Beat Big Markets & Bottom Up Live Betting w/ Ant DeRosa | Ep 123

But guess what? You can grab a few challenger tennis matches and parlay them with even a positive, you know, no EV play on the NFL or something else. You can probably the technology for some of these books is so bad that a lot of times you get the same limits as the NFL, even though you parlayed it with two of the challenger matches. And now here we are. You got a big bet on something that, you know, it was manipulated 50, 60, 70 cents. I see the soccer game once again manipulated two goals. Hey, what's up everybody? GPSP and Ant, the Rosa. I would say like a, I don't know, true legend in the space. Our first, I would say for, you know, first person who's kind of reached that, that legend status, even if you may not say so about yourself. But yeah, welcome to the show, Ant. We're really happy to have you. No, thanks for having me. I think legend is a bit too kind. But actually, I came across your podcast not too long ago. And I think after the flop episode, maybe because he tweeted about it. And I've been listening in and they're great. You guys obviously, I wish I would have found this podcast when I started betting, you know, many years ago, because you guys do some really good work here. Wow, that's nice. I told us via the highlight of that bash was when I met you and you told me you listened to the podcast. Yeah, I think it's great. Like, there's a lot of things, you know, like in the DFS world or the pick six world that I don't know too much about. So I find those episodes quite interesting. But, but yeah, my only thing, I know we're going to go over two hours, but the only thing, the only complaint I have is two hours long, it gets quite long. Yeah, I was going to open with that. Do you have a hard cut? Because you've been, one of the GPs told me you're one of the most vocal, you know, shorten it. So we're trying. We are trying to shorten it. Last week, we were close to an hour and a half. So we'll try and we'll try and tighten this up to, let's go for as long as, you know, we find interesting things to say. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter. All right, well, let's kick it off with, I think one of the more interesting, like, starts to betting. You had was, I call it start to betting. It's interesting to hear, like, everybody's first advantage player or whatnot, but you were a professional, magic, the gathering player when you were in college, right? Do you want to talk about how you got the start and magic and then, like, why so many successful gamblers, like Justin Bonamo, David Williams, Brink and he have come from magic and made that jump like you did. So I started playing magic when I was a kid in middle school, you know, we were just play at the lunch table or whatever. And the game is super interesting because it's always evolving. It's, you know, poker obviously evolves with strategies, you know, as people get smarter, computers get smarter. But magic is kind of cool because every three months, some new cards get released and some older cards, you're not allowed to play anymore. So it's like always kind of fresh and it's kind of fun to like discover strategies that before didn't exist. I think it has something to do with, first of all, most people that play magic or at least when I play magic professionally, we were all like late teens or at least 20s. And you live this world where you're playing for a lot of money at a really young age. You know, I remember I would go to magic tournaments and it's like, if I don't do well here, I can't pay for rent kind of thing. So you kind of learn how to live, you know, as a gambler, you know, because as we all know, gambling is one of those obscure professions that you could do everything perfect, but then you can lose money. I'm not even saying make money or break even you actively lose money. And it's one of those lonely careers where when you have a bad day, you can't really go tell your friends about it because nobody can relate, you know. So I think that has something to do with it why, you know, you name some of the most successful poker players who can't become their career in magic. But I think in poker in particular, magic is really good because you can recognize patterns. That's kind of what it teaches you to do. And I think games like poker, like it's a lot of pattern recognition. And it's like, yeah, I was in this spot last time. I tried this thing at dinner work. Let me try something else or, oh, this has been really working really well in these spots. Let me keep trying, keep doing what's working. And magic has a lot of that. And I think that related really well when I started working for sportsbooks because trading is really, in my opinion, all about pattern recognition. Because the betters will do the same thing every day. And if you do recognize their patterns, you can kind of be one step ahead. And then when they'll change their patterns, if you're quickly to notice, then it's just always a concept battle. It's kind of fun. Yeah, I think I find it super interesting. I don't know a ton about magic, but the idea that the game is non-static in a way that like even say, you know, you can make an argument like poker games are not static depending on who you're playing with or whatever. But in the way that the sort of meta changes, I know like a lot of video games are like this. And I think, you know, on the podcast before we've talked about like, at least in my opinion, one of the easiest traits to determine whether someone's going to be good at sports betting is like how effective they are at a game's player, especially games that like change or have because like that's the adaptability that's so important in sports betting. And so is that like the main piece you think sort of helps you contribute to pattern recognition, the adaptability, because it's quite unique, you know, coming from that sort of background versus I would say many more people that we talk to are, you know, sort of in sports and then start gambling or like come from a data side and then start gambling. Stuff like that, I would say it would be much more common. So do you think that gives you like a different outlook on unbetting then say some of those backgrounds or a hundred percent. And you know, as much time as I spend, you know, refining our models and our processes and all that, we spend a lot of time also trying to figure out patterns that are happening in the market, you know, like for baseball, I can tell you exactly at what time of day every single picture for, you know, like people, people betting on a certain picture or against a certain picture, like when it's happening every single day, you know, that's, that could be a simple thing that you can track. And, you know, by the end of the season, you know, you will notice some really crazy things. You know, and the same thing with, you know, how is the market react when a really good basketball team is losing at a half time, you know, or football team, you know, the chiefs losing at a half time, you know, sports books, most likely will put some blind betters will come on the chiefs. Yada, yada, yada. You know, those are, I think that could be very really helpful in your betting journey. Yeah, I, that's, that is interesting. And it's kind of like, I can't, I see that from poker where you're always like, okay, who, who is this? Who is doing that? Why are they doing that? And then just like trying to figure out basically like their whole strategy, because it's in poker, I'm sure, in magic, like who you're playing. Actually, this is, this is a good transition for kind of talking about getting, getting to pinnacle, but like learning the patterns of who you play is really important in poker, because if like they're making mistakes, you would want to shift your strategy to be optimal against like their mistakes, not necessarily like GTO. And it kind of sounds like when you're looking at the action flowing in at pinnacle, you know, you're trying to figure out, okay, like, are we gonna do what we think is the actual optimal line here? Are we gonna move it? Because we understand like the patterns of these betters. So why, how did you transition from magic to pinnacle? And like why was pinnacle so gung-ho about going and getting like specifically magic players? I think that's like one of the most interesting like pinnacle lore stories of all time is like how the trading floors is made up of magic players who'd never like watch sports. I, I think I said the story in a different podcast, but really what just happened is there was a magic player who was beating pinnacle for millions of dollars. And in 2007, I think pinnacle closed doors to the Americans for the first time. And so that player couldn't play there anymore, so pinnacle went and hired him. And one of the first questions I said, hey, what can you beat us for so much every year? And he just basically said, you know, the people that worked here are not that smart. And imagine a person, you know, who was borderline, you know, he's autistic. He's one of those guys that's like very smart, but he's not smart enough to know that he has to brush his teeth every day because he's always so busy, you know, solving world's problems. And then, and then the owners of pinnacle said, oh, where we can find people as smart as you. And this is a story that's been told me, I don't know if it's true, he laughed, he shook, and he said, ah, nobody's as smart as me. But there's this game called magic, they're gathering the people that play that are somewhat smart. So then pinnacle, they basically went down the the standings at the time of the best magic players. And luckily in that period of time, I was one of them. So I got the call 7th or 8th person on the list. But I think where they really struggled is not that they just hired a bunch of kids, you know, like games. It's that they brought us all on this island with no friends, no family. And basically almost nothing to do because the silent other than the beach. So we were all in Curse House, a small, I don't know, 60 miles across from one side to the other. And we basically are going to the beach and go drink beers. We had nothing to do. So like when we were not working and we were together, what do you think we talked about work? So it was, you know, they hired these people and we're willing to work 24/7 because we were competitive and we all wanted to get better. But, but yeah, that's the kind of the story. And something that you said about, you know, trying to figure out what the odds, you know, based on what people are doing, like what odds you should offer. You said something like that before you question. And something that I always say is there's a misbelief that the sportsbooks are offering the optimal line at all times. The sportsbooks are actually offering the line that's going to make them the most money at all times. Right. Which is something that I think the casual better doesn't actually realize. The goal is to overcharge the public or most of the money where it's going to come as much as you can without ever taking a bet on the other side. And I think I think we did that really well, where at other, you know, I've worked at other sportsbooks or I consulted for some others. They really, that's I think the missing sauce that they don't have is everyone is so worried about offering the right odds at all times and it shouldn't really be that way. Yeah, I think like first layer thinking when you get into betting is like, oh, they're offering something to split the money 50 50. And then second layer is like, oh, no, they just want the media and outcome. And then the third layer is like, no, they want to offer what's going to make them the most money. At least, you know, like a sophisticated trader, a sophisticated book. And I know you've talked about, you know, moving to to Curacao and what not another podcast. But this, this totally fascinates me because I try and put myself in your shoes. And I don't know exactly what age you were. But if someone called me, you know, at that age and said move to Curacao, there'd almost be zero percent chance I would, I would have done it. So like what what walked me through your your appetite for risk or like uprooting your life or whatnot. Because I think like I don't think we should just gloss over like that fact. I think many people, you know, like would be, you know, in today's day, good at video games or whatever. And like if they got some sort of opportunity, like that, I think a extremely small portion would actually take it. So like, how did you, how did you do that calculus to decide to go down there? So I was in a very like most people, they didn't really have jobs. You know, they were just magic players. And obviously they were willing to offer more money that you could win play magic. I actually added job. I was working for a baseball card company called Upper Deck at the time. And when I got the phone call, I first thought I was a joke. It was a joke. Then I was talking to my friends, I was like, oh no, I heard this other person also got the call and this other person also got the call. So, you know, I called them back. And I said, well, I already have a job. I just bought a house in California. I don't really, you know, can I come there and check it out, right? So, you know, I flew there for a weekend. And you know, once I saw how many magic players were already there and how many more they were wanting to hire. So I was a game designer before going to pinnacle. And I'm talking about the game designers of card games. During that time, like video games are coming out, like I don't know if you guys remember the big race of like World of Warcraft where basically everybody played. Oh yeah. So I didn't think that industry like was that great, you know, for a long-term career because I was like kids are going to start just want to play video games all the time. Nobody's going to want to read car techs on cards and play these games that we're making. And there was there was a moment as a my game designer, you know, a journey that I realized that my success, like on my work, was like sure I had something to do with it, but there was so many outside factors that like told me like is if I am I doing a good job. So like we make this great game called Quick Strike. Nobody ever bought a single card of it. And the reason why it was bad, it was because they decided to put it on an intellectual property that they just sucked. So they we make this cool game, they decide to put Pirates of the Caribbean on it. Then something happens in China and instead of releasing in November before Christmas, it releases in February, the game comes out, nobody buys it and it's a big epic fail. But we're all in this game design room with a bunch of smart, you know, game designers and we're like, man, this we thought this was the best game we ever designed. So so then I said, you know what this sports betting thing even though I didn't know what a money line was, a spread was, a total was my mother told me, Hey, if you go to Curacao and they ask you to go collect money from somebody, please don't go, you know, like I took a leap of faith, you know, that ended up working out. I'm real like you you pay homage to the name of this podcast more than we do with the risk takers podcast. We're like, yeah, you know, that's a bit much for us. We kind of like to just live the suburban life. But yeah, I think and this is like something that came up on on shippers pod and why I think one of the reasons why he's such a good guest is and probably such a good better is because of that experience being on the other side of the counter and then coming over to the betting side and I told him I was like, Oh, I'm kind of jealous that I didn't do like at least a year kind of seeing that side of it because I feel like it would give me a lot of good a lot of good experience. He is betting. So let's talk a little bit about working at pinnacle. I think we you've kind of hit on this, but you know, our first with the with what you said about the optimal the line I'll make you the most money, not not the right price. But what are some common misconceptions people have of, you