exclusive bet hit last week after I went for as high a probability and PROBLY Score I can find. Can we do it again?

Of course our best bets, probabilities, and PROBLY Scores are always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store. Find the best bets on YOUR preferred sportsbook and win more in sports betting now!

New to Probly? Learn more about optimal settings for Probly, expected value/market-based betting, or see a product demo from me!

As we talked about last week, we’re working on the integration of our Bet Now button which will deeplink users to the bet on a sportsbook. We’re behind on it since there’s an issue with having to geo-tag some sportsbook URLs – specifically BetMGM and Caesars — with the state you’re in to make the bet populate correctly. It’ll be a somewhat complicated solution involving using Google Maps’ API but it’s taking longer than expected.

After that, we begin a big lift on what we hope will be a new feature to roll out before NFL season that we think will change the way Probly is used and viewed. But more on that to come.

We also made the move to kill our free trials after thinking about it for a few weeks — and having a conversation with a friend in the industry who said it worked well for his company.

The free trials became an issue because of people signing up on a maxed out credit card, using the product, then staying on throughout our grace period for free access only to repeat the process with another account.

Trial users stayed at a decent conversion rate but the amount of abuse we got — both of the trials themselves as well as from some of these users over email — made us feel like it’s a better move to go with requiring payment up front for access.

We’ll see how it performs but so far the results have been encouraging.

At some point we’ll build something else out to try to give people something for free. For now, we believe our product is premium enough that we want to go with this approach, particularly as we head into NFL season.

Otherwise, we remain in investor flux hoping for a resolution before we have some billables coming up mid-month. We’re focused on the product in the meantime, particularly with our big fall NFL/NBA push on the menu. But we’re hopeful we’ll get some good news here soon.

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

As always, thanks to all of you who read all the way down here. We covered a whole lot today but, ultimately, it’s all in service of being an advocate for consumers at a time where the betting industry has outwardly showed their disdain for us. Between products with no domain expertise that cost you money on both ends and sportsbooks that want to fleece you at every turn, it’s going to be harder than ever for many people to turn a profit. But we’ll keep fighting the good fight and evolving the product accordingly.

It’s a great time to learn more about Probly and kick off a membership at Probly.com! Get your head around the product in time for NFL season and get some MLB/Olympics/etc bets in the meantime!

Have a good weekend all, see you soon!