Episode 48: Telemachus Joins For A Discussion

(upbeat music) - Welcome to episode number 48 of the Circles Off podcast and video on YouTube. I'm Rob Azola, joined by Johnny from Betstampt. How are things? - Very good. If you are listening to this, then March Manus is underway. - Yes. - He releases podcasts tomorrow. We're recording on Wednesday, the day before the unbelievable event that is the March Manus tournament ripe for betting. He got four back to back to back to back days of incredible betting. It halves off after the Friday, Saturday, but boy, is this the best time of the year? - I agree. It's one of my favorites for sure. Just, you know, games getting started right before noon, going, you get that dinner break, like that very brief dinner break into the night games, definitely one of the best times to be a better. And we're gonna welcome in a college basketball better. He is a totals originator for college basketball. He's an aspiring pro better, an NBA steam chaser as well. You can follow him on Twitter at Telemicus model. And you can follow him on Betstampt at Telemicus model as well. He is killing it on the Betstampt platform right now. Just heading to the marketplace, we have him listed as the first featured better in the marketplace, a track record of over 750 bets now with 9.1% ROI, 2.7% CLV. Telemicus model, Taylor. Thank you for joining us on Circles Off. - Hey guys, that's awesome to be here. Thanks a lot. - No problem at all. You're a very interesting personality for me. This is the first time I've met you or seen your face in person. And I think for a lot of people out there, you've gained a following now in the Twitter community at least. And also on the Betstampt app, you almost have 400 followers in a very short period of time, which is actually quite big as well. Just for the viewers out there and the listeners, just give us a little bit of personal background on who you are and how you got involved in the betting space. - Yeah, sure. So I grew up in a small town in Northern Michigan. My family was really into sports, watched a lot, played a lot. The opposite was true for gambling. We had a problem gambler in our extended family. And so from a very young age, for me, gambling was made up to be bad. And being the good kid that I was, I just accepted that. And I've kind of lived that way most of my life. I went to college, got a software engineering degree from the University of Michigan. Went and worked at Microsoft for 11 years. Left Microsoft about three years ago to start my own small software company, which is what I do now. In that time, I got married, had some kids, and didn't even think about gambling at all. I'd play in an occasional poker game or a March badness pool for sure. But no real gambling. And then the pandemic hit. So I stayed in close contact with some friends for college. And because of the pandemic, we couldn't do anything. Like we couldn't get together, we couldn't hang out. One of them suggested that we throw some money into a sports book and gamble on college football together. So this was in the fall of 2020. And I'm like, that sounds like a great idea, right? So we gambled like the generates for the first three months of the college football season. We're talking a few hundred bucks here, not much at all. Lost about half of our bankroll and had a blast doing it. And then I discovered gambling Twitter. And I'm like, wait a second, people just give out picks for free on here. This is awesome. And started tailing a caper. Her name is Pam Maldonado. And she got really hot right at that time. And we made our money back in the last month of college football season. And I was like, holy shit, we just figured out gambling. Like this is awesome. So we're like, all right, what's up next? College basketball is up next. She suggested that we follow Ian McMillan. So I looked him up. He'd had two years of a winning record. And so we start following him. And that was probably in January of 2021. And his January of 2021 was just complete garbage. Just, you know, doesn't say anything about him. Just bad variance. I didn't understand it at the time. And I lost a bunch of money. Again, a few hundred bucks. And so I'm like, this can't be this hard, right? Like, I'm going to build a model. Like me knowing absolutely nothing about what I'm doing. I'm going to go build a model. And so I built a really crappy college basketball model, which was my first attempt here. And that was ready about mid February of last college basketball season. I started betting it and, you know, looking back, like, I had no idea what I was doing. Got lucky. Like, probably finished up 10 units or so for the season. And was convinced that I had to figure it out again, right? Like, I've got the simple model. I'm going to win at college basketball. All I need to do now is build a bankroll, right? So I'm like, how can I do that? There are, you know, I live in a legal, a state that has legalized betting. There's a lot of promos running all the time. I'm like, all right, if I can take my bankroll from $2,500, to, let's say, 10 grand, I can be ready for next college basketball season and like make some real money off this model I built. So I started churning promos, just doing really basic stuff. And it was while doing that that I stumbled on to my first, like, really profitable angle. And from there, like the light bulb actually went on. I realized you can actually make money doing this. And so that was, you know, that was 10 months ago, started off with $2,500 bankroll. As of this month, as of this morning, I just crossed the 250K mark. So like, since I got started, I've been hooked, right? Like this is a 250K total bankroll. Yeah, that's what I hit this morning. Wow, congratulations. That's awesome over such a short period of time from Taylor Pamela Maldonado up to that. I know, right? Yeah. No offense to Pamela. Yeah. I mean, there's so much unpack there. The story is