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A FREE and Pay service dedicated to superior sports handicapping Everyone has heard a promise that sounds something like this... "pay us only after you win.."... find out a little more about this scam. This is a major scam and is major league unethical.All the picks on this page are monitored by 'The Arena', 'Sportpix' and 'The Big Guy' monitoring services.Subscribe to the PREMIUM picks now!!
Who am I ?I receive an email a week asking me if I am actually a professor. The answer is YES. I am a college professor in Northern California. I received my Ph.D in Management and Human Resources Management. |
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An essay on contemporary sports handicapping: How to detect a scam in sports handicappingOne of the problems with scams is that they often feed upon one major flaw of sports betters. This flaw is that many betters are simply purchasing an excuse.. not good picks. It feels bad to make your own picks and lose. It doesn't feel as bad if you lose .. but your picks came from someone else. In psychology they have a concept called the "fundamental attribution error" referring to the fact that everyone wants to take credit for successes and blame others for failures. Many handicappers, without knowing it, are simply selling a convenient excuse for individuals. The result of this is that many handicappers can be good, they can be bad, they can treat the customer well or poorly, and the customer keeps coming back. This is always strange. However, it does make sense, given the nature of many betters. The large majority of sports handicappers are not qualified to do this work. The reason many of them entered the field is that it is an easy field to scam other individuals. It is easy to 'shirk' in this business. In economics 'shirking' refers to the tendency of people to cheat when their behaviors are not observed or monitored. Many handicappers cheat because there is no way to truly observe their performances. Most of the 900-number handicappers claim 75% against the spread.. but absolutely not one single one will ever produce the evidence for this. Another subset of handicappers enter the field because they feel they are good at sports. They usually won their company pools, made some money in Vegas .. or have participated in sports professionally themselves. The problem there involves the problem with handicapping from the trees vs. handicapping from the forest. Many 'specialists' will handicap from the trees, meanng they know so much about a particular sport that they cannot see the big picture. They may adore a particular pitcher or quarterback so much that they cannot see when another team will win. The evidence behind the problems with handicapping from the 'trees' is shown by the performances of ex-professional athletes who turn to handicapping. The large majority of them are not beating the spread. They simply do not have the ability to weed out the unnecessary information and focus on the necessary info needed to handicap correctly. Think about this anology for a moment: do you feel you can tell alot about a person from a job interview? If you do.. then you will not do well handicapping. Most individuals enter looking only for their own 'pet' features of a job applicant.. ignoring the 100s of other important variables. Many sports handicappers fall into this trap. They may simply look at the pitcher performances, or the recent team trends. There are thousands of variables that can potentially influence the outcome of sporting events. You need to consider as many as possible. Most handicappers are not capable of doing this.. and, thus, their advice is terribly flawed. The large majority of handicappers refuse to be monitored. This is unfortunate. There are some absolute truths you must know when you hear someone make a claim about their handicapping performance. It is nearly mathematically impossible to go 75% against the spread over an entire season on any sport. If any handicapper claims this, he or she is absolutely lying. Almost all of the 900 handicappers I have seen make this claim. The optimal performance ATS is 66%. There has never been a handicapper who has beaten 66% against the spread on any sport. 66% is considered a mathematical ceiling on performance. If anyone ever claims they can beat 66% over an entire season... avoid them. 55% ATS is considered pretty good. 58-60% ATS is considered rather excellent. 61-64% ATS is absolutely extraordinary. Anything above that is criminal! The easiest scam of all is the split/half scam. Also known as the 50/50 scam. A handicapper purchases 1000 names on a mailing list. They have a game, lets say, Bulls vs. Lakers. 