know, pinnacle, the sharp book model, etc. that you still see on gambling Twitter and that you can kind of help us break our our wrong assumptions of. So the first misconception that that I think everybody has is that opening lines are like this this thought out like project and like they're any good. You know, like we would I would literally make our opening NBA titles at pinnacle within two minutes, just using a calculator, a piece of paper and a pen. And it didn't really matter one number you put up there within 30 minutes, you know, at a thousand dollars a pop, you would get to like, you know, close enough to the closing line. So then another another misconception that I always find funny like Vegas knows or whatever or you know, it's, you know, obviously that's not from sharp from sharp sports books, but you know, that always makes me giggle when I see that. Another misconception that I kind of see is a lot of people do top down betting and they they don't realize what they're top down betting in. You know, like while pinnacle might be a really good sports book for soccer or tennis, they might really be bad for college sports or, you know, while bookmakers really good for for American sports might be really bad for soccer. It's kind of like knowing exactly what these sharp books are good at. So I think that's another misconception. Another thing that I think people don't realize is that they think that sports books are taking millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars on every single game. I promise you, there's NFL games that get kicked at really big sports books with less than a hundred thousand dollars of bets. And yes, those are some of the misconceptions. That last one I'm really shocked by honestly the NFL one because I was like, especially now we see all the numbers from like call sheet and and whatnot. You're just like, I just assume that the sports books are doing millions on every single NFL game. You talked about like the openers being like not super scientific. I think the most interesting thing and like I assume why pinnacle could do really well is you guys got to the close quickly and you're willing to throw up an opener that's not, you know, perfect because you know how to work your way to the close through profiling or whatever, but can you kind of walk us through that process of like, you know, setting the opener and then getting to the close at a book, like at a market making book. So so obviously, you know, when we would post the line, you know, if I didn't copy another book, so sometimes, you know, you're busy, you don't get to it right away and then some other sports book has them. So you're like, I'm just going to copy them. There's a funny, there's a book that probably not too many people know about it's called Marathon Met. They're in Russia. They have very little vague, but they kick out every single person with a pulse. Their, their openers are actually pretty decent. So sometimes we would just copy them. But um, but yeah, we would just open it up and then, you know, as soon as you open it up, you'll get bets right away. It doesn't matter what the limits were, you know, if it's $500 or $1000. When you're opening a line, the first thing you need to really realize, you cannot be scared to over-move. That is something that like modern traders, at least the ones I talk to, like they're terrified of over-moving. They, they, everyone so we so terrified about her earning on the next bet. And like, that's really like, they have to earn on the last bet they just took. And I think that's just like such best strategy. Like, if you have a guy that beats, you know, yes, uh, whatever, he has a CLV of 4%. You know, like, why not move the full 4% when the guy bets? Right now, of course, yeah, you can have the guy that you bet, you move 150% of the big, then he might bet you on the other side. Okay, whatever, great. But how much money did you really lose? So, you know, you just have to move super aggressively. And then once you start getting two-way, you can just open it up for a little more. You know, I think, I think we used to start MBA total. This was in 2015 or 2016. I think we used to start them at 2K. And then by, you know, within an hour, we would be at three or $5,000. This is on a 10-cent line. On average, the total will probably move to the 2.5 points. Sorry, sorry, one sec. I was getting a phone call apologize for that. But, uh, but yeah, totals, totals, uh, you know, they don't move that much, you know, as soon as you post them. Funny enough, we used to have a guy, it was a Russian customer who would bet $50 every time any opening line got posted. And, uh, the guy was just totally crushing it. I figured exactly what his stats were, but this guy was winning well over six figures betting $50 at a time. I'm that serious. This guy would bet everything. This guy is a count started with an A and a V. So those, the pinnacle accounts, like, when they come in, it would be like a V. So his first name is definitely with an A. His last name is definitely would have V. I remember Marco Blume, uh, reached out to him and say, listen, we know it's a computer that's betting these lines because as soon as we put it up and automatically bets it, can we buy it from you and offer them tons of money? And the guy's like, nah, I'm good betting my $50. But, uh, yeah, this is a true story. Um, but yeah, of course, you want to profile your customer correctly, um, you know, so you know how much to move. Um, today's game, I haven't been trading in a long time. I suspect today's trading is much harder because there's so much manipulation. Um, before the passport repeal, there wasn't that much market manipulation because there wasn't enough places to get down. Um, so, you know, you should take that with a grain of salt, what I'm saying. So I'm sure when you're considering manipulation in there, there's things you have to do differently. Um, but yeah, that's, uh, that's a story about the overnight. Like, I jotted down like eight different directions I wanted to double or ask on. So, one thing you had mentioned earlier on a while back is you said, like, different books are sharp on different things. I think you were giving the example of pinnacles, sharp on stuff, like, you know, tennis or golf or whatnot, but maybe not American sports. Is that, is that, uh, because we get questions on this, this type of idea all the top, like, of like, where, where should I use this, my source of truth for top down, like types of questions. So maybe just taking like a step back from that, are those discrepancies and differences, like driven by investment in product, sort of differences at pinnacles. So like, you know, they, they invest more in something like e sports than they would say, like, American football or more relative to other books. Or is it like a liquidity difference? Like more money is bet. Um, like, what, what are the drivers of those, those differences? It's basically liquidity. Um, you know, Americans in theory are not a lot to bet on pinnacle. So, obviously, their college sports are going to suffer because of that. Um, you know, most of their business Asian. So while their MBA and baseball is really good, uh, because Asians do love the bet that, you know, is their NFL really good? Yeah, I know they take big limits, but, you know, I suspect it's not the best. Um, you know, I've done some testing. Like, I think their MBAs very, very good. Their baseball is very good. Their NFL and college sports is a little bit less good. They're tennis. Super good. Uh, you know, they have, they're, they're legal in many European countries, you know, and they have a great product there. Soccer, same thing. Most of their customs are Asians. That's why e sports is doing so well with them is because that's who usually bets e sports, you know, lots of Koreans and whatever else. So, so yeah, so I think liquidity is something to do with it. Um, they, they, of course, spend a lot of money as you guys can see. Look at their esport, you know, uh, like, uh, menu. Obviously, you can tell that they're doing very good stuff there. You can actually even click through some games and see they have games open for $20,000 on esports, you know, so obviously you can assume that either they have liquidity or they've done a lot of good work there, right? But yeah, it's just depends on where the company decides to move their direction, you know, I assume Fandals, very sharp, probably NFL, you know, they have mostly the American customers, you know, yeah, I was shocked like I was checking or two things on that, but checking Fandals props like for NFL, you type like they're taking huge size and some of these just like player props, uh, this year, but the esports thing on pinnacle, I mean, SP is a esports guy. So I have to hear his take on this, but like, there's a couple of things that they, and I think you've talked in the past about like their investment into esports, and I think I've heard other people even speak about that being top three or four, like most booked sports at pinnacle, which is just insane. It always makes me like wonder how is even possible because a lot of the esports, there's, there's certainly a lot of people that make a lot of money in esports, but there's a lot of leagues where their players themselves are not even making probably what you can, you can bet on it. So it, uh, I think it's their second right now, second most bets poor they have after soccer. Wow. So they, they book more action on esports than American football or basketball, and that means all the basketball doesn't mean just the NBA. Well, I mean, the thing that esports certainly has going for is a lot of games, a sheer number of games, right, like 24/7. So that's, that's definitely a component, but maybe, maybe coming back to two other things I jotted down. Um, one of the things that I'm as curious your take on, I think you started to go into this of like, maybe trading differences today versus, you know, what it was like back then. From my vantage point, it feels like people have gotten more sophisticated on some of the manipulation and or not, not just betting, like that $50 better, not betting right into the sharp books off off the rip. I think you've, you've talked about this in the past and other podcasts. If you just totally try and avoid even sharp books so that they can't recreate and that, that sort of permeates to market pricing throughout the whole market. So like from, from that perspective, do you imagine it's a challenge for, for some of these, these books now that like, because I always think like, you know, pinnacle has done all this good work, for example, to get this, this reputation of sharp, but like if they were to come to the US, would they struggle actually getting like, liquidity? Like would people be like, I don't want to play there? I'm going to lose or whatnot. And have they just sort of like, are they giving their sort of IP or all this hard work out for free at this point because of the reputation they've built up? Yeah, they're basically doing everybody's work. I don't know if you guys know you guys know the company bed radar. So yeah, bed radar is like a data provider that powers, I don't know, basically every single sports book in the world. And I've used the bed radar product and it's basically, they're just copying pinnacle, you know, and a lot of people do manipulate, understand this. So what you, what you see they will do, maybe like even on smaller leagues, they'll attack a tennis challenger or a second division pool and soccer game and they'll go and bed pinnacle and they'll bed and they'll bed and they'll bed and they'll keep bedding it while bed radar and then the whole world will follow, you know, those lines. And then obviously, you know, you can't go with your fresh, fandal account and go and bet those challenger tennis matches there. But guess what? You can grab a few challenger tennis matches and parlay them with even a positive, you know, no ex, no EV play on the NFL or something else. You can probably, the technology for some of these books is so bad that a lot of times you get the same limits as the NFL, even though you parlayed it with two of the challenger matches. And now here we are, you got a big bet on something that, you know, it was manipulated 50, 60, 70 cents. I see the soccer game once again manipulated two goals, which is like absurd. You know, we're talking like from minus 3,000 to plus a hundred or whatever. But, but, but yes, but, but pinnacle, they're happy that people are manipulating them obviously because that's just crazy for them. And they also get really smart at realizing who's manipulating. And guess what? If you're an accountant manipulates them, guess what? We're going to lower your auto move, you know, so not to manipulate is good to cut suit twice as much. You know, so it's, yeah, there, there's, there was time to where we were argue like, you know, internally is like, hey, should we get off of dumb best? Everybody's just cutting our numbers. You know, because a sports book has to choose to put their numbers on dumb best. You know, so what are the pros and cons of, you know, keeping those numbers up there? But I don't really know what the solution is, but I think pinnacles doing pretty well with, with all that manipulation they're getting is my assumption. Yeah, I think this is one thing we've talked about a little bit, like the sharp book model, and the outlook for like, what do you, do you think like, do you think they're still and will still be a place for the, the pinnacles and the back crisis bookmakers of the world, even if we see the exchanges or prediction markets, whatever you want to call them, you know, come to the, come to the States and maybe come to some other countries. I think the, the sharp book model is definitely, it definitely has this niche and it should definitely will exist. You know, I don't know if it's, it's not the model I would use if I want to make it, if I want to make the most money. You know, and I didn't answer SP, like some of his questions, like, you know, would pinnacle secede if they come to America as an example? And, you know, and the problem is pinnacles model is they can't give out bonuses because they have lower vig. They don't ban anyone so they can't have all this exotic menus. So, you know, so they will obviously struggle in a market where people want bonuses where they want in same game parlay with their 150 props of player props on every single obscure player, you know, so it's tough to compete with that, you know, with that. But if you're kicking anybody out, you can post, you can post any line you want on the sports book and it doesn't really matter, you know, it's, you know, it's just, people just put the coins. So, yeah. Sorry. What was the other question? Well, then I answer it. This basically, just like if you think the sharp book model has, like, a future, the max five for so years, I think it does. But, you know, do we want, is there going to be a world where in one country we need a pinnacle, a prime sports, a surka, and some other place, you know, a no big profit X, you know, whatever, like that's probably not necessary. But I think maybe one or two a place for where, you know, there's people who who thinks they're sharp and they're, you know, like imagine all the people they get banned from draft Kings and Fandall, they weren't really sharp. You know, they have to go play somewhere else. So, you know, I think it's, you know, it's good to have some of these around, log on to Twitter and see anybody bragging about getting banned, a draft Kings and Twitter, and that's the, that's the ovulation we're talking about. Isn't it like, can't wait till surka comes to my state or whatever, let's get limited by draftings. It's like, all right, good luck. Well, that's the other thing that like, you know, I always find interesting people complaining about being limited. But like, if every book was like pinnacle and bookmaker in surka, like would all these people are making money actually make money, you know? And I can tell you from my, from my results, I do much worse when I do bet pinnacle than, you know, or bookmaker than when I bet other places. So I can