20-Year Journey from Square to Sharp

I didn’t keep records back then, which is a good thing, because if I kept track of how much money I actually lost in the fall of 2002, I probably would have thrown in the towel then and there.  Luckily, for my bankroll, or lack thereof, I deployed to the Middle East in early 2003, which prevented me from going completely bust. Turns out, being a sports fan and an athlete my entire life didn’t equate to successfully being able to predict the outcome of sporting events, go figure!

I was back in the States by the time the 2003 football season kicked off and I was ready! I spent all that downtime during my deployment to carefully craft my new strategy and I was going to make my bookie pay this year! By mid-October, I was in a bad spot and was looking for help to get out of the hole I dug and through the grace of Internet Explorer, I found that help in the form of a handicapping site. These guys were amazing, 14 winning days in a row, $10 bettors up $16,000 in the last 120 days, 9-1 on their last 10 Super Duper Whale Locks! Unbelievable, all I had to do was sign up for their 30-Day Package and I’d be back in the black in no time!

Turns out as soon as I signed up, the winning streaks stopped, they couldn’t win 3 bets in row let alone 3 days, yet the streak continued on their website…the picks I got just went 1-4, but the website now says 15 winning days in a row…after talking to “my guy”, I was told the picks on the website are Super Diamond Palatium Picks and those cost 5 x what I just paid, desperate and naïve, I gave them more money, for more losers and so it went until I finally relented to the fact that it was a façade, these clowns are not handicappers, they run a well-orchestrated scheme that preys on the weakness of gamblers desperate for winners and out of answers on their own. The sad part is this was 20 years ago and these losers are still running the same website feasting on the next generation of suckers.

I spent the next 7 years of my gambling career stumbling along, but I was learning and my losses were manageable, mostly due to my adherence to flat betting. Turns out my severe losses early on were more about poor money management than my winning percentage. Things started to turn for me in 2009 when I got hooked up with an old school bookie who did not have a website, this forced me to keep an accurate record of my bets which turned out to be the biggest factor in my transition to becoming a profitable bettor. The insights one can glean from analyzing your betting data is invaluable. If there was one piece of advice I could give to a losing bettor, it would be to keep detailed records of their bets.

It took three more years of studying, testing and analyzing before I turned in my first profitable year of betting on sports in 2012 when I had a winning percentage of 56.3%. I regressed to the mean a bit in 2013 & 2014 with small losing seasons before turning a profit again in 2015 with a 54.5 % win rate. Since 2015, I’ve only had one losing season which was in 2018 when I had a winning percentage of 52.3% and lost $20 for the year. My overall win rate since 2012 is 53.5%, but I’ve made significant strides in my models since those early years and if you just look at my last five years, I’m hitting at 54.3% on well over 1000 bets, which leads us to today and the decision to start Red 51 Sports.

As any handicapper with a real edge will tell you, the game shifts from finding winners to finding outs and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a meaningful amount of money down on a game once you’ve proven to have an edge. Therefore, I’ve decided sharing my plays with a small community at a price that will maintain profitability for my clients is more appealing than the cat and mouse game of constantly getting limited and having to continuously find new accounts.

Some of you may be thinking, 54.3%, that isn’t very good, I see a guy on YouTube right now that hits at 75%! We’ve been over this, if you need to go through the pain yourself, send me an email and I’ll provide you with the same tracker I use to log my bets and you can keep track of every bet you get from your YouTuber over an extended period of time and let me know how it goes. 54.3% over approximately 250 bets a year, which is what I average, equates to an annual return of around 20%, the S&P 500 averages around 10% a year and Warren Buffett, who many consider the greatest investor of all-time, has an annual return rate of around 19%, so turns out a 54.3% winning percentage isn’t all that bad…