My Updated Views on Account Health

When you have done a year+ of advantage gambling content, you are bound to touch on longevity v. profit maximization a few times.

Most of the discussion I did around account health was offhand comments or stories in podcasts. The most in-depth (and still best) piece of account health content I did put out was my interview with Mr. Liiiimited (check it out here if you missed it).

After a particularly bad week of accounts getting limited, I decided to take account health more seriously.

My approach was twofold:

1. Do some A|B testing, experiment

2. Take notes on sportsbook behavior

The goal of this exercise was to get to a place where we were getting thrown out because of our P&L instead of thrown out for sharp behavior.

Did it work?

Kind of - we have improved account longevity (even bringing accounts back from the dead - spooky).

There are times when we get kicked out before we turn profitable (and sometimes that's a knowing sacrifice we make). But I know more now than I did before the exercise. So let me share the big key findings after the following disclaimer.

Disclaimer: If you are a losing or breakeven bettor - you should not care about account health. If you have NEVER been limited - do not bother with any strategies that sacrifice EV in terms of account health. Account health is overrated for the semi-sharp gambler, non-existent for the recreational, and underrated for the professional.

If you are making consistent money betting - there are takeaways here for you. But remember the tradeoff. Account longevity decreases your $ per hour on an account. If you have a small edge, it will either wipe away your EV or create long breakeven/ losing stretches.

Like anything worth doing - the right time to deploy account health "tactics" depends. So mull over the following takeaways and see if you can incorporate any profitably into your betting.

The five keys to account health

1. Does the sportsbook even care?

2. Time till post

3. CLV (but not exactly how you think)

4. Account history

5. Bet mix (aka parlay mix)

1. Does the sportsbook care?

Before you even consider modifying you betting behavior, you should know if the sportsbook has any gamble at all.

The strategies used to extend account health (cover bets, parlaying sharp bets together, priming an account, etc..) cost money.

That money is an investment - and the investment is only good if there is a return. If you spend $500 of EV priming an account - but get limited the first time you get CLV...the investment wasn't worth it. Or, If you have to place 90% "cover bets" to stay on the sportsbook's good side - it's not worth it.

The math around when to use cover or not isn't straightforward - because there are always unknowns about how your opponent operates. So whenever you learn something about how they operate, incorporate it into your calculus.

2. Time till post

Remember when I said we brought a few accounts back from the dead? This was through the power of betting within an hour of the game starting.

And I believe so strongly in the universal account health benefits of betting near post that I have a rule. I usually do not have firm and fast rules because they don't work. But this is unique

RULE: If you are going to place a "cover bet" aka a bet where you are trying to look square, you must place it within an hour of game time.

PERIOD!

Why? Betting right before post is when the sportsbook is most confident in their lines. Sportsbooks, imo, live in a state of constant anxiety. The only cure for that anxiety is a bet that is made when they know their lines are as solid as can be. Or a bet from a known massive loser (but more on that later).

Now John - isn’t it hardest to win at the close? Yes, which is why the rule only applies to cover bets. If you are beating any semi-major market at close, then you're already in good shape.

If you are beating a more niche market at close (or a few in the same sport) then there is a strong synergy with mixing in some cover plays on bigger markets at the close. Your account will look recreational in the sense that you're always betting at post. And if your mix isn't just one niche market, you may not stand out from the crowd.

3. CLV (nuanced CLV)

CLV is neck and neck with "time till the game starts" for the most important account health factor.

There are a few unfortunate problems with it though…. For starters, you can’t control it. CLV is created by either the sportsbook moving off your action (problem you now need to solve), or a bunch of other people betting the same bet as you.

You can guess when people might be betting the same side as you - and then you have to decide how you want to act/ not act in that situation. But there still is that big part of the CLV equation that is out of our hands.

The second problem with CLV is we don’t know exactly how the sportsbook measures it. This is easier to describe with the following example:

There have been times when we bet some stuff that we originated and the market moved against us initially. But then 6+ hours later it actually moved back in our favor.

So did we get CLV? Yes - but in my opinion it was a less toxic type of CLV. Two reasons:

1. Market initially moved against us

2. Long lag time between when we bet and when the market moved in our favor

If you are a sportsbook and you are programmatically trying to pick off "undesirable" customers using CLV, you would probably write a line of code that says:

If a customer gets positive CLV on 30%+ of their bets within 2 minutes of betting, then they get 10% limits.