concur. Well, with bookmaker, bookmaker is sometimes I feel like I place it that on bookmaker. And I'm like, if I have the same position anywhere else, I'm like, I've doomed my entire position. Well, that's a thing bookmaker's strong and golf. So yeah, if they have the best price, you might want to stay away. That is something that I've learned, I keep learning. I learned that maybe three to four times a year. I'm real quick back to some of the manipulation, because I think people like these types of stories or scenarios. So when you were, when you were trading, you had mentioned like, you know, you want to move less if you feel like you want to make them pay more to move the line if you feel like they're manipulating. Can you walk us through like some stories or battles you had with people who are manipulating or like some scenarios like that back in the days of trading at pinnacle? So, you know, you don't realize people manipulating right away, you know, it takes a few bets, you know, a few different games. You know, it's kind of a mouse type game, you know, you see the bets come in, you suspect this manipulating. So, you know, ideally the way you kind of want to handle manipulation is if you know an account is manipulating the very first bet they bet, you kind of want to move a lot. And then every single bet after that, you want to move very little. But you have to be very careful of things like that, because the other person on the other side like sees that the auto move is moving in different ways. So, so they're like all done a second like they can start actually sending you like the right place. So, you know, it's funny enough I later many years after I left pinnacle, I met Spanky and you know, he's known to do a little manipulation here and there. And it was always fun battling him because he's not he's not dumb, you know, he's very smart. And he knows that he doesn't know me, but he knows the person by the computer is also not dumb. So, what I would do sometimes is today, if somebody's trying to manipulate me, I'm going to choose one of four actions that ran them. You know, because because it was just too hard to always do the same thing because then it's too easy to get tricked. You know, the only thing you really have to realize though when manipulation, Billy Walters used to manipulate a lot and use the better pinnacle. And he was not, you know, you would always do like sometimes it would be a real play, sometimes it would be a manipulation play. And you just as long as you realize right away when you have been manipulated and the other side is the actually side they want, you just have to be very, very aggressive at getting back to the price that, you know, the right side. Let's call it. So, no, it was fun. It was definitely fun doing things like that. I love that because that's like been a common thread of all, like I would say our past podcast is, and it ties perfectly back to you being a game player of like, if you do, if you are predictable, that you then become exploitable. Like in any scenario, I think this has like a lot of applications, you know, we're talking about your trading, but I think this has a lot of applications like to anybody participating on these exchanges these days too. Like it's going to become more and more important. So, I think the randomization is something like a game's player understands, but like someone who just comes from it from like a data science who, but not may not understand that, that those points. Yeah, I heard poker. Yeah, poker player based on like the suit of your ace or whatever. Yeah, here's it. There's a few. There's one. I think so partially, I think people like pretend to randomize, but actually just do the thing they wanted to do. But in poker, some people are randomized based on the clock, like the second hand. And the other thing is players online will have like, they call it like rolling a die. The roll number usually will be like one through 100, and you know, you basically, I'm like, okay, you know, certain percent of the time you want to do this plan, the other you want to do that play. So it's easy out of 100. You break it down, but you'll hear people be like, yeah, I rolled the three, so I have to do this. And it's like, I think you probably just wanted to do like the insane, like terrible play. But yeah, the grandimization is a part of poker. There is one more tricky part that like I didn't go over is that interior manipulation is good for the book. So while you're messing with the person is manipulating, trying to, you know, to create more equity for your game, because I can't do it. You know, we want, we want the loose side to be a much smaller than the big side, you know, with some bed numbers in the middle. You know, you don't want to fuck, can I say fuck, you don't want to fuck with that? You don't want to fuck with them too much because you don't want them to stop manipulating, right? So you kind of have to find out balance. But yeah. So this is what I was saying. It's like, I almost feel like if I were in your shoes at pinnacle and I knew someone was manipulating, I'd be like, this is, this is hilarious because I'm going to move. They're going to bet me on the bad side. And then I'm going to move a little bit and maybe charge them a little more. But then the funny thing that's going to happen is like all these books that don't do their own work are going to copy me and get killed. So I'll think that's hilarious. I'll make some money. And then like, you know, it's all good. I remember, you know, just you said something that made me trigger a story. I remember the very first day I traded MLB totals because the pinnacle the way we used to do is one person would do the spreads and the money lines and another person would do the totals. And I got put in front of a computer and I was told, this was like my second month and I was told, you know, 7 equals 35, 8 equals 18, 9 equals 25. There were tell me how many cents each number was worth. You know, years done best. I was, by first two months, I was doing soccer. Here's this thing called done best. And I was the very, I was in front of the computer first time I remember trading totals. And I moved the line and I thought it was so funny that all these books would move the line with me. You know, and I'm like, I wonder if they realize I have no idea what I'm doing. You know, but that's incredible. So let's pivot to, let's pivot to some of the betting stuff as of today. So maybe like to tee up that conversation. You worked at pinnacle. I also think, you know, probably don't have time to get too much into it. But you, you then worked at Planetek as well. Is that true? Yeah, I worked, I worked at Planetek and I ran their trading floor in the Philippines for about five or six years. Got it. So you, you, you, you're still on that, that side of the counter. Walk us through how you started got out from that side of the counter or maybe you still even do some, some consulting potentially for that. But walk us through how you pivoted more of to the betting side. So toward my career ending at pinnacle, I was basically trading the NBA mostly and I was mostly doing NBA live. And we started trading NBA live at pinnacle and think in 2009 and we were doing it by hand. Okay. So there was no model. We would watch the game every basket that went in. We would move the ads. I think we were used to only post them during the timeouts. You know, time went by. Models came out, you know, whatever else. But I, I noticed that many years later, some of the things that the market didn't understand, like they still didn't understand. So I felt that once before while I was working at pinnacle, this is definitely a true story. I never made a single wager in my life. I actually didn't think it was a moral thing to do. And we never had the culture of like, you know, being a trading floor that actually bet. So I reached out to a friend of mine. I know it was in the space, another magic player. And I say this and I have an angle on NBA. I have an angle on an NBA that I would like to bet. Now that I don't work for pinnacle anymore. And so we got together and I remember working every single NBA night. We would just go in bet, you know, like my thing. And it was really good for a few years, which wow, yeah, actually lasted about four years where we made a lot of money. And then on the fifth year, it kind of, you know, kind of stopped. I think I think that you'll still be there if the game didn't change so much with the total score. Yeah, the basketball like just totals going up so high and, you know, triples and defense, you know, like changed a lot. But yeah, so that's what we did. And it was more of like, I think I can win. Let me try it. And then as we kept betting, just kept winning and winning and winning. So that was pretty cool. So that's how we got started in the betting. And then to this day, I'm still partners with these two, you know, my friend and then his friends, you know, we were doing it together. So that's kind of how we got started. Yeah, that's that's fascinating. I know you've talked about live betting in the past. And you know, especially, you know, I wanted to drill down on the live betting discussion because all the live betting I hear about these days and I'm not really a live better myself is like what I would consider like some top down sort of stale price strategy for live betting. So for you to actually like more of have an angle or a model or some type of edge, I think is really interesting in the live sort of type of betting. But maybe before diving like into that, let's maybe level set like what types of betting. Is it, are you still primarily live betting? Are you betting all sorts of things now? So I always tell people we bet on everything except things with wheels, horses, or video games. So so we basically bet on we bet on everything. But the way we're kind of unique, you know, we're unique that we do bet everything, but we're unique because the way we run our business is we know what we're good at and there's things that we're very good at. But then there's some sports that we are not that good. We still model some of the stuff that we don't actually bet just to make sure that like, you know, make sure like we don't miss anything kind of thing. But for instance, we also work with some of the biggest the biggest syndicates out there. That originate that stuff. So for instance, baseball, the baseball that we bet is an ours. It's another group's baseball. But we we only work with them. We don't bet, you know, if two baseball people ask me to bet they're baseball, I'm not going to do that. I just we just we've been around enough to know who's the best at every single sport and that's how kind of we do it. But yeah, that's and we still do bet's live. But live is the unique challenge. Not that, you know, me and my partners all have kids and we're a little older that it's very time consuming. You know, you start working at 7 pm and you work until 12 30 every single night. We usually would work with a few employees at the same time. It was very time consuming very many hours. So now what we're doing, we're just betting at half time. We still bet NBA. You know, we've, you know, we have a model. The original edge doesn't exist anymore, but we found plenty more. And we just bet at half time, which is kind of fun because, you know, it's only 15 minute span, you know, like moment. And you don't have to send it for other computer all night long. Yeah, I'm so interested by people who have live, like bottom up models. I guess I have like a lot of questions about that, but I'll try and make it, I'll try and make it somewhat concise. Like how hard is it to build? Is it really, it's not, it's not easy to build pre-match stuff, but it's not like a technological challenge because you can spend, you can, like, I can run a, I can have my golf sim take 30 minutes and it's like, okay, whatever. But like, if it's taking 30 minutes every time I want to update a price live, like, there's, there's no shot. So it's like, what are the major differences between originating or bottom up or whatever you want to call it live first pre-match. And is there like, there's one big difference. Okay. So when you're originating like pre-game, like, you know, you can have a model based on team, some model based on players, you know, whatever, whatever you're doing, you have to try to predict, you know, what, which players are actually starting the game, which put, you know, like in Soccer, this is very important as an example. You have to do all this work that, you know, you have to have a players rating, you know, like if my left defender doesn't play how good is this replacement and all this other stuff. In live, you have a wonderful input that you have the closing line of the game that tells you everything you kind of need to know. So the way I would, you know, the way I've built my live models and the way I would suggest people to build their live models is, well, one of the inputs is the closing line. You have to assume that the closing line knows all, right? Now, once you know that, it's not that hard to simulate the games based on score, you know, of the game, west of ball, almost time there's left. And all, you know, all the other stuff, of course, there's going to be things that matter that you need to tell your model that the model doesn't know. Does Yokech have five fouls, does LeBron, the LeBron tweak his ankle that, you know, that does this team, like, even things like, does this team have a back-to-back? So do they play tomorrow? You should assume the closing line knows that, you know? So it's, you know, you have to tell it stuff that's, you know, one qualitative instead of quantitative, you know, throughout the game. But if you assume the closing line is good, I think that's a good start. And I guess on a technical, the technical side, like, what, like, I guess what, like, what language are you writing a live model in? See sure. Okay. Yeah, not, yeah, that, the other ones like Rust, maybe you could do a live model. I'm not sure. This is like, I'm, I'm all, pretty bad. I don't, I've never actually, we wanted, we want to do an episode where we talk about failed betting projects. And one of, one of my failed betting projects, he's actually trying to do a football live model. And the problem was it was in R, and it was just not going to be fast enough for me to actually ever bet it, right? I actually think it's, it was, I spent a decent amount of time. I actually think it was fairly good. But I, it was not, not like, not executable because, hey, I didn't have all the pipelines like hooked up to like, you know, to pull in the score right now. So there was like some manual parts of it that I even needed to do. And I just, our, our, our sister manual, we have to tell the score and the time left. We have to tell, you know, you said you're betting a half times instead of before were you primarily betting like timeouts. And we were already betting, we were only betting timeouts and like, end of quarters and things like that. So if you want to have like uptime, like if you were, uh, whatever, draft Kings, or you were somebody, I don't know who was just betting constantly, you would need basically, bet radar. You need some, like the stats, the thing is like the game info, like, I'm just thinking of like where you could scrape game info from. And it's like, not even straightforward. Yeah. It's super hard. If you want to optimize where you get telling all the inputs automatically, not only is the, the game data going to cost you infinite money. Um, you know, like something like bet radar charges a company like $1.2 million for the NBA live data or something, you know, which, which is, which, you know, like we can't afford that. Uh, but if, so if you want to do that, you would need your model to ingest this live data. And then to spit out every time something changes, like the time or the possession or the score, then it would automatically run. That's what sportsbooks do. That's how they build their models, you know. And that, that's a lot going on. You know, we just had an application that just ran, uh, you know, after we would put it, you know, we would