very fascinating. I want to start with one thing. I think you use the word trappy in terms of the, or maybe it's crappy. I couldn't even-- Crappy. Crappy. Yeah, OK. Crappy-- what's the trappy model? That's what I was trying to get into. But crappy model, fight. Let's start there. So when you start building out a model, this is one of the most common questions that we get. We do Q&A episodes, obviously. On a personal level, it's probably the most common question I've gotten over the course of past three or four years. I want to build a model, where do I start? Now, I've identified that you built a crappy one at first. Can you walk us through what the, quote unquote, crappy model was, and then how you evolved on from there? Yeah, sure. So when I started with that, I knew there was a lot that I didn't know, right? And so the first thing I started doing was looking for ways to learn. And I didn't find a lot-- you can't just Google how to build a model and find valuable resources. So what I started doing is I started by coming up with a list of podcasts that I found valuable. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to listen to every episode of this podcast, every episode about the process, all the evergreen episodes of the Deep Dive Pod, and then just anything else that caught my eye. I built up a list of about 300 hours worth of podcasts I wanted to listen to that I was going to hopefully glean some things from. And I like podcasts because they're parallelizable, right? I can do them while I'm cleaning up after the kids, or things like that. But I wasn't going to do that before I started. I'm also someone who has to be hands on. And so I have a very limited stats background. I have a very strong software engineering background. So the way I started was to build a robust back testing engine. So I went and pulled down a bunch of data for a college basketball lines and game finishes. And I was like, all right, I'm going to make it so that I can simulate all the games between 2016 and 2020 and find out how I would have done had I been betting whatever strategy kind of popped in my mind that day. I focused. So the thing that I was actually a really good start and that's something that has stuck with me today, the my crappy model was based off of trends. So it's the simplest thing to do. It's like someone threw it at trend. It's like this team has covered the total in their last seven games. So we're betting the over here tonight. And I at least understood that probably wasn't a safe thing to do. But I was like, OK, are there trends out there that can be valuable? That aren't true of the last seven games that, you know, you can say over the last 500 games, if two teams had come in, covering the total, and eight of their last 10 games, like, you know, and they could they would go over or under, you know, 57% of the time, like those were the kind of trends that I was trying to find. So I actually built like a little data mining engine to go and, you know, gave it a bunch of parameters and said, find me the trends that make the most sense. That that would have been the most profitable over the last four years. And found a bunch of those. And, you know, that took a lot of time. Like, so over this time, I'm listening to all these podcasts and starting to learn that, hey, this may not be the best approach here, but, you know, I'm kind of pot committed. And I remember distinctly one day where I had run a simulation. And I would simulate 2016 to 2019 to find the trend. And then I'd say, OK, how did this do in 2020? So I didn't want to poison my testing with my samples. And so it found me some outrageous, you know, trend that had hit it. 57% of games over a 600 game sample size. And again, we're talking about like very simple, like trends here, like the two teams had gone over a bunch and we saw a line movement in one direction and the idea was, okay, the market has adjusted Beth Yonder, right? And so I ran it on the 2020 data and I'm like, okay, like how did this thing do? And it hit like 46%. Right, it hit just at like just a terrible rate. And so I'm staring at that saying, like, you know, I had learned a little bit of stats at that point. I'd said this thing had a 99% confidence level that this was gonna continue going, right? That this wasn't just randomness and then I got absolutely crushed on it, right? In theory. And at that point, I'm like, I, this is not the way to go, right? Like if I'm gonna do this for real, I have to produce a number. I have to be able to say, like this game is lined up 140. I make it 136. It's because of that we're gonna bet the under, not because of, you know, some random set of trends. - I love the back testing part of it because in your situation, you proved how extremely valuable that kind of stuff was as well. A lot of people forego that and probably would have built out a model identified something at a very high confidence rate and just been willing to back it with their own money and probably learned a lesson the hard way rather than figuring out before actually betting hard earned money. So that I think there's a lesson to be gained from that. It is really interesting though, just kind of the evolution of that and starting with trends. I think a lot of people typically do start there. My personal belief is a lot of the content that's out there now is trend-based. So it's very easy to get into that space and uncover that, especially people with larger followings on social, you coming into gambling Twitter would have noticed that a lot of people are handicapping via trends as well. So that's pretty interesting. Now in terms of, let's say after the back testing framework as you continue to build out the model a little bit more, you obviously have a software engineering background which is extremely helpful. For those that don't have a software engineering background as long as you're okay and excel, there's still things you can do. But how