Exploiting a FanDuel Mistake For Big Money | NFL Reverse Teasers - YouTube

there is one thing that i learned back in third  grade that i use to beat sports betting markets  

today and i'm going to tell you exactly what  that is but first hi i'm jack from unabated.com  

and i make sports betting educational content both  here on youtube as well as at unabated the goal is  

to help you understand this exciting world of  sports betting and to help you help yourself

whether you are a professional sports bettor or  you are just aspiring to be one your method of  

finding angles is a never-ending pursuit oddly  the best advice i ever picked up on finding  

angles came from renowned video poker expert bob  dancer in his book million dollar video poker bob  

talks about a former partner who would just walk  around casinos endlessly looking for new angles  

it is the needle in the haystack type  of method that seems too tedious to most  

bettors however it's also a trait that many  successful professional sports bettors have  

i'm a big fan of the scientific method it is  a concept you were probably taught in grade  

school but you've rarely thought about since  perhaps this illustration will jog your memory

that chart takes me back to third grade where a  

similar diagram was crudely constructed  with construction paper and stencils  

on a bulletin board in our classroom the  first step in the scientific method is to  

observe as an aspirational sharp better the  best thing you can do to kick-start your career  

is to constantly be observing have you ever  looked at every bet available at the sportsbook  

every single bet dig down into each sport and  into each game some of these books have hundreds  

of available bets on each game now that is a  lot of surface area for a sports book to defend  

it is in these nooks and crannies that you can  sometimes find something they don't realize is  

beatable sometimes it's a mispriced line and yes  that's always nice to find however more valuable  

is when they have a systematic misunderstanding of  what they're offering and how it should be priced  

usually this occurs when a sportsbook is the only  one to offer a certain wager there is not a market  

price to help guard rail their pricing those are  the situations that can be extremely lucrative

i'm often reluctant to go into specifics about  various angles the world of advantage play is  

pretty cyclical and while it's rare for a casino  or sportsbook to make the same mistake twice  

it is commonplace for other casinos and  sportsbooks to fail to learn from another's error  

often i can reuse an angle at a different operator  later so best not to tip my hand however i'll make  

an exception here because it is a good example  of what it takes to exploit a mistake at the  

beginning of this nfl season i was poking around  fanduel i decided to see if they had any changes  

to their teaser pricing and they made that easy  to spot with this new flag on their teasers button  

now their teaser pricing wasn't great they used to  offer a two-team six-point teaser for -120 which  

was average and a three-team plus 160 which was  decent however i noticed i could adjust the number  

of points in the teaser up or down up to plus 14  points and down to what's this minus six points  

fanduel was trying out the old reverse teaser  or pleaser as it's sometimes known the reverse  

teaser is almost always a sucker bet instead  of getting six points on each leg of your  

parlay you give up six points on each leg  in exchange for that you get some long odds  

i first became familiar with the reverse teaser  in delaware when they had their nfl parlay cards  

fortunately it didn't take long to realize  that they were a bad bet in delaware  

you're just giving up too much value  in exchange for the odds they offered  

i decided to compare the odds though i still  had some old reverse teaser cards from delaware  

and it appeared they pay plus two thousand or  twenty to one on a three team reverse teaser in  

delaware but now here on fanduel they paid plus  twenty eight hundred or twenty eight to one hmm  

that seems like a pretty big discrepancy  this is going to be worth a closer look

as a professional sports bettor my method  for analyzing any wager is to first figure  

out what i was up against i needed to know what  the break-even point was on the fanduel wager  

now i outlined this technique in an article i  wrote on unabated.com about building profitable  

teaser bets i'll link that article below  now since this was a three team wager  

and it paid 28 to 1 we take the cube root of the  implied probability of the payout you convert  

the odds to implied probability and then well  here's what the excel formula would look like  

so now what this is saying is we would need a  32.55 implied probability or plus 207 odds or  

better on each leg to make these bets a positive  expected value now this compared well versus what  

i was up against in delaware back in the  day that was 36.24 as a break-even point  

however i still wasn't optimistic it's tough to  subtract six points from either side of any nfl  

line and not pass through at least one key number  we would definitely want to avoid situations where  

we'd be giving up too much value instead of  just focusing on three team wagers i also ran  

the numbers on the two team wagers they had a  six point wager which paid nine to one a six  

and a half point wager which paid ten to one and  a seven point wager which paid eleven to one and  

here's how those numbers looked suddenly  it's starting to become a little bit more  

interesting these odds felt beatable to me the  same factors that make a teaser bet profitable  

would make a reverse teaser bet unprofitable  likewise the same things that make teaser bets  

bad would make reverse teaser bets good and in  that pro building profitable teaser bets article  

that i referenced i outlined some teaser traps  to avoid these include teasing through the zero  

teasing totals and teasing other sports all of the  things that would make a regular teaser a bad bet  

are the things i would be looking to do in a  reverse teaser so i started poking around now  

what's this i could play these reverse teasers  on college football well now things are really  

looking good but i kept poking and that's when  i discovered i could play these reverse teasers  

on totals mind officially blown there's got to be  an edge here now i just need to quantify my edge

using the alt line calculator at unabated i was  quickly able to get an accurate price on every  

game on the board with regards to subtracting  six six and a half or seven points i found that  

totals were by far preferable how good was it  well consider these two week one nfl match-ups  

pittsburgh buffalo over under 48.5 points and  cleveland kansas city over under 54.5 points  

now when i enter the pittsburgh buffalo game  in the alt line calculator and look for a total  

seven points worse than the market line it tells  me that the correct price would be plus 234 now  

remember i already figured out that anything with  odds shorter than plus 247 was going to be good  

now entering the cleveland kansas city game in  was even better over 61 and a half which is seven  

points from the posted 54 and a half total well  that was plus 204 to find out what that two team  

teasers true price would be we convert the implied  probability and then multiply them together and  

then convert it back so plus 234 is equal to  29.94 percent and plus 204 is equal to 32.89  

by the way if you aren't sure how to  convert from odds to implied probability  

i have a video on that from last year that i'll  link above but you can use various tools around  

the web to get this done for you as well now let's  multiply those two numbers together and we get  

