Circles Off - Ep 187 - Diggs

Podcast Release Date: 2025-01-23
Podcast Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/32Y3PgS97bHiyqy4XmexBz
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2025-01-24
Rating:

Notes:
Bias - I talk to diggs on an almost daily basis during the football season. Outside of my small charting team, he's the only person I talk football with these days and the only person I share my fairs with. Diggs, while not exactly the nurturing figure Groovin was for me, is the second most important person in my gambling life and talking to him and having to bring my A game in every conversation as to not be ridiculed has improved my process and ROI significantly. I feel very grateful every time we speak on the NFL that he would even let his process be infected by my opinions/fairs. To say I am biased would be the understatement of understatements.

1:20 - Origins in Sports Betting - Didn’t come from a gambling family. Starts by running a football in 8th grade. Some online poker.

3:30 - Contrarianville aka #cville was just a group from a message board and this drove some early betting, just being contrarian. Bet.US would have lines 2 points shaded and starts middling. Starts looking for best line, SportsOptions (before its bought by DB).

6:30 - Rob asks about origination background and very interestingly a very heavy Survivor focused beginning (not sure I have heard this before in the many of these I have done). Pool was named “Win or Die” (gets raided by feds). Before sites that did FV and EV calcs for you, so diggs builds these himself.

8:30 “Basically what Fezzik still does is what we were doing 15 years ago” (lol).

9:40 - Early influences - “Chad Millman, Todd Fuhrman” (lol). Mentions Favre, Tucker Max message board (where #cville was born), mentions that Favre is “much better at processing bets than him” (which is insane to me having talked to diggs so much that there is even another level to this).

15:05 - Tout Disdain - “A predisposition to dishonesty” which comes from putting on the “best face” to sell something. A lot of it was RJ Bell & Pregame focused. Reminds people that RJ Bell was very prevalent before legalization so RJ being everywhere was a piece of it. Mentions the Ryan Goldberg Deadspin article on RJ/Pregame and the cville bet scraping of Pregame touts (if you haven’t read that new people, you should absolutely read it, it was the peak of cville and the several John Does listed in the court doc).

Rob brings up his Philly Godfather tracking (which I actually forgot about), diggs brings up how tracking touts back in 2015 was “a really, really big waste of time”. (So is review sports betting podcasts btw).

22:30 - “Is there an ethical way to sell picks?” - Yes, but 1) even if you assume the picks are good 2) diggs goes through the huge issues with a pick service + account longevity issues. “Discovery bias” - the idea that with enough pick trackers just variance dictates some tracked people will be winners, but as the sample increases you will likely see their true edge. “Edges change/erode”. They both mention how when producing content (like this pod) even small things that you may know, many people do not and so nothing is totally inconsequential to talk about.

26:30 - State of Sports Betting Content - diggs mentions something I was wondering if he would because I had picked up on this in our talks. diggs mainly focuses on non sports betting content and more sport specific content (film review, own charting), gives the example of Kyle Hamilton and the small positional change being talked about. (I actually enjoyed this answer because now I have a better understanding of what he might find valuable interacting with me, these data points that aren’t elsewhere and I should probably do less talking about information he’s likely to already come across).

30:10 - Good content, mentions the Wednesday football show Rob’s network does.

32:45 - diggs tells the very funny story how he had 3 diggs accounts that all looked the same so he could troll people who had just blocked him with a seemingly same account (which was a very funny bit).

33:15 - “Have you ever considered creating content?” - Not really. diggs smartly mentions the amount of prep that goes into pods and how carving out the required time.

35:50 - “Why the NFL?” - Partly how he started with Survivor. Mentions how golf is a really fun sport to bet (I don’t bet golf, seems like every sharp person I know bets golf). Enjoys the “obvious, discreet high leverage events” vs, as an example, NBA sweats. “You want to be directionally correct” which is where you start and you end up at “I want to know everything”. “I spend half my life reading injuries, it’s not binary what this is worth if this guy is in or out”. (I was wondering if he would talk about this. I have many thoughts about diggs’ behavior when it comes to interacting with injury tweets vs what Ferris wrote in his blog about diggs’ seemingly bizarre behavior. My input would be “his behavior is not bizarre at all, it’s actually highly rational and actually gives you a really good idea about the topics, at that moment, that matter to him”).

42:30 - NFL Betting Market - NFL market structures has changed a lot. 2018 - mainly betting offshore, waiting till Saturday night because that’s when Pinnacle would have a substantial limit bump. “Obviously, this would be a poor strategy now.” “5-10 years, earlier in the week, the lines were just wrong, but not the case now.” “These days - update stats on Sunday, now injuries/news is so massive during the week is so massive especially with the limits being higher”.

47:00 - Brings up the idea (good research project) that over the last say 15 years, doing a full study of how efficient the line was on Mon morning, Mon overnight, Tues morning, etc. and that, while only doing some of this work, the market has just drastically changed in recent years.

