Risk Takers Podcast - Spanky Ep 59

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hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-02-17 03:59:45
Rating: 8.00

Notes:
5:00 - Spanky says at start of football season, they have 2700-2800 accounts.

Sidenote - Made me think, one question I am not sure I have ever heard someone ask Spanky is - "What's your overhead?" for running an op this large. Could probably fish out some answers if kept to % terms. I also wonder if Spanky's ever identified some theoretical maximum of accounts his group could handle or if there's some law of diminishing returns w/either accts, books or groups/partnerships. I also wonder how hard it was scaling out to hire good, trustworthy people and exactly how easy/hard are these people to find.

11:00 - Oh no we're talking about the Kelly Criterion like it's a belief system again. Kelly is not a religion, it's not some shibboleth for bettors to mention.

20:00 - Description of top down strat. Slow books, price signaling exceptions at certain books, injury interpretation, handicapping other group's action, etc. Basically information interpretation. (Funny, I typed information interp as I'm taking notes and Spanky actually mentions the missing 4th piece in about 10 minutes).

27:00 - story about a sharp book in China that would get action but not move the market, but he would get the odds sent to him via Skype. Spanky says "once you make a bet that information is no longer yours". He's correct and it's an extremely smart way of looking at it. My bias is that this is exactly the problem that zero knowledge proofs can solve (but won't because incumbent interests won't ever allow it to, but wouldn't it be great if the major liquidity in the sports world did emply ZK proofs). Spanky states he gets a lot of hate for this information "theft" approach and as an originator I understand the reaction, but as a security conscious person I respect and appreciate Spanky's asymmetric information advantage. Should we build better systems with advanced cryptography to eliminate some of his asymmetric advantages? Absolutely. Will we & then gain the necessary liquidity & legal stronghold? Probably not in my lifetime.

30:15 - HBob wanted 50-100k to move his games.

47:45 - Concept of limit changes/history combined with line histories and interpreting that data. My bias is that this is one of the more important things in the space if you're developing any type of screen move based strats. Spanky doesn't reveal much here, but he's dead on about how valuable this information is. Spanky brings up how Grande used to define the market 11am EST and boy those were the days. For those unfamiliar, here's a blast from the past - https://www.sportsbookreview.com/forum/players-talk/918666-grande-sports-book-still-big-player-industry.html (I'll include a picture of Billy Walters' screen from the 60 Minutes interview where Grande was right there).

Sidenote - As someone who has always worked alone, this concept Spanky raises was the lightbulb moment for me personally (other than everything Groovin spent his time teaching me when I would ask questions). I approached this concept as a "Metadata Analysis" since, being a security pro, I had seen this exact approach unravel the identities of people in other areas. So, as someone who couldn't tell you who the biggest groups were influencing the market, I approached the concept as "identify Entities X, Y & Z through their effects on the market" and the lightbulb goes off once you marry certain markets with limit thresholds changing.

53:00 - Talks about how with quick outs hitting things like 1Hs first before full games because sportsbooks weren't moving as aggro on action vs 1Hs as opposed to moves when action vs full games. Very good topic to bring up.

Sidenote - funny, we just had a small convo about this in the new home for soccer bettors where someone asked me about betting LigaMX 1Hs, but before I could answer the user did his own research and was surprised by his findings.