This would be sufficient to pick off users of the most popular odds screens and tout services.

If a customer bets and six hours later they get CLV, what are you supposed to make of that? It's not great, but so many things could have changed between now and then. A square better can accidentally get CLV on a game where they bet and two hours later a big group bets the same side or an injury is released.

CLV is important - but since it is out of your control (especially if you are originating), I suggest you focus on the factors you can control. Or at least sort of control, like...

4. Account History

You can't fake a two-year account history of losing play. I mean...you can. It's called whale flipping and it's HIGHLY DANGEROUS. I will be releasing some content shortly about a whale flip gone horribly wrong. But that's for a later date…

Account history is also why I tell losing or break-even bettors to not care about this account health stuff. They have great account history - so they already check the hardest box to check. If you are someone who has been betting for a while and hasn't been limited, you have good account history.

So if you are in that camp and came across my content in an attempt to take betting more seriously - just take whatever winning strategy you can find and start plugging away. Ignore cover, time to post, parlays, CLV etc... You have the golden goose, go get your money back.

For the rest - this is where "priming" comes in. The first two weeks matters more than the next two weeks. A lot of you have been through the DraftKings VIP showcase - basically a period of time DK gives potential VIPs to see if they are idiots or not.

My advice is to treat the first two weeks of any account (on a sportsbook that cares about this) like it's a VIP showcase. It could literally get you in the VIP program! You want your first label from the trading team to be a good one.

Priming is just betting major sports around close, bet parlays, bet SGPs etc... Think about your friend who sucks at betting, and model your behavior off of them. Don't go crazy - try and take a decent number at close if you can and maybe a SGP that's priced better than at other books.

Remember - just like a cover bet, priming is an investment. You have to have some evidence the ROI is there to do it.

5. Bet Mix

I call this parlay mix in my head. What % of your bets are parlays? What % of your bets are SGPs? (What % of your bets are major markets works as well)

I like parlays because you can keep your EV while looking like a recreational. My line on parlays is this:

"It's a lot harder to tell if someone is a winning bettor after 100 parlays than it is after 100 straights"

I am going to show you what I mean by using the free bankroll simulator from my website to run 10,000 simulations of the following two scenarios. (Flat bet of $100 used)

Scenario 1: 100 straight bets at +100 where the bettor has a 52% win probability (4% ROI).

Scenario 2: 100 parlays at +600 odds where the bettor has a 15.5% win probability (8% ROI)

The key is that you can play longer odds parlays that have a 100% bigger ROI than straights, but still profit a lower % of the time over 100 bets.

Why would you want to profit a lower % of the time? Imagine you are the sportsbook and you are evaluating bettors. You want to know what % of the time a player should be winning due to luck alone. If the player is deploying a high variance strategy like parlays - it takes longer for their results to paint a definite picture of if they are a winner or not.

And this is BEFORE you account for the fact that sportsbooks see parlays as recreational bets compared to straights (all else being equal.)

So those are the big 5 takeaways of my months-long account health study. I hope 1-2 of them can help you make more money - which is always the goal of any email I send.

The other major takeaway I had was one can express account health rules programmatically (to a minor extent at least).

And as I was getting serious about account health, I was also building GP Picks+. And if you have checked out GP Picks+, you probably guessed this as there is an account health rating for the bets it sends out.

The two things that I needed for GP Picks+ (so it wasn't just me slapping a logo on the market-leading bet feed) were:

1. Price movement > de-vig

2. Context

The price movement was a non-negotiable. As a trader, I became painfully aware that the price something trades at is far more important than the price it's quoted at. We don't have a tape in sports betting, but we do have market-making books. When they move - expect that someone traded there. I care more about following those trades than the de-vig market weighted average price.

Context is infinite. But to start I wanted to give people a sense of how much they should bet (“recommended betsize” on alerts) and how much a bet fits in with a recreational profile (account health rating).

I am excited to refine those metrics and continue to add context where I can. It's the benefit of creating a product AFTER having done this professionally for years. And I believe that will be what differentiates GP Picks+ from the rest.

During September, if you sign up for any of the yearly GP Picks+ plans you get the 10+ hour course "Six Figure Sports Bettor" for free. (It currently sells for $300).

If you are looking to start with your first winning strategy or add another tool to the arsenal: click here to unlock hundreds of profitable bets a day.

Thank you for reading!

John