set the pre game inputs, then we would tell it in game inputs and they would do whatever, 50,000 simulations. And it would tell you what the average is, you know, this game, ending a certain score or a certain total or whatever else, right? The, um, you know, if you can find some alpha, like, hey, when an NFL team is really winning, does the pace of the game go up or does it go down? Does the team losing tries really hard to come back, whether they just give up, uh, a lot of it is also coaching dependent, you know, but, but you know, there is some decent angles out there, you know, just, uh, to do that. And also the other thing, remember when I said earlier, the, the Patrick, my home's example, if you made a simple model or a complicated one, to know roughly what the line should be, well, guess what? So chiefs are losing at half time. Sportsbooks know the chiefs, people go to bet the chiefs. So they inflate odds somehow, you know, it could be half a point, it can be the big, it could be whatever. Then guess what? Then customers come and bet the chiefs. You know, what they do wrong is they're moving off of bets. They already knew we're coming. So that means, that means that they didn't post the correct odds because there's no new information there. Like you should post the odds you're willing to take bets on. Then they start taking that's, then the line keeps moving. And then if you had a model that somehow tell you what's up, you can probably bet the other side, right? And, uh, and that is something that that traders a lot of times do badly. Like, uh, another example, if that one was a little too complicated for your audience, is I used to train traders out of be traders and a smart guy would come and bet side X or side A, they would come and bet. And then the traders that go, I want to move the line because look, this other sportsbook is these odds, let me move the line into a arbitrage or a scalp. So some robot will bet my line and I will be able to sell off that bet, right? So there they will go, move the line to inside an arbitrage, arbitrage bet would come instantly. And then they would move the line back. And I will always guess so angry. I would say, listen, why did you move the line because you want out of that? And the guy goes, yeah, you know it was coming. Does taking that bet make you happy? And they would say, yeah, why would you move it back once you get the one arbitrage bet? You know, so that's kind of the way I see it. It's kind of like, oh, sorry, you got ahead first. Well, I'm just going to throw it, but it was like, it's kind of like, especially now I've had some experience, like posting liquidity. It's like, if I post the quity, I'm at the top of the book on Rory Mackerel or Sky Shuffler. I know, I know without a shout out of it, that I'm just going to keep getting filled. So it's like, if I were to go up there and then get filled and be like, oh, no, it's like, well, that that's just what happens when you're top of the book for those guys. I do have to be honest though. Sometimes you do post something and you're like, I do think I'm going to get filled and then you get filled and you, I do say, oh, no. Oh, yeah, every time I get filled, I still say, oh, no, maybe I'm not cut out to be a trader. But one of the things I did, I didn't want to ask was, like, you had mentioned there, like, price moving based on sort of action in live. You know, from an outsider, I would imagine, most live is, I would have assumed, most live is just sort of model-driven, primarily and not necessarily like traded or price discovered. Is that a false assumption? Is that maybe true for timeouts and quarters, but not true for half times? Like, how much of your, I guess there's a bunch of different questions I'm asking here, but like, do all these books have sort of like different models? Are they all converging to some market number? Like, pre-game is very much like a singular market, right? Where everybody converges to, they might have different opinions around a number, but they certainly are converging to it. Is live that way, or is there? So the books I work for, they add their own models, most like recreational books, they'll use somebody like bedgeneers or bedradar. But I pinnigore a plan, we add our own models, and usually when I work at these places, we would have one trader per game, sometimes two, but mostly one trader per game, and the model is, you know, data is coming, the model is calculating the nuance, based on the new stuff that's happening. The trader does have input, right? So the trader is making one team stronger or weaker based on the bets that they see, sometimes that is happening manually, or sometimes that is happening with auto-mover triggering, right? I don't move like a guy bets, auto-mover triggers, then the trigger of the auto-movers goes in the model and changes the input by a little bit. And then at the end of it, like you have to imagine working for these sportsbooks, like the salaries aren't great, right? Even like in America, they're really bad. You know, offshore, some places pay you well, but not great. And I remember, I remember when I worked at Pinnacle every time I had a big loss, I always got that phone call, say, "Hey, Ann, why did you lose so much? Could it have lost less?" But when you win a lot, nobody calls and say, "Hey, great job last night, right?" So now, Ann is Ann, like I could care less about the phone call, and I would just say, "Oh, I lost a lot because of X, Y, and Z, and I actually think I should have lost even more." If I was doing it correctly, so I didn't have any qualms like fighting back, but most people, they just want to go to work, they don't want any stress, they definitely don't want the boss calling them. So every one of these sportsbooks, they have some boss who tells them, "Please don't lose more than X amount of money per game." Or at Pinnacle, the way we used to do it for pre-game is they used to give us our max limit, that was set by the managers. So if MBA totals, the max was 20k, they would not want me to lose more than three times max limit unless I had a reason. Of course, I could risk 200,000 or whatever, but without any real reason, I should have never lost more than 60 grand, right? So they all do it a different way, but the reason a lot of times, people are moving also is because they just don't want their boss bothering them. And they make choices that makes their life easier instead of making the correct choice. I want to jump into some of the group discussion. I want to make sure we have enough time, because I think this is really interesting, and I can probably add a lot of interesting comments, and I think we have some good questions in here. So do you want to, do you have anything else on live betting? No, I'm just saying that I actually think live betting is the place to be personally, if you want to build a model and try to make a lot of money. In sports, in pre-game, you don't have them any opportunities. You have the line when it comes out, then you have the line after there's a big move. You know, in live betting, every single dead ball is a new opportunity, a new game, so you know, to any inspire better who actually can model and configure things out, I think there's way more money to be made in live than in pre-game. You know what's interesting is I, not that this was a successful foray into this, but I recently built a rider, I did a rider Cupsin, and I would run it after every session and after every day, and you'd take like who played what the score was, who were the announce lineups, and all of this, like I would put those as manual inputs, but like everything else would run. Besides my like heavy U.S. lean overall, like I did find that there was a lot of mistakes. I guess it is the right happens once or two years, so I can say this, or without ruining my, without, you know, getting not being able to pay the bills, but like, yeah, there's there's certain spots you're like, oh, this is obviously the, it would just be such clear value because of like just what's happened, who's been announced in the lineups, and you're like, wow, this is like a terrible price for like came young top U.S., like it's, it's just truly atrocious, whereas you wouldn't, I would never find anything that bad, like pre-match and like a matchup. I'd be like, oh, this is like, okay, 4%, you know, but this, I'd be like, wow, that's like 30% right there, like I can't believe it. So, but the thing is, I don't, we all of our stuffs in Python, it's kind of slow, and but it did give me the, it gave me the taste of like, changes of game state, being really good opportunities. So who knows? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, like I said, I've, I've tried it before. I mean, the other benefit of, of live, which, you know, I think is, it's super relevant is like, the, the CLV sort of thing goes away, right? It's much, you know, if you're betting like, especially if there's, if you're betting like your own opinion into a live market, like, that'd be exceptionally hard for a sports book to tell, you are a winner, it would take a lot of sample for them to tell you are a winner, for sure. So, yeah, that's there, there is an easy way that sports folks don't do this, but this is how I create my, my live bets is what were the odds a minute later? What were the odds three minutes later? I get it as a different game, but like, you know, if, if you're betting, and you cannot see where the odds were, whatever, some number of minutes later, like, it's almost kind of like CLV a little bit. Yeah, the basketball, because I would, I would think in certain sports, that'd be really challenging, right? Because like something like, like, that's very event-based, like football or, yeah, baseball, like, that would be really challenging to do, basketball, that makes more sense to me. Or, or if you bet the under, you get natural CLV, if there's no goal scored, you know, I could give like soccer, right? That's great. I always get CLV one minute. That's what I do. You just bet the under live, and then you, you pull, you take screenshots and you could just, you know, sell your top packages of all the TCLV you're getting, and it's kind of like smart and gelling. You're like, if you don't lose until you lose, that's absolutely an asset from CLV, like, they scored goals, really. All right, well, let's, let's jump into your, your group and sort of operation today. So maybe walk, walk us through what your group, I know you talked about, I think, yeah, you said you had two main partners, and then some additional employees, potentially, but walk us through like what, what your betting group looks like today, and how you guys operate. So, so we have, so it's me two partners. We have 17 employees. We work 20 hours a day, so they're all over the world. We have a bunch in Europe, some in North America, some in Asia. It's really tricky because, so, you know, about 50% of the volume we do is ours, 50% is other people. So we always know what bets we want to make ourselves, you know, like at the beginning of the day or the night before, but we never know how many bets the other groups might send us. So it's a bit challenging to, you know, like for us to process a bet correctly, it takes us about 20 minutes, and what that means is for us to hit all of our accounts to make sure all of our partners bet it, to make sure, to monitor, to make sure nobody's doing anything tricky, where the line moves. So if it takes about three bets per hour, we can only make 60 bets per day, roughly, and there's some days where we have a lot more than that. So at the end of the day, we just try our best and try to get as many bets as possible. We kind of champion processing the bets properly more than trying to bet all of our games. And that's because we want our partners to get good prices, we want everybody with work, we work with being happy. Obviously, we start with the bets that we think have our ROI. But yeah, sometimes it's very challenging, especially when, you know, if one of the groups we work with has a lot of plays that day, we try to put our place sometimes on the side, because a lot of the stuff we bet is not super time sensitive. So that's kind of how we do it. But as you can imagine, we also have about right now 40 active telegram chats that we sent to to help us fill. And then we also have, you know, we have with people who bet for us and some of the legals and we bet in Asia as some of these, you know, underground telegram groups, or we also have a bunch of shop runners in Europe. We also have, you know, we have a bot that has roughly 300 pphs in it. So you have to, you know, always struggle with those, because having a bot it sounds easy. You just push a button. But I don't know if you guys know much about the pph market. It's a lot of times there's these accounts that have freezes. So like a Buckeye skin, for instance, there's a lot of accounts that have freezes. So if you hit this, you know, your bot and the first very first account that gets it in your body and Buckeye is one with a freeze, it will freeze the lines for all your other accounts. So we spend a lot of time monitoring these, these pph accounts. There's also this thing that only some people know about. People try to sneak in fake pph accounts into our group. And so imagine you get a pph account when you bet it triggers something on their end and then their bot triggers. So you have to be really careful with that stuff like that. So, so if it was just betting, it would be not easy challenging, but there's all this other crap that we have to deal with that makes it super challenging at times. You know, and then when we find one of those fake pph accounts, we have to start sending the wrong sides into it. Exactly. You know, like there's, there's all, there's a game as well. You know, I just want to make my bet send it to people. They bet it. That's it. But it's not really like that. I was going to say that the fake pph, I first I was like those bastards. But then I was like, same thing as being a pinnacle, like it's, there could be the value. There's value there too, as long as you know, or it. Like we found the pph account once and last that for a few months where every time we bet it, the bet went straight into bet online and booked me. Wow. And once we found that it was like, it was like Christmas. You know, he just, okay, here's $500 bet, which only $250 is my way. And you're literally moving the market 15 cents. It's so good. And in the last few months, I can't, like, the the mental gymnastics that person must have been doing like, there's no way. Like he, like, I've heard he's so sharp, like, but I'm losing every single, you know, I love that. I'm good. You know, that's what you get. That's what you get. Yeah, it's, uh, so, so yeah, so usually like it also depends like what we're betting. So like, you know, if we bet, if we're betting, um, let's say we're betting a college football game, um, we have to be very careful because if somebody does something wrong, um, and basically we're ruined too much liquidity for us. So there's sports where we send the bet to people and we say, please wait for the go. And then we tell everybody the side we want, the price we want. Um, so we get, and we get everybody ready. And then all at once we go, go, and everybody hits their accounts. Um, then there's some other sports like tennis, which is not really necessary to do, um, because, you know, if somebody misclicked something or bet something they're not supposed to, yeah, they will ruin some of our liquidity, but it's not that much. So we don't care about that. So it just also really depends what we're betting, you know, and then there's things like if we send you a second half bet, you know, we bet a lot of basketball second halves. If we send you one of those, it's kind of like a race. Like we send it, we tell people, bet it as many, please don't touch number these three sports books and all the other books. It's a race, you know, whoever gets a first gets a first. So it just really depends what it is. So with, with betting, like all those different sports and I know earlier in the dish to show you talked about, like we know the best that each, each