Be Better Bettors - Tim Fraley

Podcast Release Date:
Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-02-21 16:08:53
Rating: 4.00

Notes:
There's a clicking sound (I think on Tim's end) in this audio that makes it a really rough listen especially with headphones. Mostly the reason for the lower grade, the audio drove me nuts. The clicking / popping just never stops.

The best part of this pod is Tim's honesty (not to say you should consider all things said as honest) which is commendable. There isn't anything actionable really in this pod, one interesting research topic I mention below. It's the story of an imperfect man finding a path that works for him currently. Think if you're looking for a more emotional story this is for you.

There's one interesting idea at around 38 minutes about top down betting and using the cash out feature if the number doesn't go where you think. I'd love to see a real backtest of that with some real data.

8:30 - Tim is running his own book in his teenage years and just laying the action off which is quite the racket to be running I know I wasn't that savvy betting in my teenage years. Book taking his action ends up hiring him on.

10:00 - Wife leaves and the loss changes his betting and blows up. I think this is one of the things that makes gambling so dangerous - forget the addiction part of it that's something else, but there's this other thing where traumatic life events mess with your mental balance. My bias is that 99.999% of my life I have been a robot, I've always been very different - the best way it's been described to me is "you're not a sociopath, but you have sociopathic tendencies, but you're Chaotic Good". But the .001% was when the thing that loved me the most died. I've dealt with loss before & it's never effected me ever (which is probably bad), but I've always just continued moving forward totally unaffected. This time I couldn't. Luckily for me, since I don't need to bet to live, I knew I was in a bad headspace and I just shut it all down for a few months. Pro bettors can't do this. My respect for the pro bettor, the guy who bets to eat and live, never grew larger than during those two months. I think, even though I don't consider myself a "pro", I think every pro should have a contingency plan in place for serious life events & a plan to follow if you need to step away. I never hear anyone really discuss this topic, but people probably should.

37:30 - Over 500 bets hitting over 57% which he does say is "insane", we'll have to check back in on this number in a few years. Then follows it up with if the bet had no value and the line didn't move his way, he would just use the Cash Out option. I've never run any type of backtest against something like this, interesting research project for a top down bettor.

38:40 - "I dont want to bet at Bookmaker. MGM is taking a couple hundred a pop."

42:50 - "If a game is 2 and it goes to 4 and I missed it you have to let that one go I don't care if it goes to 7 I won't bet it at 4 that's the discipline." Hmmm. I get the point, but said it weird.

46:25 - "I've bet 13,085 games and probably posted 12,900 of them in live time." I do wonder sometimes when I listen to these podcasts and people can't just clack off their betting metrics and what exactly is going on there so I found the precision here almost shocking you don't normally hear that. No idea if it's true, but it's rare to hear that type of precision.

50:15 - Update from 37:30, only 55% this year so at least the numbers are sounding more reasonable now.