500 of the people receive a call from the handicapper telling them to play the Bulls and that this pick is completely free. 500 receive a call telling them to play the Lakers..with the same message. At the end of that day, there are 500 happy individuals. The handicapper now finds a new game and splits the picks for the 500 happy individuals. At the end of the second day there are 250 individuals who have received two days of winning picks at absolutely no cost. The handicapper then tells that group "look here.. I have been winning like this all my life and you can too. From now on I will have to charge you for these picks.. say $25 a day. Look at how I have done for you so far.. 100% ATS... not bad huh?" From this 250.. a small but significant amount will purchase the picks... and will lose money. The handicapper can make huge sums of money from this scam. The best way to avoid this is to avoid unsolicited advice. If you ever receive a call.. do not listen to it. There is nothing free in the handicapping business. There is no insider information. There is no once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you must take today. Don't fall for this scam. Another scam is the 'pay after you win' scam. This involves a handicapper telling you that you don't have to pay a single penny for his picks until his picks win. If the pick loses.. don't send him money.... if the pick wins.. send him money. Sounds simple? It is, but this is a sophisticated scam. With this scam the handicapper has no true incentive to give you good picks. He will make a significant amount of money flipping a coin.. as he knows you will then be sending him money 50% of the time. This is good income for just flipping a coin. Logically the handicapper is forgetting something. If you pay him for the winning pick.. the handicapper should also pay you for a losing pick. Without this, the handicapper has no incentive to be good. The "game of the _____" scam is quite interesting. You may have heard of the claims "This is the ACC pick of the month" or "the PacTen blowout of the week" or the "BigTen upset of the year". You can create an infinite number of special picks using this logic. I tracked one handicapper's mailing that had listed over 130 of these claims. How can there be so many 'special' picks. Also, given the mailing was created months prior to the season beginning, how could this handicapper know that the 'ACC game of the year' would be on the 8th week of the college football season? hmm. Never, ever, ever pay for a pick that is part of an 800 or 900 number from a mailing that is sent to you in the mail where the claim is "game of the ___". This is a false claim designed to generate some excitement. I have also seen one handicapper claim that this pick was the pick of the year. He did this claim over 50 times just in one season. His response to my challenge was that each new game was the 'pick of the year', better than all his previous ones! hmmmm If a handicapper does not back his pick with evidence to support it.. avoid it. I do this all the time with telephone handicappers. They do not back up their picks with any evidence. They get annoyed from my calls but these calls are necessary. Most handicappers will simply look on the board and pick based on about 20 seconds of analysis. No joke. A good challenge is to simply ask him what are the 10 most important variables they use to make picks. If they cannot list these 10 instantly.. they are likely using the '20 second' technique. Any handicapper who claims to have inside information is lying. There is no such information in professional sports. This claim is made to make it easier for you to purchase a very expensive pick (e.g. $50 one day). This is a complete lie and is very common in sports handicapping. The word 'guarantee' is misused in sports handicapping. Almost all telephone handicappers claim that their picks are 100% guaranteed. This is not what is sounds like. You will never receive your money back with bad pick. However, the handicapper will likely give you the next day's picks free with a losing day. If a handicapper even claims that the picks for the weekend are 100% guaranteed .. and doesn't offer something else.. this individuals is running a scam. The scam will likely involve the 'money chasing after money' request. This request involves the handicapper saying that in order for you to truly win big.. you must send him additional money .. sometimes up to $5000 or more. You send the money and you get even more losing picks. It is quite amazing. Absolutely every single handicapper has losing days, weeks and months. It is simply mathematically guaranteed that this will happen to every single handicapper. If a handicapper claims that he has never had a losing day or week.. he is lying. This is impossible. I have seen several handicappers charge at around $3500 for picks last football season. This is amazing. I enjoy going through their sales pitch to see if they are honest. Pretending to be a customer I claimed that I make about $20-50 dollar wagers. They said that their $3500 plan would be perfect for me. I challenged them on this and they said I was wrong. If I don't purchase anything and flip a coin for all my picks I would hit 50% of the time with a resulting loss of about 9.1% over the long run...depending on how I make the wager. The handicapper could only claim about 60% ATS. In order to make his picks worth the money I would have to wager enough money so that the profit difference between his 60% and my 50% would exceed $3500.... at $20-50 a wager.. it will not cover it. Thus, I would actually have less money at the end of the season purchasing his 60% ATS picks at $3500 than just flipping a coin! Go figure. Avoid handicappers who avoids being monitored. There are several honest monitoring agencies on the internet. If a handicappers says that the monitoring is a scam.. he is a scam. I have sent all my picks to monitoring agencies since the very beginning and they have proven to be fully accurate and honest. A handicapper who doesn't want to be monitored is embarassed about his performance. If they are truly as good as they claim, they will enjoy monitoring.
Questions? email at professor@hrmgt.com
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