sport, like you know, and, and we'll, we'd rather move their action then, then better on if we don't think, if we think their stuff is better. Like how, how did you cultivate those relationships? How do you, how do you, how did you get to a point where you know, not only do you know the people, you know, who's best, but how do you get to the point where you can evaluate like who's best and how, how did that process sort of play out over time? So it took time. We did bet for other people that did not win or not win as much in the past. You know, our idea was let's just stick to, you know, what we're good at and what we're not good at. Let's, you know, help others. And it's kind of nice because then they help you to run away back. But it just took time. We, we keep track of, you know, closing line value on much they win by, you know, and me working as sportsbooks as add some doing in that, because while I still don't work a pinnacle, I definitely have somebody I can ask to say, how sharp is this guy? Or, you know, same thing at Plana, you know, so it's, it's a lot of just trying and keeping good records, but also just asking around. A lot of times, you know, the best is because like really what you want, you want the bet from the source itself. So, you know, I think our guys are the best the ones we bet for. But, you know, even if somebody comes along, that's a little bit better. But like I'm getting the bet, like second-handed, I would still prefer to work from the source. Every one step you're removed from, you know, from the best, let's call it, or from the source, like it just gets worse and worse for you. So something that I would recommend anybody that wants a bet for somebody like, isn't that because of like price leakage or other reasons? Yeah, you might get the bet after the fact, so you're never getting the best prices. You know, you also don't know, like, is that person getting the right side or the fake side? We moved for one year for StarLizard. I don't know if you guys are where they are. Of course. Hey, and so we took a big leap of faith and the reason why we were able to even strike a deal was because of our, our shops. Like, like we have, like one of our strengths is we have a lot of shops in Europe. So, you know, they would send us like an Italy, Serie B game and we could get them down, like whatever, $40,000, $50,000 on a market that the pinnacle is open for $50,000. And the problem was, is we're not doing anything wrong. But like, when so many people see the bet, somebody's going to do something they're not supposed to do. And eventually we had to stop working with them because they, we were moving their markets so much. Even though we were betting all quiet places, you know, and they basically, they didn't even tell us that like we were moving the market for on them. So like they start like sending us some wrong sides or some right ones and some wrong ones. You know, and and basically like to be successful at this business, like you kind of have to be honest and like always be transparent, I think. So like we had to step away from start lizard. But it's, you know, I like those guys. It's just that some of their business practices. I didn't really enjoy. So now we just bet our own soccer. But at that time, we were like, let's just try the start lizard thing, which is kind of nice. Do you feel like you learn stuff from working with them that now your own soccer is better? Oh, 100%. There's things, for instance, in soccer, there's a, there's a thing where I don't know if you guys ever looked at soccer lines. The spread and the total are very correlated to each other. You know, if you're like a one and a half goal favorite and you like that side, it's very unlikely. You also like the under as an example. Because if you like the favorite to cover, then most likely the games could go over because, you know, they're, you know, whatever makes sense. And, and what I learned from them is that was a misconception I had. There's actually sometimes where the opposite side is could be correct. It's not often, but prior to working with them, I would have never thought that I would ever bet a big favorite and an under. And sometimes now we do. You did get one question on soccer, which I think makes sense to loop in now as we're talking about it from Hagrin. It was since and Antonino was moving soccer. Can we talk about the soccer market? Which books are important for soccer? Maybe a bit on some of the more popular Asian, Southeast Asian books and experiences dealing with Asia. On, I think, a prior podcast you've mentioned HGA saying ISN and curious like what has changed or like what the soccer markets look like now. So so things have changed a little bit. So ISN, which was basically top three sports book for soccer in the world. As I don't know if they went out of business, but they closed up shop. A used to be funded by Starlizer, believe it or not. Here's a secret that nobody knows. And it's called International Soccer Network. They closed this summer so obviously losing them hurts because they never limited and they had pretty good limits. Singh is the best. The only problem with saying is they have this thing in their rules. If they think that a game is weird betting suspicious or betting patterns, they serve the right to delete your wagers. And I promise you they never delete a losing wager. It's always the winning ones. This is post, post match. Post match. Now, while they take big limits and money is good, etc, etc, the problem is that, you know, it doesn't happen too too often, but maybe once or twice a month, you'll get a nice. Why did I get paid in this bet? And it's always, you know, betting suspicious. And like what they're doing is they're trying to protect themselves. I think from manipulation, some, but you know, when they get totally run over on one side and then they try to understand why or whatever, but I'm guessing it's just manipulation that that's when they decided to delete the bets. The thing is like, we don't do any manipulation mostly because obviously it's good to do and it's something you should do you make more money, but we just don't have the time to do it. So that's why we don't do it. And it's sometimes it's a little sucky that like I'm betting what I think is the right side, but a little that I know somebody else manipulated it, you know, and I'm now getting my bets deleted. Then there is a whole network like we have PPHS, you know, like that it's all these like illegal bookies. They also have their versions of PPHS, which are basically sing clones with private bookies behind it. So you can find some really good accounts out there for soccer. And then if you don't care about price or smaller leagues, Europe is still really good to bet soccer because the shops are willing to take it. You know, they think that they're extra vague that they have other lines like it's protecting them, but you know, that's not always the case. Yeah, I can't really like I've never I soccer scares me as I always, you know, it's like people like you star lizard or whatever. I've just never even even considered the option of opening up the soccer odds and like thinking, hey, I should bet on this, but do you think it is like the hardest sport to beat? I mean, there's so many levels, but let's talk about maybe like the top, you know, whatever, five, six leagues, like, is it most difficult sport to beat? I think. On game day, like is definitely just as hard as the NFL for the top five leagues in Europe. They trade, you know, soccer gets traded for way smaller margins, you know, and the limits are comparable to the NFL game day. You know, most sportsbooks in America do minus 110 on the NFL, right? They're doing EPL minus 103 on both sides in Asia. So, but they before, like, I think is still beatable and you don't have to be too too advanced to be able to do stuff like to beat those markets. Soccer, believe it or not, like soccer players, like on a basketball game, the players are the ones they're worth the most. Obviously quarterback for NFL, but none of the other players are worth all that much in a basketball game. The players are each individual player is worth a lot to, you know, the one team winning or not or not. In soccer, not a single player is worth all that much, like Messi, Messi in like his heyday was probably worth a quarter goal. But the thing with soccer is they do turn over in a way that like when they decide to rest their players, they rest them all. Well, they rest half their team. So, a lot of the soccer alpha that people get is by predicting good starting line-ups. And if you ever watch the soccer market 45 minutes before any game kicks, that's when the official line-ups get released. You will see the lines move so aggressively and it's so different than any American sport because in the last 45 minutes the line barely moves, right? So it's unique in that way. But when we used to bet a certain league, we would like try to pay a local person in that country to like get us practice information and things of that nature because because, you know, if half the team is not going to play, like the odds really shouldn't be a lot. So I remember we used to have a guy in Mexico when we used to bet the Mexican Premier League that, you know, would tell us, you know, these guys are not going to play, you know, they were going to get the news or whatever. But I remember Google translating like French newspapers when I was betting French to league to try and read like the news or whatever. So it's a lot of player information that you kind of need to know because modeling soccer, like at the team level, you know, there's already some really good, you know, date out there, XG, whatever, you know, like there's so much of it out there. I think it's just all about information on the players. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think anybody who's bet on sports or anything for long enough has found themselves trying to Google translate some language of something they don't know. It's just like eventually you you find yourself there and you ask yourself what you're doing with your life. But it certainly happens. I want to make sure we have time for some of the questions. And so I think the last topic that that we really wanted to drill into was some some like scaling discussion. You gave a a seminar at Beth Basha that's great. I wasn't there, but I heard it was, you know, people were on the edge of their seats. You know, tears were being brought to eyes. It was wonderful. So what what and you've you've honestly not been betting like full time all that long really because you know, just your work and you've obviously scaled this up like really fast and you know, you've rattling off all the places you're betting. It's quite the operation. So what what what were some of maybe those those main topics from that seminar for anybody or some of the biggest challenges or accelerators for scaling quickly. Yeah. The so making that panel was quite challenging because scaling such a broad term. Are you trying to scale your player props operation or are you trying to scale, you know, real market things? Well, if you're trying to scale every market things like there's plenty of places to bet, you know, you don't have to worry about that. So that's always challenge. Like for me, for me, I think the biggest thing, the reason why we've been so successful and we have a lot of partners, you know, John can speak to that is I think we're very easy to work with, you know, like we really believe that like I want to make more money, you know, I'm not going to sit here and then say I don't like money, but I really do want the people that work for us or help us to also make money. And, you know, there's time, I remember on the very first bat, John made for me bet the wrong side. And I said, hey, please, you know, drop me the wrong side. And I didn't I didn't know this. That's that's that's that that first impression. And no, but like what I'm trying to say, like, you know, like I believe that if you're betting for me, there's going to be times you misclick that that just happens. Like you should not be the only person taking that risk, right? And then another thing that we do that we I really believe in that other people don't do is I'm willing to work with anybody. Like we have a guy right now that bets for us $250 each time we send them a bet. And that is nothing. But my goal is that that $250 guy in a year from now is going to bet me $2,000 a game, right? So, so I really do want people to grow with us. And, you know, obviously, two years from now is the guy still betting $250. I'm going to tell him, you know, to go do something else. But, but the idea is you have to take a leap of faith and believe in people and, you know, and I kind of a lot of people in this industry when you start talking to them, they're always thinking like you're trying to screw them or you're trying to, you know, get one over them. I kind of live my life and business and in real life is I'm going to hope the best in people and, you know, if they screw me, they screw me who cares. But the challenging part is, you know, making sure everybody came back, right? Because there's always somebody who's doing something that is not supposed to. And it's even if it's not the direct person that like I work with, it could be well, this guy then takes our bet and sends it to three other people. One of these three people is doing something that is not supposed to, right? So, that is the most challenging is figuring out when something is not working, like why is it not working? And then also make my partners understand that I'm only bringing up this issue. Now, I'm not even mad at you is I just want to try to find the solution. You know, we had a guy this morning that he knows that he's not supposed to send any of our tennis bets to Italy. And somehow, some way my bets got to Italy through them, you know, Vio and other person. And, you know, at first the guy got super defensive, but I'm like listen, I'm not even mad. I'm just, you know, sometimes, you know, context via chat like you can't see the tone, you know, when you're communicating. But, you know, the goal is just to try and make sure that everybody can get it the bet and, you know, everybody makes money. It's too bad that whole part's going to be deleted because of the part about us betting the wrong side by me. No, I'm just kidding. But I want to talk about that that bet bash seminar because I think it was like, so we had always just kind of bet our own stuff. And, you know, and I think before I went to bet bash, I was like on the podcast saying like, yeah, we have like too many accounts like engulf season's ending. And then I went to your seminar and you were like, yeah, like we bet like a lot of our stuff. And then we work with like some of the best, you know, people as well and other sports. And I was kind of like, yeah, like, there's, you, there's, there's more to this, like don't, don't pigeon, don't put yourself in a box of like, I just am a, you know, hockey originator. And all I do is like take my hockey bets and send them to my friends. But like, you know, you can't, once you meet people, you can work with other people. And I came up to you after the seminar and we met and I was like, yeah, golf seasons ending. I'd love to, you know, I have all these accounts that probably won't see much, much action. Like, you know, would you be willing to work, work together? And I will say you guys are very easy to work with. So I'll give that that very nice group, very nice and chat. I'm actually, I'm surprised that somebody would even mistaking your tone, because you're one of the nicest in the telegram chats out of anybody. But, you know, I think you kind of showed me a little bit more about how like, you can, like, how to be more of a complete, how to get the most out of what, what, what you have, operationally instead of just like thinking about betting as like, how am I going to get better at making this number? Yeah, there's, there's other like, you know, the reason why we started the way we did was mostly also as well, because we were betting only live. So we had all these accounts and nobody was betting into them during the day. You know, and then to John's point when, when the season is over. So somebody gives you a PPH account, let's call it. And then for two or three months, you're not putting any bets in it. The guy is going to be like, you know, dude, like, I want to give this account somebody who's actually putting bets in it, right? And then, so, so that's why we think whatever we got is going on is good, because, you know, even if today there was no baseball games, because the playoffs or whatever, like, we're still going to get plenty of bets, you know. And another thing is that I think it's super important is that when, when you're, when somebody is, like working, you know, betting for you, like, you should also, like, as just like I was pretty open here to say a bunch of stuff, like, you should be pretty open to tell them, you know, like, the first thing I always told John, you know, that's as I said, listen, if there's any account that you care about, please do not use it on our stuff. You know, and with some of our partners, they ask me, like, hey, I'm not sure ROI's in the, you know, in this sport that you bet. I'm willing, you know, after we start working with people to tell them, you know, while women tennis wins at 11%, or male tennis, you know, wins at 2.5%. Right? Like, that is information that I'm willing to give if a partner is, you know, once, and then, and I'm even willing to tell them, I have some partners that say, well, I don't want your 2.5% plays. Can you please only send me your 7 and 8% plays? And then, you know, if that's what they want, that's what they'll get. So it's, it's all about everyone making money, not me making the most money. