Oct

25

Sports Betting Apps Are Even More Toxic Than You Thought
Pro bettors have taken to disguising themselves as gambling addicts so sportsbooks keep the free money flowing.

Among the main challenges for a pro bettor is finding places that will take your money. If you show signs of being good, or even just highly methodical, most sportsbooks will drastically limit how much you can wager. But there are ways around this. Sharps, as pros are known, often employ surrogates to place bets on their behalf in exchange for a share of the winnings. Or they “prime” their accounts by making wagers that a casual bettor, or square, typically would.

“If I open an account in New York, maybe for a few weeks I just bet the Yankees right before the game begins,” says Rufus Peabody, a pro bettor and co-host of the Bet the Process podcast. If this trick works, the book sees these normie, hometown bets as a sign that it’s safe to raise his limits. That gives Peabody a bigger purse to work with when he switches to making bets he thinks will pay out—and that the book will likely recognize as coming from a skilled player. The idea is to win as much as you can before the house catches on.

Pro bettors have recently added a wrinkle to their priming routines: They’re acting like gambling addicts. Isaac Rose-Berman recently described the practice in his How Gambling Works newsletter:

“One pro bettor I know set up a bot which logs in to his accounts every day between 2 and 4 a.m., to make it seem like he can’t get through the night without checking his bets. Another withdraws money and then reverses those withdrawals so it looks like he can’t resist gambling.”


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