48:00 - 2021, saw huge line movement on Mon/Tues, then the Caesar tweets on huge bets early in the week and then the screen would move drastically and Caesars was taking “400k” (so diggs and I talked about this, you can still find the tweets it was usually 300k in size. Like diggs when I saw these tweets as they happened, I just assumed it was marketing and never married the screen move to the Caesars bets. Turns out, that was a big mistake as this was a very sharp group doing this). “Caesars were taking 400k, when Circa was taking 10k”. (Rob starts moving his lips on video, he would know / obviously knows the group, I have since found out who it was). diggs questions “should they have lit up the screen the way they did, should have they bet everywhere because it was easy to figure out?”. Great question, although I didn’t really figure this out in real-time. Rob does mention he knows who the origin of those bets were, diggs adds “It sort of became a tell”.

53:20 - Mentions how RAS would send out a warning “will be releasing stuff in 20 minutes” and that actually would cause the screen to move since people would frontrun the releases thinking RAS was about to blow away edges. “Was driving people to bet earlier, everyone cutting each other in line”.

55:45 - Mentions it quickly again here, but talks about you don’t really want to oppose these late movements especially near post for NFL (definitely something I should adhere to more, due to ego I will add as diggs sends messages to me “price still good?” rubbing it in that my opinion now has -CLV). “Sweating inactives on gameday used to be a much bigger deal than it is now, information more readily available”. Does bring up the 2023 Week 1 CLE/CIN late move where these huge groups just blow up the screen late and “this is tuff that’s going to win”.

1:00:30 - “How do you deal with a position that’s going against you?” - first, let me tell you from experience, this rarely happens to diggs. He will almost always give me his fairs/plays early in the week and it is absolutely extremely rare he gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I respect my friend’s privacy so I don’t track every fair he’s given me, but if it happened 5 times in a season that the line closed worse than what he got without him taking the other side due to injuries breaking a certain way, I’d be shocked. diggs - “A difference between a line drifting in one direction vs a line moving 3% all over right away”. “Looking at the subset of bets where the line does come back to my number late, that subset performs worse”.

1:02:30 - Doesn’t focus on the alternate line markets / props.

1:05:10 - Mahomes - Week 1 2018 vs LAC - look at the data and “it just didn’t look right”. Then Week 2, watching that 1H and then looking at their PPD (points per drive) just being so absurdly high with this “new” QB. Goes through the history of running Mahomes splits and the splits not looking human not going to take notes on this section, if you’ve followed diggs you’ve seen it all. The important part of this section is “is this random? is the data right or wrong for these crazy outliers?” and when you find these crazy outliers that “there is a different distribution in their games”. (Right there is the salient point, the effects on the distributions in his games. When everyone else is betting KC opponent +points and taking KC ML at post).

1:16:30 - Jayden Daniels - They mentioned the oddity of that Week 1 game (which is quite the rewatch looking at the QB run call gameplan in that Week 1 game). Brings up the rib injury midseason. This diverges into a “these guys play way more hurt than you know” and brings up a bunch of examples and this is an interesting topic that I have talked about some with him especially watching / charting plays and looking for undisclosed injuries. (Only thing missing from the Jayden story was that early season WAS 4th down stats, but diggs covered it all).

1:23:30 - Top QBs - Top 5 - 1) Mahomes, 2/3 Allen/Mahomes, 4) Burrow and the fun is who is 5th. “There's so much recency bias”. Then diggs goes on to say “but Jayden might be 5”. Herbert sniffing 5, Stroud sniffing that area. Underrated - Baker. (100% agreed and requires playing with his data a bunch if you don't weight his priors correctly you come up with bad numbers). Overrated - brings up Hurts. Mentions Purdy but doesn't know what the outside opinion is to know if he's under or over. Also brings up Jordan Love.

1:36:55 - Best & Worst Accts for Gambling Twitter - sprotzbettor, NFLPinnacleBeater. NPB - “have a take and believe it”. Mr Peanut Bettor. losing_bettor. “Fezzik should be on the good and the bad list, there’s no one like him”. Worst Accounts - Rex Beyers, Plus EV to which Rob just goes “... yup ...” before hedging like Rob does. Feinberg. ClevTA. Ben Fawkes. Joey Knish. Actually brings up the time DPP tweeted out that nonsense from Will Hill which was a blast from the past.

1:58:55 - Taylor Swift - The song “Welcome to New York”, 1989 is his favorite album. Listened to a lot of Swift during covid tweet reading. Tells the story of going to a concert, 1 solo floor seat since no one would go from the UConn game to the Swift concert, gets to the concert late which isn’t a thing going late to a Swift concert. This story is incredible in both the details and the fact he told this story out loud which culminates with one of the great lines of not only this podcast, but maybe any pod I have reviewed that I won’t spoil here (2:03:50, but go back a minute to get the full context). Wife - “You’re going to a Taylor Swift concert by yourself, be careful”.

2:09:45 - Most Memorable Bet - 2010 World Cup Draw/Draw bet 6:1 at Pinny, was 26:1 at sportsbetting.ag to win $10k.

2:12:45 - +/-EV - +EV, everyone should do Circa Survivor. -EV, buying or wearing uncomfortable tee shirts. Old charity / run tee shirts, just ditch them, tee shirt tech is better now. Rob’s +EV is putting dirty jeans in the freezer and he learned it from a FUBU salesman and I don’t even know what to say here.

2:21:00 - NormGambles shoutout, miss you bud.