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a lot of people have probably been burned, right? Is why they're not like that? And I imagine you've been burned as well. So you just have an attitude of be burned and move on and not, you know, not bring too much into it. Yeah, like, if you always, like, also some of my best partners that I have are people that if I would have been scared or not worried, you know, I would have never been partnered with, right? So it's, I don't take, somebody screws me, it sucks, but whatever I just move on, but I prefer to try to make the most money and take some risks, risk takers. We have a guy, we have a guy who bets soccer for us in Azerbaijan. I don't even know his name. I only have like a telegram avatar. And we do the biggest, this is the group we do the biggest numbers with. And, and, you know, I'm talking about, like, you know, like two, three hundred K a game, kind of numbers. And, and, you know, it's like, let's try it. What's the worst it can happen? Let's just send them one bet per day. You know, if we win, let's ask for money. And the worst thing that can happen is we lose one bet, you know, and, and slowly one bet became two bets and then two bets became three bets. And that's how you got to do it, you know. I love it. It's like such a, that's such a, just a great story of the, like, internet gambling age. It's like, yeah, I don't know the person. I don't actually know. I never met him. But yeah, anyway, I just sent him like two hundred K, you know, and it's just like, that's just how, how it goes. And I think like a lot of people talk about, I mean, I think we've all been burned. And there is that you want to be so funny. I like made this episode about like how you do want to get stolen from a little bit. And I literally got stolen from like the next week. So it's like, I don't want to repeat that. But like, there is some, I feel the prophecy. Yeah, you want it to be right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And gambling Twitter, sometimes they tell, like, if you have not been stiffed, but like a certain amount, you're probably not taking off risk. Right. I think, I think, you know, Chris flop made said that in your podcast, if I remember correctly. And, you know, obviously, we don't want to, none of us want to get stiffed, you know, we are, we get stiff plenty, you know, but, but sometimes we, we ask ourselves, for the amount of money we're moving every week, are we getting stiffed enough? You know, and, you know, it's one of those things, you know, they claim that if you, like you, you should, if you're getting stiff, I heard somebody smart, I think snow or storm, you know, I don't know if you guys know these guys, but I heard them say that if you're getting stiff less than 10% of your winnings, you're doing, you know, you're doing good, but it, but if it's like, if it's more as bad, but if it's too much less, you're not doing a great job or whatever. So they think about 10% stiff rate is like good to have, but I really don't know. That is, I got to, I think our stiff rate last year is like 8% or something. Okay. So that's like solid. Yeah. It's not like economic study on optimal stiff rates and whatnot, it'd be good. Last, last question before we get to the listener questions, because we get, this is like a broad, trying to be a broad encapsulation of listener questions we get all the time. So you obviously work with a lot of partners, a lot of people. We get questions on how are you determined if someone would be a good partner with you? How do you like, in some of the details around it, like settling with them, the deal structure, you give them, like, how do you determine who gets a PNL cut, how do you determine who's just sort of getting like, whether it's free roll or 50/50 or otherwise, I think, I think you've mentioned just, you know, we even 1% of volume before. Yeah. So like, how do you, how do you think about all of that sort of stuff? So, so the, we're willing to work and try anybody really, the only thing I really care about is people just being honest, and when I ask you, where do you bet, you tell me where you bet. And not because I want to, you know, like, know your business, but more because if, if somebody tells me, listen, I'm going to bet draft kings, I'm going to make sure that the next guy is not going to bet draft kings, as an example. So obviously, as long as you're willing to tell me where you bet, and I believe you, and you keep to that promise, you know, we'll work with anyone. In terms of what we decide out to pay our partners, to be honest, we ask, I might have not asked John, but everybody comes from different walks of life. You know, some people are willing to gamble for a lot of money. Some people are not Europeans hate gambling 50/50, just to give you an example, they would prefer a free rule deal. We usually start people around 20% free rule. The thing with free rule that you have to be careful of is, it's with the belief that they're giving me everything they, they bet, right? But I obviously don't know if that's happening or not, right? So, you know, there needs to be a lot of, like, trust. And I'm sure that some people that I have on free rule, they're also keeping, you know, 50% for themselves, like that just will happen. But usually we offer a partner 20% free rule. We do have people that we give more than 20% free rule, but it's usually after we've been working with you for a long time, and it's usually if you're giving us something that's unique that otherwise we wouldn't have. Then most of our deals are 50/50. Our PPHs are not going to lie. We take a lot of PPHs even lower than 50/50. You know, we have, we have a bunch even a 25%. And for the pay commissions on volume, we do that. The problem is, we're not good enough to pay 1% on all of our sports. So, you know, there's some sports where we'll gladly pay 1% on, but you're going to get a lot less place. You know, I can't pay 1% and send you my NFL bets, as an example, right? So, so kind of that's how we do it. And then I heard one of your podcasts, you guys said the guy, the mover guy, the AP, AP gambler. Yeah, Dan, Dan. Yeah. The way, the way we structure our 1% is we use base, base amount and not risk and not to win amount. So, what does that mean? If you bet a big minus, we pay you on the to win, the 1% on the to win amount. And if you pay, if you bet a big plus, we pay you 1% on your risk amount. So, because they said, oh, they pay 1% when they're betting minus 2000. Well, you can't do that, right? So, yeah, that's, we kind of give that choice to all of our partners and whatever fits best with them, I'm willing to try it. The pay on volume, it's funny because there's one person we work with that will send bets to that we pay on volume or like pay the 1%. And it's like, he, it's such a good strategy because I'm, I'm only sending like just bets that I think are absolutely smashes. Yeah. Because it's like, I know I have to pay an extra 1% on this. So, I'm just not even thinking about it. But then the, like you said, like people who could give you like something unique, like this guy specifically will be able to bet big size at certain places. And it's on credit for me, I guess. So, like, it's very valuable. So, at the same time, it's like if people can offer you that extra something, like there's a lot of, you know, you're being willing to, being willing to be flexible, it's so hard to be flexible in the business from an accounting standpoint because you want everything, like this is our deal. We want this to like flow perfectly in our Excel. But like you miss out on so much value. It was not like a hard part of scaling for you, like the desire to kind of keep everything uniform, but the lure of like at first we tried, but then, you know, we have people betting in Bulgaria, in Bulgarian potatoes, people betting, people betting for us in Europe and Euros, people betting us in China and Hong Kong dollars. So, keep everything uniform as a bit tough. You know, so it's, you know, we have this one unique place where we bet NBA second halves, which they use decimal odds. And we give the guy a free roll plus we give them 0.1 decimal on every single winning wager, right, which that could get quite expensive. Oh, my God. Tidard would kill me if we offered that. But it is a very unique place, you know, we get $20,000, you know, like, you know, but it's, you have to be adaptable or, you know, you are going to miss out on some of these deals. And it's also like a lot of times things are happening like, you know, what do you guys do when somebody brings your partner, but like they're not part of it, you know, like, so like, we have a lot of deals to where like a guy brings me like this Bulgarian thing that I made the joke about. I got this Bulgarian shop runners through another guy, right? Now I have to pay the Bulgarian people, but I also have to pay, like, I think it's fair that I pay something to the guy that made the connection, right? So we have a lot of deals like that. Like, we might give a 20% frugal to the shop, the shop runners, but then we also give a 5% frugal to the guy who can make the connection, you know, like, there's a lot of deals like that, that, you know, they're kind of fun, like not fun to keep track, but it's like fun to try to figure out what is fair. Because at the end, we just want to be fair, right? The 5% is what we do for referrals to, like, especially if you're good, if you were good, like if you were betting for us and you were good, like, happy to pay 5% frugal on, like, someone, yeah, I thought. But yeah, again, like, even, yeah, like, the accounting of it becomes a nightmare, but it's just like, that's where I'm sure a lot of your employees are on the accounting side, and the squaring upside. So we have two full-time employees, the only thing they do is accounting, and then we have our head trader, Tommy, who does only accounting for the drop boxes every Monday. So it's basically, you know, two full-time employee plus a third employee who only does one part of the accounting, and then we have one of my partners, his only job is to make sure the pay people, when we lose, and, you know, chase up the money when we win, you know. That's the other thing, it's just like, you need to have it, like, that's the other thing, it's like, you want somebody to be telling you like, hey, you should hit this person, either because they have a big balance with you, or you have a big balance with them, or whatever, and, you know, if you're not in the accounting, you also might just forget to hit people off one way or another. Yeah, that was fun. There was, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I don't know if I, if there was more, a more of a question, but I think I think we got it all. Yeah, I think that let's move to the listener questions. I know we hit a couple of them, but I think there's several good ones here that I wanted to hit. So first one's circling back to some of the live betting discussions, this one from BPlay. On PassPod, he's mentioned a low ROI percentage in live betting, live NBA betting, and can you ask him how he distinguishes a cold stretch as normal variance versus evidence that his in-game model is missing something? I think we could probably broaden this question, you know, not even specific live betting or anything, but obviously, you know, like the lower edge you have, and it sounds like you're betting some fairly liquid markets here. I imagine you're not, you know, in some of the more competitive markets, you have relatively thin edges. Like how do you, you come from a background of trading, so maybe that helps, but like how do you, how do you wrestle with the fact of like variance versus cold streaks? You've worked with a lot of people. How do you wrestle with them losing their edge versus still being good, like all of that in betting? So for other groups, you know, the only thing I really have is an indicator when we make their bets is the closing line, and how the market reacts when we bet into it, you know, that's really the only indicator we really have, and we do, we do track all of that. You know, for our own bets, we do the same for pregame, for live is tough, right? We always look at things like, you know, that the game, how did the game change? You know, did they make any rules change like two years ago in the NBA? Did they decide that they weren't going to call fouls after the All Star game? And that was like a directive from the referees or from the league telling the referees, because I think the All Star game was so poor and people were complaining or whatever. So like totals all went down a bunch of points as an example of that. So we try to keep track and look at smaller samples of data points to see if we're missing something, you know, on my sea, how does our model look if I'm only using the last seven days of data? I was a look if, you know, I'm using the last two years of data, whatever else. But I don't know, it's just you've been around for a long time, you know, like losing money, thousand, you know, whatever, we deal with it, you know, a lot of us, I get gray hair, some people drink whiskey, some people smoke weed, you know, however they they deal with things like this. But, but you always have to try to figure out if you're doing something wrong, you know, and not only that, you should try to figure out if you're doing something wrong even when you're winning a lot, because if you're winning way above expectations, like, I don't want you people to think that like you're doing everything great, like you could just been getting lucky and, you know, still have some kind of issues, right? Yeah, and it's a lot more fun and easier and better to figure out those problems when you're winning, not when you're losing, right? So I do try and more than ever realize that and work on like process improvements or whatever, or like find gaps, like, while I'm winning, because while I'm losing, I'm going to be grumpy, like you said, and probably do all the vices that you mentioned. That's so funny, because I'm the opposite. Like when I'm winning, I'm like, whatever, if I'm losing, the only thing that can make me feel better is like making improvement in the process, like that, I guess, is like, and then I can kind of go on my day, but like until I make some improvement, I'm like, so grumpy. There is like, you know, like something that, you know, I don't know why you guys with your betting, but I think that all professional bettors hold less than their expected, you