Risk Takers Podcast - Ep 125 - Maple

Podcast Release Date: 2025-10-15
Podcast Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ELx8U79i6IBPUbgQE5qfU
hagrinBPR Review Date: 2025-11-24
Rating: 8.50

Notes:
Ep 125 - Maple

Bias - No direct exposure outside of Shipper's recommendation so I have been gearing up to do a full review of this one for quite a while. @maple420069 on X/Twitter.

2:00 - Intro: Used to hustle bank account bonuses which is awesome. Sports betting legalization happens, risk free bets/bonus churning and then the accounts sat for a while. First edge was some top down Pinny vs market stuff. Later talks about just slowly building up this bankroll to a number that starts to get meaningful and then starts digging into opportunities (talks about $20k deposit into Barstool). 1st big edge was 1st basket parlays on DraftKing + 1st player to score (Jae Crowder shoutout) . Then starts adding legs to these parlays, wins a few of these and opened his eyes to the potential for success. GP makes the point that many people would stay with the 16:1 edge, but pushing the edge / idea and that approach to maximizing is the thing that separates the elite earners vs other APs.

16:55 - SGP Engines: Makes a very interesting point that I have talked about in other reviews where SGP pricing/trading engines are discussed that after grabbing a dataset like 1st basket, he could "look at any SGP trading engine and I could find you an edge in 5 seconds just with an intuitive understanding this is probably good" and then go and reference the dataset. GP then talks about how sharp bettors were saying SGPs were too juiced to be beaten and that must have just been in a different corner of GT than I exist because that wasn't ever a thing for me (in fact, well before SGPs, cville would constantly correct fake #shraps that would just say blanket parlays were bad. Think the issue here is take care in curating the people you follow/read). 19:00 - mentions how PrizePicks et al. probably ruined a bunch of the edges he utilized which is a great and fascinating point about how those sites affected the market at large.

21:00 - Shipper / PointsBet Story - "The overall opinion of PointsBet that I honestly agree with it is that PointsBet was not a very competent sports betting operation". Funny, heard Shipper talk about this story on a Circles Off podcast and he goes "that ahole is talking about me!" lol and then Shipper goes on to say "yeah I do a lot of same game basketball stuff" and Maple says "this guy just stole my stuff and he took the information and moved on" lol (very funny story). Also mentions how Captain Jack also was all angsty at Shipper for some personal information getting out. Strategy with PointsBet was to do everything "in broad daylight" since the plays didn't appear to be an edge without multiple levels of inspection (the best types of plays obviously) and be as aggressive as possible. Worked the VIP reps super hard and tells some awesome stories here. Fascinating approach where he used different approaches / gears - sometimes being his best friend and then other times giving the rep a hard time about low limits on trader reviewed points boosted parlays. This approach worked to get some parlays re-submitted at the amount he wanted originally.

30:35 - Blackjack Story: Halftime of a 76ers game, courtside with the VIP host, decides to play $1 million in front of the host. "PointsBet is giving me only these points boost tokens, DraftKings is giving me all these blackjack bonuses, why don't you guys give me blackjack bonuses?" Had a DraftKings offer he had to play through, does it in front of the VIP rep, attempted to try and get casino offers. GP recounts that every time they almost cut Maple off the VIP rep would come "bursting into the room no you can't do it!" (lol, hilarious). 35:50 - Maple mentions that all of this is "very much a moment in time" that came together very well, it's a great point, but these stories / lessons are important for when similar, new opportunities in other industries pop up.

37:10 - Mentions that he believes that most of his success happens when a sportsbook is just opening up or like when an odds provider changes. This is a great point too and right in my wheelhouse - new implementations almost always will present with attack vectors that new entities or changes in operations pay for in their own version of "education costs". Example he gives is the 1st basket stuff happened around the DK change from Kambi to SBTech. "Their early focus when first opening up" will be things other than limiting, but other areas of the operation. 39:45 - "That's the only way you're going to have significant upside is you have to get into something before everyone else". (Always goes back to "Be first, be smarter or cheat and its hell of a lot easier to be first than to be smarter"). Mentions doesn't really take advantage of the Fliff opportunity, but mentions that despite his early impressions there were probably missed opportunities.