did you gain the, let's say the statistical knowledge, how to build out whatever types of models you were, whether that's a linear regression model, Monte Carlo simulations, anything like that, was that Googling stuff, was that reading books, was that just from the actual podcast you were listening to itself, where were you actually getting this information from? - Yeah, so there was, I'd say a little bit in the podcasts. And I'm gonna be completely honest that I still don't have a lot of statistical knowledge that I'm confident in. So my approach has been very stats light. Now I still do use some very basic linear aggressions here and there. Matt Bullcalter, plus EV analytics has been on this podcast before and he wrote a blog series, blog post series on Bayesian modeling, which I read that, I think it's a five part series. I felt like I really understood the first three parts. The fourth part I'm like, okay, this is getting heavy in the fifth part. I'm just like, I give up. Like I tried to read that fifth part six or seven times and just stood like zero chance. So if you were to look at my model today, there are, there's very little stats in it. I've learned how to use solver and Excel and I did that through a basic tutorial online and saw its value in some of the articles that Matt had put out. But the way that I've approached things, I haven't needed stats to give me an advantage yet. I know that's not gonna be true long term. I'm actually taking the Bayesian sports betting class that Matt and the guys at analytics that better have put out. And I think that's gonna be incredibly beneficial. And I plan on incorporating a lot of that during the off season. - I think you're pretty much a target market for that. Actually aspiring pro already has something wants to take that next step. So yeah, I think you probably will get value over that. Not knowing exactly what's in that. But Matt, we know Matt personally outside of this podcast as well, he's just a super sharp guy when it comes to numbers and statistical modeling. Very interesting so far. Hopefully a lot of people are gleaning some insight about the modeling point of view and understanding that you don't need to know everything. There are limitations that you will have and you can overcome those over time as long as you put in the hard work. I'm very interested in knowing if you've come across any major pain points since you've started modeling. Either things you couldn't get over potentially issues with data that you've been working with. Some personal experiences that I guess you would have had to overcome a major pain point. - Oh, absolutely. There's been a number of them. So the model that I have is based off of play-by-play data and anyone who's ever looked at play-by-play data knows that that will quickly become the pain of your existence. So I probably have 600 hours into my model at this point. I'd say over half of that has been dealing with play-by-play data parsing, dealing with problems and play-by-play data. Like it's just, if you can ever build a model that doesn't require play-by-play data, I would highly recommend that. But that's kind of a well-known one. Model is also simulation-based. So when I, if I'm gonna, you know, handicap a game, what I'll do is I will simulate a game by simulating every possession of that game, right? So from start to end, and I'll run that, you know, tens of thousands of times, and it'll give me a distribution of potential final scores. And then I will use that to judge the value of the line, right? So that's what I do. I'm one problem that I deal with right now is that if I wanna do that for every game between 2016 and 2020, it's gonna take like 12 hours, right? And I can run it on the same data set twice, and it's not gonna give me the exact same output, which drives me crazy, right? 'Cause when I wanna go and run a test to say, like, okay, am I handling free throws better now? Or am I projecting free throws better now? Like I'm gonna get a result that is a little bit different than, you know, my previous run, and it's like, okay, did I improve it? Or this is just like some variance in my model, and that drives me crazy. - Right. And that's a problem I think that we all have because obviously you could up the number of simulations, but then you're upping the amount of time that's gonna take to run it, which is, frankly, a pain in the ass. - For sure. So one thing I wanted to really touch on was, you know, outside of modeling, we can go back to modeling for sure in the answers, but, you know, what does the kind of day-to-day betting look like for you? If you don't mind sharing, and on this podcast, you know, we don't wanna share anything you're not comfortable with. So within what you're comfortable with sharing, you know, what sports are you betting? You know, what books? How much if you wanted to share that? Obviously, it's such quite a come-up to get to where you are. So we're happy to share that advice with people who are starting as well. - Sure. Yeah. So I'll talk to that, and I'll also add the disclaimer that, you know, I made a lot of my money betting baseball, so it's not part of my daily process right now, but, you know, we can get into that. Right now, for me, yeah, I'm betting a lot of college basketball over nights. So I, let's start at night, actually. I put the kids to bet around eight. I run my model. I'm a volume better. So like I think Rob mentioned, I'm at just about 800 plays. That model's only been active for the last two months. And so I've, you know, built that up pretty quickly. So I'll bet somewhere between five and 50 games. I'm in a legalized state. So I try to, you know, I will use bet stamp to find the best line out there. And whether that's, you know, it seesers here in the states or some legal sports book or at somewhere like bet online or low-vig or somewhere offshore, I will bet wherever I can find the best line that I can get as much down as