Sportsbooks use pricing, promotions, and product design to encourage costly decisions. Learn the most common tricks and how to recognize them before you bet.
Back to VideosSports books exist to take your money, but the methods of how they go about doing that range from simple math to devious psychological tricks. I'm about to peel back the curtain and show you the ways that some sports books entice you to make some really bad bets. Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide software tools and education to help people find and place sharper bets. I've been a professional gambler for over 20 years, and I've seen all the ways sports books and casinos get you to gamble more. We all know that in any gambling game, the odds are always in the favor of the house.
Sports books and casinos invite you to come and take your shot at them, but they know they've got the best of it against most customers. However, you might not realize that when it comes to enticing you to gamble, there's a spectrum of methods a sports book might use. Let's start with the methods I'd consider to be on the fair end of the spectrum, and then we'll get into some of the more manipulative methods.
The fairest and most transparent way that sports books make money is the vig. The VIG allows the sportsbook to offer odds on either side of a wager and theoretically maintain a profitable expectation for their sportsbook operation. The VIG is a cushion for the sports book. The more they short the payout relative to the odds, the more house edge they bake into the wager and the bigger their cushion. The more house edge, the more certain a sports book will profit and the bigger the profits. The house edge in sports betting varies based on the type of bet offered. By rule of thumb, the more possible outcomes in a bet, the higher the house edge.
Betting on who will win an NFL game, well, that's roughly 4 1.5% house edge. However, a three-way soccer market with the option of the draw might be 6 to 8% of a house edge. And a futures market on who will win the next Super Bowl, well, that could be 15 to 20% house edge. Now, by comparison, a slot machine has about a 10 to 15% house edge. A roulette wheel about 5%. And a blackjack table, well, that's about 1%. Oh, and bets where you can only bet on one side of an outcome, like bets offered on a pitcher to have more than x number of strikeouts, but you can't bet less than.
Well, those often have the worst house edge of all because they don't have to worry about offering a fair price on the other side of that wager. Now, even if you're disciplined enough to stay away from bets that have a high house edge, sports books have the very fair advantage of having a bigger bankroll than you.
They can withstand the swings with almost no risk of ruin. They also employ smart people whose job it is to adjust markets based on news, injury information, and betting action from sharper bettors around the world. The deck is really stacked against you if you were trying to beat a sports book based on your wits alone. However, all of this, the odds in their favor, the infinite bankroll, the sharp information dictating their lines, doesn't seem to be enough for some sports books. They employ other tricks to entice you to make bad bets. And I'm going to clue you in on some of their most effective methods.
Now, sports books look to hook you in by attempting to sell you an unattainable dream.
Sports betting can change your life, or lucky seat strikes again. You're not living your best life unless you've got skin in the game. Imagine high-fiving friends while looking at your phone because you just can't stop winning. They like to use a mix of FOMO and zeitgeist. Now, FOMO is the fear of missing out. And the thing you're missing out on, well, that's the zeitgeist of sports betting. Zeitgeist is a fancy word for cultural phenomenon, the experience of it all, the vibe. They want to make you feel as if you're missing out because everyone else is betting and winning.
Look, scroll social media and all you'll see from sportsbook accounts is their desperate attempts to get you to interact with their social media and winning bets. You're going to see plenty of winning bets. And not just any type of bet, but ridiculous parlays. Parlays that no doubt join together multiple bets with a high house edge, thus stacking that house edge to create an even worse wager. Everyone loves to hear about a lottery winner, and these long shots are no doubt a lottery ticket.
However, they're a lottery ticket that pays out nowhere near the actual odds of that parlay winning.
They never mentioned that the better hit a ridiculous parlay and was paid 50 cents on the dollar relative to what the actual odds were or that there was a tax withholding of 29% because the wager exceeded the W2G threshold of 300 to1 odds. Sports books love to normalize the thought that longshot parlays aren't really long at all. They like to pretend that they win all the time. A parlay bet itself isn't deceptive. It's just math and stacking the house edge. What is deceptive is thinking that they're easy to hit. Much like a casino showing you a jackpot winner with a giant check, they want you to think it could happen to you. Want to change your life?
Fire on a parlay. Find yourself in a hole? Well, all you need is a parlay hit to get you back to even. While I did just say that parlay bets aren't deceptive, there is one thing that can definitely be deceptive, and that's the same game parlay.
Now, same game parlays are big money makers for sports books. In fact, most sports books make more money from same game parlays than from all other wager types combined. What makes them so lucrative is the sports book can account for the correlation between parlayed events and then short the payout egregiously. And most bettors are none the wiser. The bettor is too drawn to the prospect of a big payout to even care. In general, if you're betting into an SGP with no way to properly price out the correlation, it's likely you're betting into at least a 20% house edge or more. With edges that big, sports books rake in the money on these type of bets.
In fact, SGP odds are typically so bad that even when a sports book offers a bet boost, where they inflate the payout of a certain parlay as a promotion for the better, they're still heavily negative expected value. Next time you see a boosted payout on an SGP, try to shop around to other books. You'll probably find another sports book offering the same bet for better odds and not even boosted. And remember that better price still represents a massive house edge for that sports book. Have you noticed how sports book social media accounts love pushing who will score the first touchdown or who will score the first basket?
Oh, and the ever popular Nerfy, which stands for no run first inning, which is a bet that the first inning of a baseball game will be scoreless. The reason they hype these type of bets is because they are decided relatively quickly. Oh, and they especially love to show off people who hit parlays with these type of bets. It's all part of their manipulative plan. You see, in most cases, the bet is resolved within 15 minutes of the game starting. And now they have a bettor who either has money burning a hole in their account, or more likely, a bettor looking to chase their losses by betting another bet in play on the game that they're already watching.
They know that a bettor who has made one bet on a game is more likely to make subsequent bets on the same contest. The sports book has an edge on every bet and getting you to increase the frequency of your betting and giving you a reason to make your next bet. That's all part of their plan. At most sports books, the 80/20 rule is definitely in effect.
80% of the profits come from 20% of the players. So, the sports book utilizes VIP hosts to identify bad bettors and encourage them to bet more. The number one sharpest thing you can do as a bettor is to line shop. And VIP hosts look to buy the loyalty of bettors so that they don't line shop. They just bet with their gut at whatever price their favorite sports book app offers them. And if a sports book can identify someone who is bad at betting, they can probably identify a player who is good at sports betting as well. And that's just what they do.
They offer perks and bonuses to the bad better and then they quickly limit or cut off the good better. In fact, they limit or cut off bettors who aren't even winning. They're just not losing fast enough. When it comes to shady methods of making money, this is the shadiest in my book. By focusing just on the really bad bettors, they increase their revenue margins, which makes the quarterly numbers look much better to investors. Unfortunately, this is predatory behavior. It's become known as ban or bankrupt. They'll ban the capable players who are often betting responsibly and smartly, and they'll seek to extract as much money as possible from the bettor who doesn't realize how bad they are at this.
And I fear we haven't even seen the worst of it yet. Regulated online casinos will eventually spread to more states and then these operators will take a doublefisted approach at getting you to bet more. Sports betting is really just a funnel trying to get you to end up in the online casino that's coming.