9.85 percent so we're getting paid 11 to 1 on a  wager that will win about 9.85 percent of the time  

that's a very healthy 18.17 edge in  our favor this is going to be fun

i repeated the same exercise for  every other game on the schedule  

and then took the top 10 best candidates ranked  by ev or expected value and i set out to round  

robin all of them together i would be betting  each two team permutation of these 10 teams  

well that created 45 wagers now the nice  thing about round robin would be that while  

my expectation was to win only about 10 percent  of the time on each bet by making more bets i  

was more likely to come close to that expectation  i even got a bit frisky and i tossed in this gem

now this bet would have returned nine hundred  ninety nine thousand and sixty dollars on a 9.99  

wager had it won and in case you're wondering my  odds of winning were point zero zero two percent  

or fifty thousand to one however that bet paid a  hundred thousand to one which makes it decidedly  

plus ev now i'm not going to lie i had dreams  of darren rovell tweeting about how a better  

turn ten dollars into one million and he'd track  me down and interview me and i could turn the  

whole thing into a commercial for unabated  sort of like what some of you are probably  

think this video is doing but stick with me  there is still a lesson to be learned here

well as you can see the results in  week one were abysmal to say the least  

just two of the teams won so out of those 45 two  team permutations my lone winning wager paid 11  

to one but the week was obviously a pretty big  loss however i was actually ecstatic about this  

not as happy as had i won but if fanduel cleaned  up on these bets in week one they're likely to  

get a false sense of security in how they perform  going forward i'm not sure how they didn't catch  

their own math mistake here but at this point i  was focused on getting down as much as possible  

as long as i could undeterred by the previous  results and bolstered by the edge that the  

alt line calculator said i had i pressed on in  week two now the week two card was even better  

than week one in terms of value as there were 12  candidates that were just too good to ignore that  

created 66 permutations five of the 12 games won  well that meant that 10 out of the 66 wagers won  

this made up for week one losses and the project  was officially in the black however the walls were  

beginning to close in fanduel started to institute  aggregate limits on teams so your total exposure  

on a single team couldn't surpass a certain  figure this would hamper round robin in weeks  

with more candidates and also made me suspicious  that they would look deeper into the betting  

now week 3 had 11 candidates and 4 of  them won that meant a profitable 6 out  

of 55 permutation wagers i actually had  to pass on a couple permutations because  

the aggregate limit but fortunately for me they  were all losing combinations so my profit on week  

three was actually a little stronger than expected  i started to think of ways that i could try to get  

around the aggregate limit however i'd soon find  out that those efforts weren't going to matter

when i began checking for bets in week four  i quickly realized that fanduel had finally  

spotted the error of their ways they drastically  changed the pricing for their reverse teasers  

and the new pricing for two team wagers were not  good this change was enough to eliminate almost  

all candidates from contention they also  modified the payout on college football  

even more drastically it went from a fifteen  to twenty percent edge on most combinations  

to a minus five percent or lower expectation  now of course just with regular teasers there  

are still a couple scenarios where even with  these reduced odds you'd have a small edge  

and hey if you want a data mine for profitable  scenarios be my guest but just be aware that  

you won't be making as many wagers and so  you have to be prepared for the variance  

in the end the entire profit making process was  largely all thanks to that scientific method that  

i learned in grade school you see i observed  what was available on the sportsbook site  

this led to questioning whether this could  be a positive ev situation based on what i  

had seen years before on those parley cards  in delaware i researched what the profitable  

break-even point would be for the wager and then  i hypothesized that what made standard teasers bad  

could make reverse teasers good experimentation  with the unabated alt line calculator pointed  

me to value in the market i concluded that  fanduel was offering a great wager and now  

i'm reporting it to you taking a few minutes to  look into every bet available at your sportsbook  

can be a very profitable experience a good  professional sports bettor uses this method to  

look at every scenario and tries to envision a way  that this could be a profitable situation for them  

then they go about trying to find when those  profitable situations might arise if i had one  

regret from the above example it would be that  i didn't maximize my profitability i could have  

pushed it harder i could have applied more art  to the situation instead of just the science  

but that post-mortem thinking is actually  improving my approach the next time  

a similar situation might present itself you see  it's all part of that final step of the scientific  

method the reporting perhaps you spotted ways  you could have improved on my process as well  

and if you have well then congratulations you  are on your way to using the scientific method  

to improve your betting well that's it for  this video if you enjoyed this give it a  

thumbs up that lets youtube know that this  is the type of content you like to see and  

subscribe because that lets me know that people  would like to see more from me there's plenty  

more to find over at unabated.com and until  next time go out there and win some wagers

you