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Take the Bookmaker Off Of This Year’s Christmas Gift List
Joe Duffy (www.godspicks.com)
Yes ’tis the season for giving, but why do you insist on helping your sports investment bookkeeper pay for that new Beamer every Christmas? Thanks to you he can buy one for his wife and girlfriend too. I hope you have a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that you have stuffed the stockings of every one of your BM’s loved ones.
I have warned you before, but just like the Surgeon General’s warning, it just seems to go unnoticed. No bookie feels like Mr. Scrooge around the holidays because his phone rings from people who celebrate the season of the sucker bet.
Are you dreaming of a green Christmas just like the one that we Wise Guys know?
\There are many “sucker bets” to which the gambler becomes an all too voluntary participant, but none costs him more money than the ultimate trap-betting on teams in “must win” games especially versus teams that have no chance at making the playoffs.
The reasons that this costs gamblers millions a year are more plentiful than spiked eggnog on Christmas Eve, but let us count ways. The first is the outlandish belief that the team that has no chance at making the postseason has nothing to play for. As if a job is not something to want to save. One must realize the ramifications for an also ran tanking their final games or game. It can be fatal from a high six figure a year minimum career standpoint.
Let us use the San Francisco 49ers for example. Take a look at their roster and tell me how many guys you would lay the vig and bet they definitely have a job sewn up for next year. Furthermore, even for those players that you can safely assume will be on some NFL roster, how many current starters will you wager are insured of starting the following year?
Chances are not many. Most of the players who allegedly have no motivation to perform are merely fighting for their football lives. Did you ever hear the saying that fear is the best motivator? Kurt Warner may be the all-time feel good story about going from stocking shelves to stuffing pictures of dead Presidents in his fat wallet. But players on teams with two or three wins entering the final week or two of the year have to do whatever it takes from being the nameless guy who takes the reverse rout of Warner.
Not to mention, the chance to play spoiler in many cases versus a hated division rival is well, at the risk of using a cliché, that team’s personal playoff game. No team worth its weight in steroids will shrug off the thought of another team celebrating clinching a playoff birth at their expense. Knocking a team out of playoff contention and solidifying one’s job for the following season acts as enough to debunk that twisted thinking, but not so fast there is further reason why betting on teams in must win games is twisted.
There is an unfounded assumption that teams perform better when they have to win. Teams that perform their best under pressure are not in must win games at the end of the year. They are instead trying to pick up their 13th win. If a team is 8-6 for example heading into the final two weeks, are the pro “must win” people telling me the six losses were in non-pressure games?
Plus gamblers must know one of the Golden Rule’s (hey what happened to my cheesy Christmas references?). The oddsmakers are one-step, no two-steps; no make that a country mile ahead of you.
The little known fact is that Roxy and the linesmakers also factor betting pattern when making the line. Believe me they are more than aware of the convoluted traps that most gamblers fall into. If you insist on going with the “must win” team, get ready to lay at least three extra points bare minimum.
In addition to the twisted accepted wisdom there are other factors that lead a gambler down the path to arrears. The public of course loves betting favorites to begin with. But they essentially feel safer betting quality teams and despise investing with pathetic teams almost as if there is a subconscious belief that the oddsmakers have no idea of the talent discrepancies when posting the line. Somehow the physiological pain of four losses out of ten when betting on the Cowboys is worse than the six losses out of ten betting on the Rams.
I do not know how many times I have heard people say to the effect, “I would rather lose betting on the (superior team) than lose by betting on the (horrible team)” not knowing of the actuality that they are espousing a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not that I should complain. As somebody who sells picks for a living I realize if it were not for people losing money on their own, I would not have many clients. But for those of you who do bet on your own put this article under the Christmas tree this year and your will have a Happy Betting New Year.
Duffy’s plays are part of the Dream Team at Godspicks.com. He is perhaps the most published and respected author on sports gambling theory and has been featured as a regular guest as the handicapping expert on the Rick Ballou Show on Sporting News Radio, the Meat and Potatoes gambling show and Grogan’s Fantasy Football show. His Wise Guy Plays available exclusively at www.godspicks.com are widely respected as the biggest play in the handicapping abyss.