know, EV or expected ROI. So, you know, just like, sure, there's plenty of sports where we win less than 2%, you know, but we are betting edges that we think are four to five percent. So, you know, it's just, you know, like once you understand that there's things that you're not perfect, there's things that the market is calculating for that you're not, right? And once you realize that, you know, I think it's a bit easier to come to grasp when you're trying to figure out if something is wrong. I have a question about that 2% thing, or the sorry, the, the, because I agree, like every, I think we all would say are, it realizes is lower than our expected. Do you think that's like, basically like each one, do you think that's distributed uniformly, or do you think like, you're usually right on your expected, and then sometimes you're like really wrong. Yes, that, that, the, the times are really wrong. Like, I give it a good example. Like, sometimes if my model shows too much of an edge, I might just skip the bet. And people might hear the sound of that and think, "Are you crazy?" You should at least bet a little bit. But like, if I don't understand why, um, final of Wimbledon, it was center versus Alcaraz and flop message for me, I think it was the game where he posted a bunch of money. You know, on both sides, he goes, "What the, like, did you bet the side?" And I said, "Well, my model shows like that I should betting, should be betting all my money on center." Um, but I'm going to skip it because something, something might be wrong. And, uh, and he goes, "What the, I don't make it," I said, minus 180. Fluffy. So Dejan. He's like, "I'm ready to go." No, no, no, no, I don't think he used me as like a source. I think he was already betting it. But what he said was, "Oh, you can't trust the model that thinks, that thinks center is minus 180." And I said, I said, "Yeah, that's why I'm not betting it." Right? But, but it's, uh, it's, uh, yeah, it's one of those like funny things. It's like sometimes, sometimes if money comes too easy, if betting comes too easy, this shit should be hard, you know? And if you're getting the price that you want and you think there's a big edge, there's probably something wrong, you know? No, center of question. One, three, one, you know? No, I love that example because a model is a tool, right? And I think people think if it's not perfectly dialed, then like, it's not usable. But like, that would be like, you know, you can't screw a screw in with a hammer, but it doesn't mean the hammer is not useful, right? Like, it's, you know, you can use the hammer. If you know how to use the hammer, like, you could use it. And so it's like, it would be the same type of thing, you know, I've thought about this in terms of like live betting or stuff. Like, there might be situations where you are really not accounting for it. Well, like, I like end of game NBA would be like a nightmare. And unless you like feel like you really know what you're doing or you've built like complex like foul strategies and when teams found when they stopped, like, you just wouldn't bet there. But that doesn't mean like, the model is not useful in the second quarter or whatnot. So it's that's where like, I think people have a misconception who like, who've never built a model or like, bet off a model, have a misconception of what like, a model needs to be to bet. It just needs to help you make bets sometimes. It doesn't need to, you're not booking based on it, right? You know, so that's funny. We stopped betting and we stopped betting NBA live for five minutes ago for that example reason. Exactly. And like, if I'm making an NBA live betting model, I would sort of do exactly that. I would probably have like a most of the game model. And then I would, if I wanted to bet in the end of games, I would need like a separate model altogether, probably of like with different considerations and whatnot. And you can spend like, is it worth spending all that time to make a perfect end game model like when, you know, there's a lot of the sports weeks have put the lines down, but where you can spend your time doing a million other things, you know, and a model is funny because you don't work on your model indefinitely, right? Like, like, you can always just make it bigger, you know, add more things and whatever else. So, you know, finding that right balance is quite tough, especially for perfectionists, which gladly, I'm not. Okay, let's move on to the next question, because I actually think this is related to something you said. It dovetailed into it because you had mentioned, you know, some changes post all star break. This one also from B play. Does he keep a checklist to flag macro shifts? Some examples post all star officiating, leak free throw rate, paste shot profile changes, etc. Earlier in the pod, you mentioned some of like the league changes, 10 VA that trigger like model changes or updates or like what I, and now I'm adding color to the question or basically like challenges in using historical data for a model, if the game is changed in some way. And how do you count account for those types of things? Yeah, we of course we keep track, you know, and obviously your older data becomes less useful. But, you know, obviously your prior data needs to wait, you know, to have more waiting on, you know, whatever you're trying to solve. But of course we have to keep track of all of that, you know, like in NFL, there's a new rule that just started to share, I don't know if you guys are aware, that that basically a touchback starts the game at the 35 yard and 7 to 30 yard line. And there's all these interesting discussions, like how does that affect the total, you know, and does affect the total. And, you know, people have to take this new information into account, how they, you know, but are they not going to use last year's data? Because now they have four weeks of, you know, NFL data with the new rule. You know, you have to try to find the balance and I'm not really sure, like how much you have to turn a knob one way or another, but, you know, we just try to make educated guesses, you know, because that's all we're really doing. And, you know, hopefully, you know, hopefully we get it right, and hopefully, you know, we don't get it wrong all that often, you know. Yeah, and I think that's like one of the other benefits of a model is it allows you to turn the knob in different ways to sort of say like, if I turn this much, how much does it matter? If I turn it this much, how much does it matter? Rather than, you know, sort of eyeballing it or just pure speculation, something like that. And the magic background, you know, they come out of the deck change, they come out of the rules change. The poker players are like, we only know the rules of, you know, we only know the rules. The magic players are like, oh, this is, we'll just make a guess, we're fine. Yeah. I mean, it is a lot of guesswork, but, you know, and guess what? The sportsbooks are also guessing, but the good, the bad news for us is they have the vague, the vague is a powerful tool. It helps to guess it. Yeah, I do think like listening to people who are successful and also bottom up, but talk about how like they're guessing and a lot of making educated guesses helped me be a better, I think that was a big unlock for me. Like, not everything had to be click one button, whatever. You can move things around and you can, you can take the information your mouse puts out and not bet it or, or, you know, bet it even if it shows something that's like, neutrally be and stuff like that. It's not, it's not so cut and dry. So I think like, that would be helpful for people who are maybe building a model, but they are kind of tied to the output pretty religiously. Let's talk about Adam's question. I thought that was a really good one, because in this, you kind of hinted at this, but Adam asked, when you were a trader at Pinnacle, what was the most interesting or creative way that he saw someone disguise their edge? So Pinnacle couldn't reverse engineer their edge. And this question like hits on my peak anxiety to be about betting into sharp books is like, is not that they're going to avoid the bad or limit you or whatever, but there's a reason why they're letting you bet in. And it's, it's a lot of it's because, you know, they are modeling the thing themselves or they're, you know, understanding of, of betting, you know, they understand what's going on. And then they can see what you're doing and be like, oh, that that's interesting. Also, other players in the market can see the line move. Yes. And they know that a move for some reason, they can also reverse engineer whatever you're doing. Right. So I've seen at first hand, Pinnacle definitely reverses engineers some of their best better things, trying to understand, you know, why they're betting. And, you know, they might not be reverse engineering it for like to build their own model, but they might be trying to understand why they're betting when they will bet just to like make sure that they can like overcharge that side a little bit more later, you know, like for their next bet, you know, let's call it. You know, there's this, there's this, there's like this belief is that the squares are all going to lose all their money, doesn't matter if they win today. Every single dollar a sharp takes from your sportsbook is a dollar you're never get back. So obviously like trying to overcharge those sharp betters as much as you can before they bet is very key. You know, the the most unique way that I saw somebody distinguish some, you know, like being sneaky so you don't see what they're doing. Isn't it wasn't because they were trying not to be reverse engineer, but imagine this. So when I worked at Pinnacle, I used to create MBA and also college football. All right, so college football usually was inside of the day. There's not that many games of MBA on Saturday. All right, so when I worked, I was in charge of watching the MBA games and the college football games. You can make assumptions like this about every single sportsbook, right, that they have the same person watching multiple leagues. All right, like for soccer, maybe the guy that's watching EPL is also watching whatever Spain B, whatever. So let's say you want to make some bets on Spain B. When is the best time to make those bets is during an hour before kick on English premiere. So I had multiple customers that actually understood that the same person was watching the MBA and college football and they would come and bet all my college football lines, right, and MBA kick off. So what that means is my Betty, my ticker, my betting monitor, or whatever you want to call it, was so full with MBA bets and big bets that they were able to sneak in some college bets or getting multiple hits on a college football line that I wasn't fast enough nor sometimes even noticed because so much was going on. So that's like the coolest thing I ever saw as a trader. Jedi level. Yeah, because they're able, they're able, yeah, and it even goes one step farther. There's some customers that actually knew which trader was working based on all the lines move. Because of course, I'm going to have a style different than my coworker. Well, I can't work seven days a week. So guess what? I would sometimes get exploited on my coworker's days off because he would do certain things a certain way and vice versa. So like they knew our schedule. Like they knew this guy, he trades MBA on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. And this other guy trades MBA on Wednesday and Friday. It was just like kind of crazy because we would see how, you know, like we could look back and how they they bet. And it's like, well, this makes no sense. Like if they would ever bet like this when I was working the way I moved the line, so it would never work. But like since you're working it works and vice versa and other games, you know, those are always found like really cool. You know, like I believe suspicious of all my my coworkers, you know, I think there's a dark in there or something. I mean, it's like even you, you mentioned earlier, like you're like, I know people, you know, still at pinnacle, which makes sense. You're like, you know, I could talk to traders and stuff. So I'd be, that'd be I'd feel like eyes were always on me in a way that that makes me uncomfortable. Well, there's also like, you know, a pinnacle as an automover. I don't know if you guys ever bet into it. When you bet the line automatically moves, that automover when I was there was set manually by traders. So it is possible that, you know, I personally liked very low-automover and then I would move the lines myself. Maybe a different trader, they liked higher-automover and then they prefer to pull back the light. So somebody bets minus one or two and moves the minus one ten, they would pull back the minus one away. Maybe I would, you know, there would be minus one or two, it would move to minus one or four and then I would move it to minus one away. Right. Maybe we would get there at the same price, but we would get there into different ways, right? So if you can actually figure at least things out, like that's pretty exploitable stuff to do. Yeah, I did know it was so at pinnacle, like it doesn't always move it exactly the same. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of like Casino AP layers, like with dealers and stuff. Like it's obviously much more opaque in the sports world, but it's a similar idea of like, you know, whole-carding stories or dealers who are doing something that's exploitable. So, a couple more questions and then we can wrap up here. This, a couple of fun ones, I guess. This one I thought was funny because it brought me to a tweet that made me chuckle yesterday. PromoCactus quoted one of your tweets of you on tilt and Twitter about someone not betting to win 100k. I think it was risk 100k to win some like rounded amount or something. So what other, what other pet peeves do you have that occur at your level of betting that maybe other people wouldn't understand? Well, the minus 110 thing, like where people would risk 100k instead of 200k, like that one is very big because the guy obviously just wants to show 100k ticket, but he's leaving like 10% of the volume, like obviously if he's a sharp guy, he's good at 110 grand to win 100k, right? Like that one just bothers me so much. Like another thing that I don't like, there's been this course on Twitter, like especially on Circus Off, you know, like what's an ethical thing to do about betting things like past posts and, and, you know, like, I don't know, I even heard things like, oh, we're betting something we already knew the outcome of, you know, like the all-star hockey skill challenge or whatever, like, I only feel this way, I think it's because I worked on the other side of the counter, but like, I really, it really bothers me when people think that it's okay to steal from a sports book by betting a, like, not a stale line, but like a past post line, because, because like, it's like, imagine like going to Walmart and they have a TV for $500, but for some reason, somebody put the sticker, they're only cost $50. Like, you would not feel okay walking out of Walmart with that TV, maybe some people would, but I think it's a good, I think most, like, many people would, right? Yeah, but like, I don't know, deep down, I don't think they feel good. Yeah, like, but sports books, like, because they're not adding much to society and they're usually praying on people who, praying on people who, you know, have, you know, gambling addicts. Like, people think it's okay to steal from sports books, but I only ever worked the sports books that treat other customers good. Right. And every time I see something like that, it just bothers me. It's like, hey, just because as a sports book, it's not, why is it okay to steal from them? That's kind of something that really bothers me on Twitter. Do you think it, like, I think some people, I don't, I feel like Rufus said this, but like, he thinks about it differently. If it's a book that, like, takes his bats or, or whatever, and the first is a book that's, let's call it, you