Market Inefficiencies and Psychoff Offers A Slice for a Price

In response to a tweet posted by Hank Tate showing the results from a few 2020 bets on Road / Unders compared to Home / Overs, @stingerpicks wrote that:

This should come as no surprise to readers of this blog either, with most bettors overrating home sides and betting on what they want which is lots of scoring. 

What this means is that if you are absolutely clueless, you should look at Away / Road teams and the Unders as a good place to start if you want to lose your money slowly. If you are clueless, you should also read this blog from the start. It'll take you a while, but you'll be informed by the end. 

Many systems I play use the 'Road' angle for this reason. 

Looking at the Unders in every sport covered by Killer Sports, the database all-time results illustrate this inefficiency. In every one of the eight sports, Unders has won the coin toss of Over / Under:

The numbers are similar for Road teams, with the exception of MLB where backing the Home team would have resulted in a smaller loss than backing the Road team, although this has has evened out over the past five seasons.

These observations only mean that this is a good place to start looking for inefficiencies. It is not suggested that anyone blindly start backing all Road teams and every Unders as you need a 51.23% strike rate to beat the vig when betting into -105 lines, and only three sports would have given you that on the Unders and only in the CFL would blindly backing Road teams have been profitable. 

The other two forms of American Football (NFL and NCAAF) have also been profitable for Road teams and Unders since 2014 though, with readers well aware of the benefit of backing Unders in NFL Divisional games with another profit last season, albeit not the biggest!

As discussed in this blog before, home advantage in many sports is disappearing with technology leveling the playing field and leagues making travel schedules less onerous than they once were.

In other NFL news, and related to rich people doing dumb things as touched on yesterday, the Cleveland Browns Offensive Tackle Greg Robinson, who has made $29 million playing football over the past seven seasons, was just arrested trying to enter the US with 157 pounds of marijuana in his car and now faces up to 20 years in prison.

Moving on and I liked the below tweet, in more ways than one, which while it relates to financial traders rather than sports traders, the point remains the same. 

Sports betting / trading is not easy, and with no barrier to entry, the competition is stiff. It's a fun hobby but don't kid yourself you can make a decent living at it. 

I'm reading that our old friend Psychoff (aka Dr. Guven) is back and generously offering a trading class at just £1,999 for up to 10 people. You will have seen my tweets on this topic if you follow me on Twitter, but if you are pondering this, save your money. You are not going to learn any secret winning formula, as no one with an edge that has supposedly made him seven figures would be stupid enough to give it away so cheaply. What you will probably get is a lot of common knowledge albeit it with some nice folders and materials about trading, but the problem with this is that:

You can put 50 people in a room and teach them how to trade. But you can't teach them how to be a trader. It's a personal journey and one of self discovery.

Remember, this is the man who claims to be a physician who would:

use my willpower to get what I want week after week

Try using willpower in trading and see how that works for you. Results are comparable to those of prayer I've found. 

He also claimed to be interested in psychology and self-improvement and yet admitted to having a weight problem.

Something doesn't seem quite right, and although some of the comments on the referenced post above predicted a coming sales pitch, the post is now over 10 years old, so it's taken a while!

The final comment was interesting, from someone claiming to know the good Doctor from a forum. He offered some insight into the methods:

FYI, Betfair is illegal in Turkey and nobody can manage to use it.

He is located in Sweden, he got 7 different dishes to scan all the live football broadcasts all around the Europe + a Dreambox receiver to decode the encrypted channels.

As I am living in Hungary and I can watch the local games, I can honestly tell you that when you can follow the low leagues + eastern European games, even if the liquidity is low, there are couple of hundreds to make per game since nobody is Tevez, Rooney, Drogba , Henry or Messi to change the destiny of the game in 3 seconds...

The reason why he does not give any ideas about his methods is quite simple, there is a certain amount of sweet pie to eat, why would he create competitors?

So after the trading class, there will be at least 11 people watching low liquidity Eastern European games fighting each other for a slice of the rather small pie? Or perhaps the pie has gone or else why create the competition? Proceed with caution.

Meanwhile, the value of my Tesla stock has now almost tripled, with another crazy day yesterday.