Despite sports betting scandal on top of sports betting scandal dominating headlines — both inside and outside of the industry — we don’t need to pour one out for the professional sports bettor.
While no one is happy about the Terry Roziers and Chauncey Billupses of the world — and just wait until the presumed indictments come in the NCAA men’s basketball situation — for the pro sports bettor, at least according to those InGame spoke to, it’s really just another day at the office.
“Yes, of course, any type of market manipulation sucks because it’s something that shouldn’t be there,” Captain Jack Andrews, noted sports bettor and co-founder of Unabated, told me. “So you go, ‘Hey, this line is wrong, I’m going to bet the other side.’ And then you find out later it was due to some kind of manipulation like point shaving or insider information. But at the same time, I’m not going to change the way I approach sports betting because those are the exceptions, not the rule.”
In fact, Andrews says he is rarely, if ever, thinking about it.
“If I was always thinking, ‘Oh, that’s some kind of market manipulation,’ then I’d probably never be able to make a bet because I’d be paralyzed. Paralysis by analysis. I’d just constantly be thinking everything is rigged or a head fake,” he said. “I’m sure there are people who react that way, but sharp bettors are typically pretty good at critical thinking, and they don’t fall for the rare exceptions. So as a sharp, it really doesn’t change anything for me.”
Sometimes, if the stars align just right, bettors can even make a tidy profit off of someone else’s manipulation — even if they don’t realize what is going on.
College hoops
Take, for instance, the NCAA’s continuing investigation into at least 30 players they suspect may have been engaged in point shaving, per an ESPN report. (The situation is also being investigated by the feds and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. For what it’s worth, Andrews says this will end up being a “bigger deal than all this NBA stuff combined.”)
One of the schools under investigation is Temple.
This didn’t surprise anyone in the sports betting community, as social media site X exploded last spring with allegations of “something” going on in real time.
Temple lost that March 7 game to UAB by 28 points, and Andrews said in the days and weeks leading up to that game, bettors were noting that first half spreads in Temple games were not aligned with the full game spreads. For instance, he said, a full game spread might have been 7 points, and the halftime spread also 7 points.
“Everyone was spotting it because it didn’t make any sense,” Andrews said. “And people jumped on board, and that’s when it got really out of control. Nobody knew exactly why it was happening, but we all knew it could be point-shaving in the first half. That way, it doesn’t show up in the final box score — you’re betting in a derivative market that maybe the rest of the world won’t notice.
“But people always notice. It’s like the [baseball players] who threw the intentional ball on the first pitch — they probably thought, ‘It’s one pitch, nobody’s gonna notice.’ But the way betting activity goes, anything that sticks out is instantly noticed.”
Thanks but no thanks
Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos, another well-known pro sports bettor and founder of SpotOdds, says he would certainly prefer to not have to deal with this kind of stuff.
“I don’t need those types of bets. I don’t want to be anywhere near that,” he said. “I just want to bet normally, because I can beat it normally. I don’t need outliers to make money.”
Kyrollos says that’s one reason he stays away from most prop markets, concentrating almost exclusively on sides and totals. As a result, he says he never sees anything wonky in the pro markets. But college …
“Yeah, here and there. College football, college basketball — we see it. Maybe once a year, maybe twice, it all depends,” he said. “Some of it’s reported by the watchdogs like IC360, and some of it we just notice ourselves.”
And he wishes he didn’t.
“At the end of the day, nobody wants this except the cheaters,” Kyrollos said. “Everybody wants a fair game — that’s important not just for fans, but for gamblers too. It’s not good for anybody otherwise.”
Andrews agrees but recognizes there’s little to be done about it outside of starting the day again with the sunrise.
“You can’t live your life thinking every exception is the rule. These were very rare exceptions,” he said. “Did I get stung by it at some point? Maybe. But one was 2½ years ago, and the college basketball stuff was a year and a half ago. If I got stung by it, I’ve lived a fine life regardless.”