I need to. Right. So I'm, you know, college basketball openers some have pretty low limits, but with all of the legalized sports books coming in, I can actually get a decent amount down, right? I haven't had, for me, I haven't had trouble getting, you know, 1,000, 1,200, 1,500 of that to grand down what I need to. So I'll bet those at night, go to bed, wake up at five or six eastern time to try to get down on any new lines that have come out, you know, ideally before the kids wake up. My model is completely automated. So whatever it spits out, I bet that's where I'm at right now. So it doesn't take a ton of time. Take care of the kids, hand them off to the nanny, head into work. When I get into work, it's, you know, luckily I work a software job. So I'll spend the first hours maybe tweaking my model, running an experiment, something like that. And then when 9 a.m. rolls around, I'm steamshacing in the NBA. And that usually lasts from about 9 to new. And I found an edge, which I'm not going to talk about heavily here that by itself isn't all that valuable. But when you combine it with steam chasing, like it takes a small plus EV bet and makes it a pretty large plus EV bet. And there's some places where that don't move that fast. And so I, you know, chase steam in the NBA for the morning. When I first started doing that, it was pretty time consuming. And I'm actually supposed to be working a day job at that point. So I am quickly found that I couldn't stare at a screen for three hours. I went and automated as much as that as I possibly could. So my setup now is I'm working, doing my day job stuff, and I have a little bot sitting there watching for line moves that I've deemed valuable for me. And then when it finds one, it plays a little chime. I switch desktops really quickly, place a bet or two or four, and then switch back and then get back to work. And then the rest of the day is real work. I will, when I get bored, pull up Bet Stamp and see my CLV for the bets that I have in place. I actually sweat my CLV numbers throughout the day, which is quite enjoyable. And then get home, hang out with the kids, put them to bed, and then start all over again. Interesting. Are you using an odd screen or some sort of odd sport to steam chase? That's the only thing I was going to ask there. I am. Well, I was originally. So like, if it had existed back when I first started, I would have been using the unabated odd screen because it's the best one out there. I was using wager talk at the time, and that's kind of painful to follow. Now I've, I'm not actually watching the screen. I have something watching the screen for me. I have a little bot watching the screen for me. I appreciate the amount of automation, because I've gone through something personal. Obviously, a lot of my day to day is with Bet Stamp now as well, and I'm a pro better. So you kind of got to figure out ways to make sure that you don't have to be available to bet at every hour of the day. And the automation component is great. I have so many things that I can ask you, but this has been a very interesting conversation for me. You mentioned sweating your CLV. That's interesting for me, because I feel like you partly create some of your own CLV in the market as well. So I can, again, the amount of people that follow you and set a subscribe to alerts for you for Bet Stamp is one thing. Once you post your plays in Bet Stamp, tends to move the market pretty quickly as well. So there's a lot of people that are tailing them in terms of overnight. Now, in a efficient market, you would guess that, if you're on the wrong side of things, the numbers would get played back. But I've noticed particularly in this space, especially college basketball totals, Ken Barkley from You Better You Bet is another one who gives out overnight, and the market is going to move in that direction and stay in that direction so much. So I'm curious how much you actually think your own CLV matters, because I personally do think that you're creating some of it. And on top of it, what are potentially some secondary metrics that you might look at, whether that's error testing that you do, whether it's just your ROI? Like how important is the CLV to you right now? - That's a great question. And actually, I'm really interested in your perspective there, because prior to what you said, I would have said that I'm not having that big of an impact on the market. And that's because I just don't have, I'm not able to see how many people are actually following these. I can see how many followers I have, but I don't know how many people are actually reacting to it. So what I see from my perspective is that there are a few books who will move off my action if I give them a limit bet. That's like your bet on lions and your low pigs, but I kind of think they move off of pretty much anyone who gives them a limit bet early enough. - Right. And that's not quite true, but yeah, partially true, but close. - Yeah, okay, yeah, sure. So I don't feel like I didn't have an immediate impact. As I've gone on this tiny two month journey, I feel like when I first started, I was probably averaging 2.4, 2.5% CLV on a good week and I'm at kind of 2.9 now. And so I could see some of that being artificial. I do think that the market will get knocked back into place given my level of betting right now, right? Like I'm not pushing back on the market at all. I'm not hitting anything higher than opening limits. But now that you've said that, I need to think about that more. When I look at my metrics, or I'm not doing proper Kelly staking right now. And so ROI can actually encourage me to do the wrong things. If you're flat staking or close to flat staking, it's gonna say you should only bet your largest edges. - Right. - So I know that I can make money off my 54 and 55% edges, but they're gonna lower my ROI and I'm okay with that. So for me, for this two months stint, I have been looking mostly