Bet the Process - Isaac Rose-Berman

Podcast Release Date:
Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-09-14 07:19:12
Rating: 5.00

Notes:
5:25 - Background Info: Grew up in NY, still lives there now. Went to Stuyvesant, Brandeis. 9:00 - starts with what sounds like bonus churning & finding the most optimal way to grind out the free bonus money being offered. Sounds like this morphs into brick & mortar promo exploitation which then leads into his focus of tennis (which I am super excited to hear a young guy attacking the tennis market). 11:30 - Very typical story - finds a mispricing in a market happening at a specific book, loses a bunch of money at that book, figures out after examining what's going on that the offmarket book is actually the one correctly pricing this market and the others are wrong.

13:20 - Mentions that he thinks he's still more on the qualitative side. "Tennis is the easiest sport to model." (makes a good argument for tennis as being a sport new modelers should try modeling first due to the limited participants, pretty simple game states, etc.). Describes his process as basically something we have heard before - full event money line assumed efficient, assumed normal distribution for pricing most of these derivatives, look for the qualitatively modeled wrong derivatives. 17:30 - One interesting tennis surface specific point about evaluating the overall variance by surface (example he gives is grass vs clay). Think the overall point of this section is a point that we've heard before is that one approach is you're trying to find non-normal distribution events that are being priced like that they are. Very solid concept.

22:25: What's Next After Tennis: Mentions the vast majority of his betting is men's grand slams after saying "I don't have the motivation to try to do other things" just going to do the one sport, work with partners. "Doesn't think he has it in him" to scale up to say the Rufus scale. "That's why I'm doing more on the media side and the policy side." Jeff makes the point ~32 min in that the entire point of announcing it publicly like this was to get everyone pissed off at the regulators. Rufus theorizes that they thought maybe they calculated it would only piss off sharps or bettors they don't even want. Interesting theories. 34:30: Sportsbook Consolidation: High tax rates, compliance, licensing, etc. lots of the same stuff you hear on other betting business pods.

27:20 - State of Industry: "Very predatory industry." 39:30 - "I think I feel worse about myself if iGaming is legal." - Rufus, after Jeff asks what would be the impact of iGaming for sports bettors and IRB asks if Rufus would make more or less money in a legal iGaming environment. 40:30 - Jeff asks for 2 way lines on Pres market. There's a question at the end about "should we teach gambling in schools?" & Jeff says yes & lays out his case.

Conclusion: IRB smart young voice, more on the policy side than betting so not a ton here, but probably a name you should remember going forward here the next 5 years.