know, a rack book that might be, you know. Yeah, I can see that sentiment. I just, you know, I just want to, like, something that people are really missing is that people taking shots and people doing things like that, it makes the product for every other better worst. You know, and, and, and at the end of it, maybe I'm selfish and so away, but all these people doing the stuff makes it harder for me to bet. And I just, I don't know, I just, I don't know, I don't know. People will think I'm weird, that I would never steal from a sports books, but that's a truth. I think, I think people have a lot of strong opinions, I guess, but like, what I was trying to communicate is I think the people who who are okay taking those shots are also taking those shots at Walmart, they would take those shots, like, anyway, right? Like, it's, it's like, to me, it's more about like, like, oh, it's a big corporation, you know, we can take our shot, right? But those people would probably not be okay. Like, very few, much fewer people would be okay, like, taking a shot at, like, a mom and pop, big or something, right? So it's like, this nameless, faceless, big corporation, I think people just feel like they can do and should do whatever they want, you know, right? And I think that's just a split in the gambling world, certainly. The exchange is kind of ignited that conversation, too, is it's like, oh, for sure, you're taking a shot again. I think, and what you said was the big point that was missed in the whole exchange conversation, like, let's say you're a sharp better, who's making a lot of money on exchanges, whether you're a market maker or whatever, if you're doing things like, like, posting an order after a game happens and then letting like a wreck better come hit it or you're, you know, or whatever, but basically like doing something that if you think about like, from a wreck better standpoint, that's just so annoying. Like, when you figure out what happened and then you might like, not want to be there anymore, you feel like embarrassed and all these things angry and you're like, oh, this place sucks. So it's like doing stuff, I think the thing that you said was a good point that was lost in that conversation. It's like, is the ego, like, what's the impact on the ecosystem of all of this, too, because it's like, the money comes to us from somewhere. And it's not like, the money will come no matter what. Like, there's, there's a trade off and there's a product that that person, the recreationals are being offered. So like, they must be considered too. Yeah, no, no big, for instance, early in the baseball season, there was a user every morning would put both sides orders minus 999. Oh, I hate that. I hate that. That's unpolished you too. Terrible. I can't mess, I can't mess, I kept messaging the, the, the no big people. I'm like, why do you guys allow this? You know, like this person, obviously, is the same person. Just band this guy. And eventually, I don't see him anymore. I hope they band them because I'm like, I don't understand what the value of this is, outwardly said, like, they don't want people. And it makes total sense. Like, those people negatively impact the experience for everyone in a really direct way. I do think it's a little bit more if I'm playing Devils advocate. Like, it is a less direct way on something like a, uh, you know, a pass post on like a PPH, right? That's, that's different in some ways. I get it's all like one big ecosystem. But certainly on the exchanges, I think they have every incentive to make it fun and fair for recreationals or else like, what's the point? Right? So there's someone who does this in golf on call. She they'll come in and they'll post like luckily, like, we're really fast. So fuck this person. But like, they'll come in and they'll post one cent offer. So basically, they want to buy the no golfer for one cent. Um, so like golfer not to win for one cent. So, you know, obviously, that's like, you know, infinite EV. Like, like, it's actually just insane. But they're basically hoping someone just comes in doesn't understand how an exchange works and like, clicks their own button and literally gives them like thousands of dollars. And it's, it's, it's so bad. It's so bad. It's got to stop. It'd be one better at a time. Good, good, Uncausty. Did you guys, uh, did you guys listen to that podcast by Heff Kelly on Twitter? Um, it's called, uh, risk of ruin. Of course. So great podcast, great guy. But the last episode tilted me because the guy was basically bragging about they spent time looking for glitches on the website. Like, clicking on things looking for glitches, you know, yeah. And I'm just like, dude, man, really like, come on. I will say I've looked fresh. You've never like looked for SGP glitches. Uh, no, but the way I understood it though was they were looking for like, I don't know if it was not SGPs or not. But I'm like, man, you can't be looking for glitches. Just make your bets, you know. I mean, I think the whole, why this, this debate is so contentious is I think everybody has a point on, but it's, it's not like, to, at least to me, it's not like a clear black and white because like, you could take this to the most extreme and say, is betting something, you know, minus six when the market's minus three is that, is that a problem? Like you, you, you, you can take it to the, the most extreme example of like stale or, like, so I think we all have like a view on what is in bounds and what's out of bounds and everybody has different perspectives on it. Um, I probably fall, you know, somewhere in the middle, personally, but like, there's no clear line on what is, at least to me, like, what is taking a shot and what's not is like, is draft king slow to move, taking a shot? I don't think so. I don't think so. Like, it's that, you really, it's got that much different than draftings having like bad, bad software pricing on some, some thing where you click these two things and the price totally screws up. Like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Like if, if, let's say like a book doesn't realize something's correlated, but it's correlated. Like, I'll, I'll be, I think, I think, I think that's okay. Okay. So this is something like that. I've definitely done. No, no, I think that's total. That's totally okay. Okay. Yeah. I do, okay. Yeah. And I think like, that's the thing. It's like, it's, it's like that famous like Supreme Court case or whatever, about pornography. It's like, I don't know exactly what it is, but I know when I see it, I feel like that's how people think about like what the line is as far as like, whatever you want to call it, angle shooting, taking a shot, like, or whatever, like everybody's like, yeah, that's, I know it's impossible to define, but you kind of get, get a sense for it by like how it makes you feel when you hear somebody talk about it or whatever. You think it makes total sense like that people's background and like informs their perspective, like you being on that side of the counter. Like, certainly, I think gives you a different perspective than, you know, someone who's, who'd never been on that side. Right. I've seen a sports book that I worked for, uh, pay a pre-recorded e-sports event where all six matches were pre-recorded and the coach parlayed all six events over and over and over and over and over and over for six figures. And the sports book I worked for paid them. So like, I would definitely say that's wrong. Of course, that's wrong. Okay. But that's super wrong, but the sports books are still paid. Yeah. And, and, and like, like, like, if I see a sports book do that to a customer, like, I feel, you know, when people are taking shots of sports books, I feel kind of wrong, you know. Like, right. Yeah. I think they're back to like the people, how people feel like they're treated differently by different sports books made, you know, make them seem like mom and pop and Walmart or whatever. So I don't think we'll ever do this. I don't think all of gambling Twitter will ever agree on that one. But, uh, I thought that was an interesting, interesting discussion for sure. That was, that was a good, uh, that we've never really dove into the, we kind of stayed away from that, that whole, we don't, we, we tried to avoid controversy. You know, I think we, I think we did it. I think we did it. We still waited, consciously. Hopefully that's where there are any other questions we wanted to ask today, or let's ask Henry's just because, you know, every deserves a shout out. Yeah. He wants to know, how do you get into the secret sunrise panels at that bash? Um, I don't even know about this. Did you guys, did you guys hear the whole thing? Yeah. Okay. There was, uh, I was approached by Scott, the guy that works for spanky, and he said that there was a secret sunrise baseball, um, panel where there was a guy using spank odds could predict, uh, the baseball moves at 830 in the morning Eastern, which is 535, 30 Vegas. Yeah. Vegas. But when the guy is telling me that he's not tell, like he doesn't know that all those moves that I've been editing the morning is me. So, so I was like, oh, that's interesting. And what is this panel? He's like, well, the guy's going to show you like how the lines move and how you can predict how the lines are going to move before they actually move. And I guess there's a lot of people that do this. They stare at dumbest or spank odds, whatever. And they can try to steal your liquidity before you go and bet it, right? So I was like, and obviously, we encounter this every day, you know, like we're trying to bet a game and somebody steals something from us. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. Let me go and see. And, uh, and yeah, the guy was trying to explain it. Um, I think we got lucky that for whatever reason that day pinnacles API went down, they went from public to private. I don't know if you guys know about this. Yeah, we actually covered that briefly. And basically, like whatever method he asked, he couldn't really teach it. Uh, but it was funny. Like I'm on my phone and I see the telegram messages that my employees are sending and the lines are moving, but the guy isn't realizing. Uh, so after, you know, two or three bets, being my partner, we'll also woke up at five thirty in the morning to go see a, we say, let's just go get breakfast, but that's kind of so you can earn it wasn't you who who took down pinnacles API to know it was not me. I swear, protect you because of the the secret sunrise panel. Funny story about it. It's funny because it's like one of those movies where like different people converge on the same thing. Dan, who was on our podcast, talked about being out partying and showing up still drunk to that panel at five thirty and then taking like a six hour nap after. And like, so your paths are, you know, your paths converge there. Um, lift me, you know, having very different experiences, but um, I can't wait till next year because it seems like a lot's going on at those panels. Do you think they're good people watching for sure? Yeah, well, what's cool about Bebash, I think is, um, you know, like every year, I tried to like get involved more and more, you know, the very first year, I just went to a few events. Um, the best part is I think it's at nighttime, everybody meets at the legacy club, which is like unofficial. And uh, you, people will say things there are super interesting ones are drunk. So if anybody goes to Bebash, I recommend just, I read at the end of every day, just go up to the legacy club and, you know, mingle with the people. Alpha just spilling all over the place. Just can't help themselves. They don't get that opportunity to talk about, you know, that that much stuff with, with people in the industry as, as often as that. So I'm sure, I'm sure people can't help themselves. All right, let's, let's close this out here. We don't, you know, we're gonna have the longest recorded episode ever with the person who is good about us having needed it to be shorter. So two, two last topics that we do to close out, um, you've given several good takes that I think people on sharp gambling Twitter would disagree with. But do you have any, any last or additional hot takes that, that you think, uh, the people of gambling Twitter would, would disagree with, uh, no, we're good on Twitter. No, I want to dive into Twitter fair enough. Okay, last topic, um, Bayesian update, do you have anything you've changed your mind on recently? Gambling or not gambling related? No, I'll go ahead. I was saying, I could give an example if you wanted. Okay, go ahead. Okay. So, uh, I changed my, so I've, so basically like this past rider cup, I really didn't buy into the beliefs that the Europeans had like any inherent, like, I call it like magic pixie dust that like made them better during the rider cup. I think there's several things that probably go into this, but I do think that the European team is better than the sum of their parts or the European team outperforms their players baseline more than the American team regardless of like home field or not. And I think there's like some intangible and some tangible reasons for that, but that was something that like I didn't believe and, uh, now I do. Um, something that I changed my mind a lot on sports betting is how much to actually trust the market. I, and I basically go on stretches where I'm like, well, closing land value is the only thing that matters and, you know, the market knows everything. And sometimes, sometimes I go into, you know, into this other side where it's like, well, who knows what that line currently is if it's even in the right ballpark because of all this manipulation that's happening. Um, and also with the, with the, um, you know, the introduction of places like Kelsey and Novig and Prophet X, like these places that some of them have lots of liquidity, some of them are, are offering tighter, you know, spreads. I think a lot is going to change in our industry. Um, I'm kind of a boomer, you know, I'm a little old school, but I think you have to evolve with some of the new stuff that's happening. Um, you know, and, for instance, um, you know, with all the money in, I give an example, with all the money that is being bent now. Um, I think fixed matches are more likely to happen as an example where in the past, I would think there's no way this game could ever be fixed. You know, the players make too much money. Um, you know, it's not really, you know, it's impossible kind of thing. Um, but I might have not proof, but I have firm beliefs that maybe some college basketball games last year were actually fixed, right? So it's, uh, yeah, you just always have to think about what the marketplace is like, and I'll likely, some things that you first thought there was impossible to happen can actually now be possible. I think that actually that actually covers both because I think a lot of invention of thought would be, uh, in terms of both topics, because I think a lot of conventional thought would be legalization, you know, it's more out in the open, you know, there's less likely to be some of these like, uh, fixed games manipulation, whatever point shaving, whatever you want to call it. Um, so that's a really interesting, uh, perspective on, on, not only that, but also like the efficiency of the market today and, and all that stuff. So I know we're like knocking on two and a half hours. So I will, I will skip my, my update for this week and weekend. We can close it out. Okay. We'll get it next week. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, man. This is thanks guys. So it was really fun and, uh, keep up the good work. Um, you know, you guys are really, it's impressive where you guys talk about for so many hours each week. And, uh, you know, just on so many hours. I'll aptly tune in every week for at least the first hour. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My, my, my thing is I give, I give a little shout out to you in the second hour just to see if you're listening. All right. Cool. All right. Well, yeah. Thanks, thanks for coming on. Thanks everybody for listening and we will see you all, uh, next week on the next episode.