at CLV to tell me how I've been doing. And I've actually gotten crushed a little bit this week on it related to NIT and CPI games. There's this prevailing trend that they tend to go over. I've shown a ton of value on unders in them. And so I've bet all those unders and the market has largely disagreed with me. So I still think my CLV has some value, but in that case, I actually think that I know why the market's moving against me and I'm okay with that. - Right. - So that's a really long-winded way of saying, I use CLV, I wish I had better metrics. I obviously pay attention to ROI and how many units I'm turning around. And ultimately what I rely on the most is my back testing and looking at my performance metrics there to know how I'm doing. - Right, so I think one of the things you said was actually very smart answer, which was prior to me even gaining a larger following, I was still getting very good CLV and tracking that. So you're probably right, and that's a meaningful thing to look at in terms of the error metrics in your back testing. Now, when you run a back test, for example, are you looking for profitability against closing lines? Are you looking for your law gloss or your RMSC specific error metrics? How would you evaluate a good back test? - Yeah, so ignoring the problem that I talked about where it's hard to get a truly consistent back test, I look at my performance against openers 'cause that's how I'm betting. - Right. - I look at my performance against closers because I wanna know when I can move my progression up, like when I wanna get more money down, I move my staking system for my back testing to be Kelly staking. So I'm pretty sure if you're doing proper Kelly staking that whether you're looking at units gained or ROI, it should be roughly the same. And so I pay some attention to those numbers, but I pay more attention to my log gloss on my projecting the total or like my average absolute median error when I project the total. I think the one thing I'm doing maybe a little bit different or I haven't heard people talk about this is because of the nature of my model because I'm actually simulating a game possession by possession, I can actually look at all those stats for each individual metric as well. So like my two point makes, three point makes, offensive fouls, offensive rebounds. And so if I am trying to change something in my model that's gonna make me more accurate at predicting offensive rebounds, then I'll look heavily at that metric more than anything else, right? 'Cause these types of models are complex systems. And so one thing I try to be super careful of is that if my goal is to improve offensive rebounds and I find that I improve that number but my overall ROI actually decreases with that change. In my mind, what that means is I had two issues that were compensating for each other, right? And by correcting the offensive rebound issue, it has now put something else out of whack. It's made whatever compensating error, it's exposed that more, right? And so it's really hard to fight that urge to say I'm gonna reject this change 'cause my model's done worse, but I know that, if you only look at games, you're gonna have a really hard time iring out issues where you're on, you have two different errors that are kind of offsetting each other. - Right, makes a lot of sense, but building out a model that way is very smart as well in the sense that I mean, should we ever see college basketball props at scale or something like that, you'd be in a prime position to be able to capitalize that as well on top of the actual major markets. So, you know, there's no one right or wrong way to build something out in this. I think you've learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way but from the sounds of things, pretty impressed with the progress for someone who started modeling at the beginning of COVID, it's a pretty great success story, I would say. - So, yeah, I feel overwhelmingly lucky. Like, I wasn't even planning on betting the model this year. I kind of started this model at the, in December of last year. And the only reason why I decided to start betting it is 'cause I started to see, you know, my back tests were coming through positive and like, it doesn't hurt. But yeah, I don't think this is a common story. I realized that I've stumbled on something good here, caught some positive variance. - What's your performance versus close? How is that compared to performance versus open? - Yeah, so, you know, it scales based off of my percent edge. So, I'm lucky enough that my model, like the bigger edge that I show, generally the bigger payoff I have. And my edge over-opener's right now is, you know, on a large sample of games, or on the games that I want to bet, which is a pretty large number. It's about 55%. For those, you know, that's across all games that I want to bet across at close right now for me. It's about 53%. And so that's that's not enough for me to be betting, you know, confidently because 53% it just isn't enough when you say 53% you mean 53% win percentage on my So just just above break even on minus one time got it. Yeah, okay. I mean that's to the efficiency of the market though as well, right? I know I just I'm not familiar like I don't Yeah, yeah, I got it. I don't know many people that track it that way, but it's the same thing. It's just a different calculation. So no, that's that's very very interesting. One other thing was so the actual style of betting for someone who's starting is massive because forget about the actual model you have. And this is I will start this so we can clip this. But when you're starting out betting the easiest and best thing you can do as we mentioned is have multiple sports books. The reason is the bonuses. And when you get these bonuses together, this is how you can build your bankroll from $500 up to $3,500, which is the easiest seven X you'll ever do to your bankroll. I'll never get easier than that. So you mentioned when you started, that's what you did. