Sharp Bettors: An Explainer

They are called sharps because their skills at gambling are so refined, so honed and so precise, they are the very best in the business. 

You can find them in the sportsbooks in Las Vegas sometimes, keeping a low profile while also knowing that they are being watched. You can find them in the border cities of New Jersey, too, because the sharps in New York are not legally allowed to wager on individual award futures markets, where the best value is often found. 

You can find them at horse racing tracks from time to time, especially if Saratoga is in season. And you can find them by knowing who to follow on social media and whose podcasts are bringing on the very best guests, but you have to know precisely who they are and what they are good at.

“We have WNBA sharps who come in sometimes, and we respect them so much that as soon as we see where they are laying their money, we adjust the lines aggressively based upon their plays,” said Jay Kornegay, director of Race and Sports at Westgate Superbook in Las Vegas. “Some of the best are the ones you never hear about. Most, not all, are low-key and try to keep it that way.”

These are the types of gamblers that you sometimes read about and sometimes only hear about. 

Some have systems for betting both sides of a line after it moves, guaranteeing a profit. Some have built algorithms that give them an edge over the public that they use judiciously. Some simply spend their time doing their homework and hunting for value before the sportsbooks realize that a team or a player has odds that need to be adjusted downward, and quickly.

“When I see the talent and I see a high number associated with it, I jump right in, because the books are sometimes very slow to recognize a player or a team,” said New York broadcaster and gambler Andy Roth, who specialized in futures markets. “All I do is bet value lines – bad for the bookie but good for me.”

There are innumerable ways to gamble in the United States, and the rules vary from state to state depending on what individual legislatures have accomplished and have written into their laws. The days of traveling to Las Vegas to place wagers are long gone, and where this is impacting sharp gamblers is in the time frames they have to make their wagers before lines move.

Roth was at the Meadowlands sportsbook in New Jersey last Friday watching Joe Musgrove of the San Diego Padres work on a near no-hitter in a game against Milwaukee and figured it was worth looking at Musgrove’s Cy Young Award futures odds, which were +1100 as the right-hander was holding the Brewers hitless through 7 2/3 innings, so he bet it. After the game ended, the odds came down to +350. 

“The book was slow to react as the game was being played,” Roth said.

So he had a sharp eye and an inkling that the Padres-Brewers game was happening somewhat under the radar, and he seized upon the timing. Not that Musgrove is Roth’s only bet, because he also has money on Sandy Alcantara of the Florida Marlins at 40-1 and then doubled up at 30-1 before Alcantara dropped to 6-1. He also bet Martin Perez of the Texas Rangers at 150-1 because Roth watches a lot of baseball and has an appreciation for pitching talent, and all Perez is doing now is posting a 1.56 ERA and trailing only Nestor Cortes of the New York Yankees in American League ERA with his odds now down to +800. 

Roth is forced to travel to New Jersey, usually to the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, from his home in Queens because New York’s sports gambling law does not allow for voting on any award determined by a panel of voters. So he is still a gambling commuter because of his love of futures, while bettors in several states that do not yet have online sports gambling are burning some very expensive gasoline to cross state lines and wager where they can. 

Anyone in Massachusetts who wants to wager on the Red Sox or Celtics needs to travel to the neighboring legal states of Connecticut, New Hampshire and New York to place their bets while the state gaming commission decides what its rules are going to be. California bettors have to travel to Nevada or Oregon or Arizona, and folks in Texas have to choose between New Mexico and Louisiana if they want to make a sports wager.

As long as there has been gambling, there have been bettors who are especially good at it. Mike Cascio does not wager very much anymore, but when he was a statistics student at Central Connecticut University in the 1970s he needed to write a paper to get a passing grade and decided to do it on an algorithm he had developed to give him an edge at the horse track.

Cascio had discerned that the top three horses listed on the morning line often had odds that were not a true representation of their chances of winning. He figured out that horses often were priced at 5-1 when they really should be priced at 3-1, and from a large sample of evidence he learned that his system could pick a winner 20 percent of the time. 

That was enough for an edge.

“My professor liked the paper so much that he not only gave me an A, he retired from teaching the following school year and began playing the horses full-time,” said Cascio, who now plays the horses at Saratoga in the summer but watches the industry and has learned that because of the level of competition at Saratoga in the summer, it is not a good place to try to make a living. But at horse tracks in Australia and Japan where the same horses race against each other time and again, an edge is available for those willing to put in the time and effort.

Statistical methodology is what gets the job done for some sharp gamblers, but with others it is simply a matter of paying attention to the way human nature could impact any given game.

When Jaylen Brown of the Celtics and Ivan Robb (formerly of the Grizzlies) were teammates on the 2015-16 California Golden Bears, assistant coach Yann Hufnagel was fired on the eve of the NCAA Tournament amid a sexual harassment allegation.

“Those guys were just out of high school, and all of a sudden a coach who they were close with had lost his job. There was no way that was not going to impact them,” said 24/7 sports VP of content and executive producer Adam Stanko, a gambler who often makes appearances on shows produced by the ViSN gambling network out of Las Vegas. Cal ended up losing their first-round game to 13th-seeded Hawaii amid all of the hullabaloo.

“I am mostly giving advice to other people, and I am probably best at finding value. The trick, in my estimation, is to understand how games are going to play out. Books examine how the betting public will react and where value will be placed, but for me other factors of the game count. In college, how will a high-seeded team react if a neutral crowd suddenly turns on them? In the NBA, the superstars always play great, but how will the role players be different on the road versus at home.

“There are underlying factors that people would not ordinarily consider that are related to human nature. Players and teams have to deal with distractions, and if they are not set up right, they are ripe to be beat,” Stanko said.

And that is the name of the game: Figuring out who is going to get beat, and putting your money on the other side of the table.

Sharps do it every day, and no matter the sport or the locale, they all have one thing in common. They are cerebral; they are thinkers. If they can figure out an edge, so can you. Just do your homework and factor in some of their tricks. It is human nature to win. So just do it. And do it by thinking like a sharp.