42:10 - MMA SGP: Mentions another edge is "finding markets that only one sportsbook offers" and that's what the UFC SGPs were. (Great advice). There were some extremely obscure props i.e. winner of knockdowns, etc. Mentions the general inaccessibility of MMA data so he cobbled together what data he could. (Note - a theme I am sensing here is that Maple is very good at finding something to attack and then getting the requisite data to try and quantify the approach. Getting data, cleaning data, understanding the dataset, all very important skills, sounds like he's right there with some other known rarer dataset collectors). But does also mention it was a little of a "vibes based market" for him. DraftKing then tries to put in some "countermeasures" after looking at some correlations and they adjusted the positive correlation pricing, but didn't adjust the negative correlation pricing! (Yet another tool for the toolbox, this is already the best pod I have reviewed, there's still an hour left). Tells story of a 4 leg, 1.8 mill parlay and it loses on the last leg and then DK just ratcheted up the vig after the "near miss". Gets asked about multi-event correlations and answers with "vibes with math in the background with reference points". Kept his SGPs to 2,3 and 4 legs.

52:20 - Klay Thompson Cash Out Story: Manipulated the NBA Finals MVP which is the grand finale of the PointsBet story. Bets $3333.69 that Klay Thompson would be the MVP. VIP rep LOVES this "you're on the PointsBet Instagram", Darren Rovell tweets it out. Day before the Finals, he finally gets limited at PointsBet. Finds out that he's limited by placing a bet, getting limited to $50 and then they moved the line aggressively so he decided to take advantage of this mechanic. Klay had gone from 100-1 to 12-1. Sent $1k Klay bets at 12-1, moved it to 10-1, does it again and again 8-1 to 6-1 and these bets move his Cash Out up ~$15k. States Shipper says he was off that day. Epic story.

59:00 - Exchanges: Has transitioned to exchanges because SGPs have limited upside vs the prior moment in time. Theory going in was that "if you have a play to fill and there's some minor $x limit at a recreational book, then if you post an arbitrage for a few cents on an exchange you're likely to get fully filled. Does think exchanges are the future overall and think you either win on the exchanges "or that's probably it for your betting career". "You're not going to vibe your way through an exchange and make massive profits out of it." 1:08:00 - Doing mainly origination on the exchanges now. "Theory going in if I can make this ROI on domestic books then cut the ROI 1-2% and that should be my exchange ROI and that's not the case". 1:09:45 - Mentions Captain Jack saying there's no sharps just posting huge amounts of their side letting that be an indicator and Maple is like #actually that's exactly what I have been doing. Mentions he's not a fan of paper trading (I agree here, this was something Mike Komaransky @ Cumberland swayed me on). 1:13:15 - Mentions you should be thinking about what tools are out there if you're posting liquidity because (he mentions earlier) those tools can be gamed (plus more directly, you want to understand where and how the flow comes). A lot of discussion on the tools and the Captain Jack tweet thread which you can find here https://x.com/capjack2000/status/1978152646075625809 . There's a bunch of exchange and liquidity talk that's great for the person who has no financial markets / market making exposure, but that's not me so my note taking sort of fell off during this section. 1:24:30 - some talk about front/top of book "penny jumping" and market making execution with these types of bids/asks (not sure I agree with the blanket conclusion around the sharpness of the entity willing to "queue jump", there's an entire HFT algo industry built around these concepts, but now we're picking nits, this is all great discussion). GP mentions increasing the tick size, I mean this is all covered ground in the financial industry with things like the NMS, Sub-Penny Rule, NBBO, etc. and we're just rehashing financial trading market structure stuff now.

1:34:00 - Some of the tax law changes / tax discussion. 1:38:45 - Paige Spiranac PointsBet custom video from his VIP host lol. "My wife was not happy" (lol). 1:44:00 - Hot Take: "if you win at NFL sides, I would not call you the end boss of sports betting". "If you're firing a million dollars at NFL sides, go do something else if your upside is like +2.7 units on a 5% edge on 3 games a week". Coming in hot! 1:55:30 - Used to think originating was the most important skill, but trading is definitely the thing he thinks is more important now.

Concluding note - you listen to enough of these and you have some formal training and you can get a pretty good feel for the speech patterns and thought processes of a person. Despite the crazy stories, you can feel the humility in the retelling. You can feel, even with all of the great content that was discussed, there's many, many more layers to Maple. Now I get why Shipper recommended this pod so highly, he was definitely right. The other point I just want to document is that GP and the Risk Takers podcast has really pivoted in a great direction. I wasn't a fan of the content there during the advent of the Spaces era, but the current format and approach to creating this type of content is such a boon to the ecosystem.