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? I think it's really interesting. Sure. So yeah, and I did just that, you know, I found out what what is the best way to make most of your to make the most of your first deposit, right? And honestly, that is something you'll find more for offshore sports books, right? Like crypto bonuses, things like that. I haven't found a ton of deposit matches for legal US sports books. You know, they focus heavily on, you know, you get a $2,000 risk free bet or $5,000 risk free bet. And those are something I actually struggled with a little bit early on, right? So I had a you know, $2,500 bankroll to start with and Caesars wants to give me a $5,000 risk free bet. I'm like, I know that's not truly risk free, right? Like the way to maximize that is to put 5K down on, you know, an underdog or some long odds line. And I can't take that risk, right? So we also won't be able to bet all five grand comes in bunches. So it'll be like, it's not actually $5,000 of one free bet. Like, for example, that that particular promo would be five risk free bets up to $1,000. Right. So it varies by sports books. So that's how it was when I eventually got to the point where I could do that with Caesars. Draft kings was offering a targeted one for the Super Bowl, where I literally got a $5,000 risk free bet back, which was, which I then turned around and lost again and lost 5K pretty quickly, which was, that was recently said, no big deal. But, so, you know, I got into arming those free bets, right? So like, arming has a lot of downsides, right? You're leaving money on the table when you are, but if you have a $2,500 bankroll like I had and some, and you managed to get a $250 risk free bet, like, and I can guarantee that I can turn that into $200 of real cash. Like, I did that and, and you know, that's a big win for me. I'm not going to take the risk at that point in time. So you are being between different sports books. Yeah. So like, if you get a $200 risk free bet, you can find a plus 500 line somewhere. You don't even need it to be a true arbitrage, right? You can have a plus 500 bet on one book minus 450 on another book. You put your free bet on the long odds and, you know, you're basically converting it. So you like, at those, at those numbers, that's probably like an 84 85% conversion rate. And, you know, looking back on it, it wasn't the way to maximize EV, but it's, it's certainly helped me bootstrap my bankroll. Yeah. Well, it doesn't maximize EV, but what it does is reduce the variance and give you a secured amount of money in your bankroll, which if you do have an edge and you're trying to compound and grow money. And I know you mentioned you, you're working another job. So you got kids and I presume that all that's, you know, taking care of by your day job. It's not something to worry about, but for people who are starting out, fresh out of school, zero dollars to their name, they, they do need to build up that guaranteed money. So it's not necessarily the biggest EV in terms of number of dollars that you're going to get. But it is the best, the best EV for people who are starting out because you need to get that money in your, in your account before you can start making more. Absolutely. All right. I want to talk a little bit about having your accounts limited because this is something that also comes up quite regularly. Again, we do a lot of Q&As, a lot of people are always looking for advice on. How do I stay under the radar? What can I possibly do to make this edge last longer? I know that because we've talked off air about this that you did some testing, particularly with your accounts and getting limited. Is there some generic advice or even more detailed advice that you can offer to those out there who are looking to fly under the radar and potentially keep those accounts lasting longer? Sure. So I'll get into a little bit about what we did and what was successful for us and hopefully that's useful to others. You know, when, when we first started getting limited, the first thing I did was listen to your Q&As and other people's Q&As and did the basic things, right. And then we were sitting with square bets, definitely helps your account police a little bit in the beginning. We found betting parles helps again, even if you're just, if you're betting your high edge things in parles that helped us. There was a, you know, when we started hitting this edge hard, like I was able to go for about two weeks before I got limited. And then the next kind of person we brought in before that was, you know, the next person was 10 days and eight days and seven days. And there was one day where we brought someone in and they're doing their betting and two hours into betting, they get limited. Like not two hours into like pay it, they're, you know, being paid out, it was, was literally like all the bets that we had placed on games, like none of those games had started yet. And then we were like, I'm graded, nothing graded. So like there's no CLV numbers here. There's, there's nothing, right. Like there's no, if you haven't won any money, they're just like, nope, this accounts limited. And so that was eye opening for me. So when I think about people prior to that, when I thought about getting limited, it's, you got caught up in some sweep, right. They're sweeping for good CLV numbers, they're sweeping for winning accounts. And this may be realized that that's one way to get limited, but there's another way it's the trade or sitting on the other end who notices that you're doing something funny and, and flags you for, you know, either to get a review right away or an immediate limiting. And so I look back on those, you know, those, the previous people that we had, we had four days, five days, like those guys probably weren't sweeps either. It's, we just happened to trigger whoever was