Circles Off - Ep 157 - Chris Dierkes

Podcast Release Date:
Podcast Link:
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-08-01 08:23:41
Rating: 6.50

Notes:
Bias - no real exposure to Chris, have seen some tweets, but pretty much going in totally fresh.

3:00 - Background: Gambling in-game in Runescape! (good times). Moves to poker, sports betting later. 25 years old.
4:55 - "I think a lot of sports bettors disagree with this, but I think poker and sports are extremely similar." Example given is that there's two ways to make a lot of money - either be the best originator or get into the softest games / attack the softest markets. Okay. 6:30 - strategy was to network with whales to get into good live games.
7:00 - Transition into Sports Betting: Found an ad for OddsJam & it worked for him. 9:00 - "It basically displays everything that's an arb to Pinny, but not everything that's an arb to Pinny is a good bet." 11:00 - Gives a good example of why top down worked/works for him with just a very basic query of W/L chasing steam vs a naive approach to open/close & while not an edge, opened his eyes to the approach of top down (good origin story on finding your own path esp several years ago before it got talked about on every pod around). Ends up losing all of his initial top down winnings on PointsBet and then gets limited for good measure. Regroups, gets PPH account(s) and away we go.

16:00 - Top Down vs Originating: Tried NFL originating, very difficult. "I'm not very sharp at one sport, but know a lot of sports well so went the get accounts route." 18:00 - Futures Betting: Tough w/small bankroll. Don't bet into PPHs. Rob follows up smartly with "how often are you finding 30+% edges?". Good example with Week 12 TEN o5.5 -110 season win total, Stroud gets hurt, future re-opened same price despite the Week 15 line moving a ton. 22:30 - Interesting tidbit about tax harvesting futures bets that you may want to listen to carefully since I am not a tax attorney.

Bunch of kiosk / correlated parlay bet stories which are fun to reminisce. But like after the 3rd one at 26:30, look it's very possible this is how it works for some people and sometimes you will just stumble into very large edges, but everything is discovered via happenstance and there's no real “process” discussed. I think I would sum up this section as "good stories, but you need to take a far more structured, targeted approach to exploiting attack surface area", but good stories that are instructive that these large edges do exist due to trying to deliver these products to market quickly. Rob gets to this point by stating "I took a day" / "brute forcing" these markets for correlations.

32:15 - Head trader at a small betting group now. Places bets / account survival, two other guys get the accounts. "I want to burn through accounts as fast as possible but while also maximizing their value", "time is very important". Longevity discussion - the best point here is the one on "classification". "Once you start betting sharp, don't stop." (smash and grab once you start). "Betting local teams."

50:40 - Future Goals: "As much money as possible as quickly as possible." Fair enough - super concise, concrete goal. Some discussion afterwards about focusing on +EV parlays and how bankroll size determines how much you can win, all down the fairway stuff.

54:00 - Some Stonks vs Sports Comparisons - Yeah, I don't know, going to forget I listened to this entire section. Limits on podcast length don't allow for substantive discussion on this issue so not a knock, you just can't cover the topic properly that quickly.

+EV - "Pay the bill right as you get your food when you go out" so you don't have to wait to get the bill. Never have done that before, interesting concept. The other one was good too - "tip the customer service" if you're a major kiosk player.

1:14:30 - "The amount of data I have stored for player props is probably more than any person." - Johnny. With Betstamp it really is very interesting that this statement is very likely correct despite my initial reaction of "no way", but he's probably right. We all might have pricing info (I've been slow to this, but getting there), but with Betstamp to see the player tracking data across all operators is actually very extensive and probably the most robust out there. I actually wonder how valuable this information is, it's likely very, very valuable.

Good pod - very similar to some other CO interview podcasts. I would summarize it as kiosks offer a very good attack surface, constantly probe for softness and attack this way with a properly capitalized bankroll that can maximize this approach.