trading that day. And so this opened up a, a big set of possibilities for us, a big set of things to try. And what we did and what I'd recommend that other people do is you run experiments, right. And so how can we avoid that initial banning like that was very important for us. If I could get four or five days on an account, I could make quite a bit of money. And so we started, you know, changing that size is we started limiting the amount of money we put on a single game, we started changing the, you know, the types of bets we place sometimes we do only parles sometimes we would only bet certain angles. And we noticed some interesting things, right. So think about the trader sitting in the seat, you know, one of the more interesting things that we found is that whoever was sitting in that seat on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at this particular book was a little bit of a knit and really didn't like it when we got a decent amount, a decent amount of money down. And I who worked on Tuesdays and Fridays didn't care all that much, right. So now we learn that we could hammer them on Tuesdays and Fridays and we'd have to be a little more careful on, you know, Mondays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, but we were able to move back to using things like that, able to move back to only getting caught up in those, you know, giant sweeps that happened that really get anyone. And there were some other things that gave us a advantage that came out of that process, right. So our process was, you know, today we're going to bet in a certain way we're going to only bet at a certain time we're going to, you know, use cashouts or not use cashouts we're going to, you know, one of the things you had to do and my example was, you had to, you know, time your bets. And so we would, we would time them different ways we don't need play them if we could get them at a certain time. And, you know, they're keeping notes, keeping records, you know, testing hypotheses on what's going to get us limited. Like we were able to get to a point where we could avoid that initial trader limit, which allowed us to stay alive much longer. This is for everyone listening or watching this is just like a commitment to the craft, right. It's like wanting your edge to survive as long as possible and knowing, you know, or trying to figure out how to go about that. One thing that really, really triggers myself and Johnny, maybe I'm speaking on his behalf, but definitely triggers me is people who think that sports betting is just as easy as being able to like, you know, I figured something out, I can bet it, I can bet this forever. And that's it. And they don't recognize the amount of effort that it takes on a daily basis to keep your edge, to have that edge sustaining over time, but also to like just prolong it in some cases. And I really appreciate your breakdown of that because it's just a great example of putting in a little bit of extra effort to prolong that type of edge and keep it going. And there's not a lot of people out there that are willing to put in that type of effort. So this is just a props to you as another better to be able to go down that path and say, like this is, I want to make more money. more money and this is a way that I can test. that out and do it. It's great. Yeah, and the commitment to the craft is huge because as you mentioned, it's not easy to go through that, like what you did, just from hearing it from you. It's not easy to basically be like, "Oh, I got to test out all these ones this guy trading. When are they accepting a bet, noting it, detailing it, things like that?" It really is. It's cool. It's cool that you've done this and not only have had success with it, but even on a part-time basis. It's more of a hobby that you're trying to turn into an aspiring, as you mentioned, aspiring pro-batter. Congrats. This has been great and pretty eye-opening for a lot of people, I'm sure, because as Rob mentioned, it's not easy to do, but if you can achieve it, there is money to be made. Outside of the money, there's a lot of success to be had. I'm sure it felt great to discover these edges or hit a big thing that comes in into the account and you're like, "Wow, I just brought my bankroll from 25,000 to 100,000." That 4x is awesome. The next 4x is even better and you keep growing and growing. I'd love to hear it. Before we get into our final question, you've gone from in a very short span from being pure recreational, better, tailing other people's plays on Twitter to what I would call a semi-professional at this point. What do you think is the best piece of advice you could give to someone trying to go from that level, from recreational to semi-pro? Sure. I think the thing I would tell them is grind and be curious. Don't try to hit a home run right away. Grind promos. Build your bankroll one step at a time. For me, I discovered the angle that ended up really helping me, really making me a bunch of money while grinding out, arming, free bets. The second part of that, which is important, is the be curious part. For me, it was I stumbled onto something where I looked at it and said, "That seems wrong. I don't understand why." The biggest mistake that you can make and I think a lot of people make is they assume I don't understand that. I must be the one who's wrong. When you encounter that, do the work to prove to yourself that you were wrong and now you've learned something or you'll find that the book is wrong. That's where you make a lot of money and that happens often. Yes. I think one of the biggest common flaws or misconceptions in the space is that people give the books too much credit a lot of times. There are these advantages you can take advantage of. What are you working on for the upcoming season? Anything interesting to share in terms of not only role modeling, but other edges you're exploring, anything like that? For me, so this college basketball model has done really well. I think I've benefited from some positive variance, but I'm definitely on to something. My current plan is to spend the entire offseason working only on that. I've got a list of 100 things that I think could impact that model. My goal is to come back next college basketball season and be ready to bet closes and be ready to push back on the market. That's my goal for the offseason. I think I'm going to spend most of my time doing that. I will also try to find some small angle probably in baseball, probably steam chasing, probably combined steam chasing with something else so I can continue to build my bankroll there and be aware of changes. Based on the advice I just gave, I need to keep grinding too, so that hopefully I'll stumble onto something else that will be profitable. Yeah, I'll tell you straight up, in my experience as well, the more you really look, the more you'll find, and it's not about, like you said, it's not about hitting every single one. You're going to explore, at least in my experience, I've scored 25 things. Nothing came of any of them and probably lost money on all of those things. And then the 26 one makes up for all of that plus more and it ends up being worth it. So it's fun, but as you mentioned, is it grand? Like it is what it is. All right, our closing question, it's what we asked all our guests. I know you listen to every episode. I will just say it out there for those who haven't listened before. But if you could go back to back five years and talk to a previous version of yourself, what piece of advice would you give to your old self? Okay, so I've listened to every answer to this question so far. And I agree with some of them more than than mine, but I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you two of mine that I think haven't been said yet. So one is, can apply to betting, but it can apply to everything else as well. So my wife and I have started doing something recently that's been really beneficial that I wish I would have known about a while back. So we're all busy people, right? One of the most common things that I think everyone says is I don't have time for that, right? Like I should go to the gym today, but I don't have time for that. And we got some advice, and I don't think this was novel advice from whoever gave it to us, but to basically remove that statement from the things that you say and instead replace it with, that's not a priority for me, right? Because it really makes you challenge, like, do you have time for that? Should you be making time for that? So like, I'm not going to go to the gym today because it's not a priority for me. It's like, is that correct? Like, no, my health and fitness actually is a priority. Like I need to change something else. Right. And like this, you know, this has helped me immensely when it comes to like doing things with my kids, but also like investing in my betting models. Like, you know, I need to, you know, rebuild some major portion of my back testing engine. It's like, now that is a priority. Like I don't have time for it, but like I need to do that because it's going to pay off a lot in the long run. So that's one of them. The other one gets back into my the crappy basketball model that I built. And it's, it's something that really crystallized for me at the end of that, which is when you're factoring in how big of an edge you have or how worthwhile an edge is, you need to consider how you will know when you've lost that edge. Right. So if you look at two different ways to bet college basketball, let's say one is trend based, right? One says that in the NIT, the overs have hit at 55% for the last 600 games bet the overs. Or and then, you know, you have a some model that says, this line is 140 and I make the game 145. So I'm betting the over. Like, let's say, you know, you've done those for a little while, you've made some money and all of a sudden the market adjusts. Right. What are you going to see? Well, in the first case, you're not going to see anything. You're just betting the overs. And because variance exists, you're going to bet that over for quite a while before you realize you've completely lost your edge. Right. Now, it's still possible to get into a situation like that when you have a number that you produce, but it's much rarer. You know, ideally what you'd see is instead of the number, the game being lined 135, like it's now lined 139 and you're like, okay, I don't, I don't have an edge. I'm not going to bet that. And so, you know, the advice I would give to myself is is on, you know, factor in what it's going to take to stop betting something. And make sure you're not just going to blow through all the profits you've made realizing that you don't have edge here anymore. Right. Great pieces of advice altogether. The first one really hits home with me because I say that maybe more regularly than anyone else. I have no time for that. I don't have time. I wish I had more time. So that's actually a piece of advice that I will take in my personal life. You can follow him on bet stamp head to the marketplace. I would highly suggest you click the follow button. I'm not telling you necessarily to tail anyone's place. You can do your own due diligence on bet stamp, but he's worked up a pretty good record over 800 or so college basketball totals. It's pretty impressive with great closing line value. You do with that what you want to do with it, but you heard a story here from recreational better to semi pro. And then maybe I mean, you're an aspiring pro. You might get there sooner rather than later based off the conversation we've had. I can honestly cannot believe the amount of progress you've made and the understanding you have of the space over just a couple years. So credit to you. It was a pleasure talking to you and we wish you all the best in the future. Thanks guys. The Luxus as well. This has been awesome. I really appreciate it.