The PlayerProfiler EDGE system is designed to help sports bettors maximize their advantage when betting all different kinds of sports. There are several ways it helps accomplish this. The PlayerProfiler EDGE system provides in-game email and text notifications to maximize leverage. It also gives sports bettors real-time injury alerts with proprietary impact ratings. This is in addition to the EDGE system’s predictive analytics that beat projection consensus, and the top value picks which can enhance a sports bettors’ profit up to five percent. Lastly, the precision-ranked player props also give sports bettors an edge when betting on outcomes outside of the individual game result.
The following article answers the most frequently asked questions about the PlayerProfiler EDGE system by providing answers from the man who helped design it, Charles Ormsby.
The link to the full podcast is here.
Q: How long have you been at the art of creating betting intelligence systems?
A: I started this project about 12 years ago mainly to fix sports handicapping. Sports handicapping I never found to be a good solution to my problem which was sports betting. My problem was sports betting. I was never a really good sports bettor. I lost way too much money doing it. And I wanted to find a solution, so I started paying handicappers. There were some times when that helped periodically, but in the long run it didn’t help. And at the end of the day, I realized that sports betting needed to be fixed on a larger scale.
Q: Baseball season is all we have right now. What the best ways to make money betting on baseball?
A: With baseball, I don’t want to say it’s easy to make money because it’s never easy to make money. It’s always hard, but small markets are the key to baseball. Just in the context of MLB you have Oakland, Kansas City, and Miami. At this point, smaller markets that don’t get the money the Yankees and the Red Sox, and some of the other larger market teams, get are good bets. If you stick with those teams (small market teams), you tend to be profitable every year which is kind of wild.
Q: What baseball player props are the best?
A: So, the odds makers have more liquidity with the points spreads, which causes there to be, in my opinion, more obvious value with just the general mathematical laws that flow across all of sports. Props tend to be a lot more micro oriented. How a player did yesterday may impact how they did today. But, it’s not easy for a machine to predict because it doesn’t follow mathematical flows essentially.
Q: When I first starting digging into this, I was surprised to hear that in-game betting provided the most expected returns. Why?
A: Yeah, in-game we have our biggest margins as opposed to pre-game. So pre-game, the odds makers have at least 12-36 hours to prepare their odds, and they can change them as they move towards the game. There’s information that they are taking from all sorts of different angles. But, when it comes to in-game, there’s been situations in-game where I knew there was a great chance we win that alert. It’s very difficult for odds makers to account for in-game situations.
Mathematical regression to the mean is a real thing, so things always tend to move back to the averages. So, when a big market team goes down early, grab that as they will likely come back and at least make it an even fight. Today odds makers cannot account for this accurately, so we have a nice edge.
Q: How do you pull together so much rich information for the EDGE system?
A: We pull from over 100 different domains today. Our system pulls all on-shore sportsbooks. We try to pull a lot of off shore sportsbooks. Our system tries to pull as many score websites as we can. We pay for a lot of data. Our data budget is higher than your average startup I would say. We are a master data management company, so we bring it into one place as input. Also, we build the master data that we essentially need to derive output which gets displayed on the web.
And we push it through a lot of machine learning processes that filter it. Machine learning is just a fancy name for filtering. The filtered content is what we display on the web to our audiences, and that’s what they want to see. We only expose about 5-percent of what we actually pull on a daily basis. We are working to expand this. However, in general, today we read data from over 100+ domains, and those domains contribute a rich set of input data that we use to make our predictions.
Q: I was surprised to hear you talk about how soccer is one of the more exploitable sports out there. I would think soccer would be tough, but are you finding some edges with soccer?
A: What I found is that everyone has data models for specific sports but not necessarily a league. Tennis has a wide ranging number of events across a wide range of leagues. There’s only like four or five major leagues in tennis. In soccer, you could have hundreds of leagues. When a favorite goes down in soccer, early, there is a lot of value there. Those are the kinds of situations we try to alert our folks to, so they can take advantage of them.
Q: How do you have access to so much soccer league data?
A: Soccer data has one of the broadest sets of data available on the internet and can be consumed by anyone looking to refine their systems. Soccer, like Tennis, is one of the most exciting sports to bet on because it can change in an instant. There also aren’t a lot of great predictions out there on the odds. They have been refined quite heavily over the decades since it is one of the oldest sports betting opportunities, but there is still a lot of value to be had.
Q: Which is the easiest sport to exploit as a sport bettor?
A: Live in-game Tennis is the most profitable. Favorites often lose the first set and come back to win. This happens every day. The challenge with Tennis is the matches are often spread across the globe making it inconvenient for the common bettor, but if you can focus on certain spots it wins 70-90-percent of the time.
There are such a wide range of player skill levels and progressions within the sport. It’s unique because it’s not team oriented at all even though as a tennis player they would say they have a team behind them. But the team behind them is normally sitting with the fans. Being an individual playing in an individual tennis match and having to overcome what they have to overcome is a very unique thing because you cannot rely on other players on your team for the most part.
The odds makers, the way they do it for the most part is every tennis match is treated it the same way in-game. For example, with the exception of some of the higher level players, the mid to high level players are all kind of treated the same, so if you have a top-25 player who’s playing a top-75 player, and that top-25 player loses the first set, and they were favored by four games to win as a points spread, that is a huge amount of value. That wins 65 to 70 percent of the time.
Q: What is the most difficult sport to exploit?
A: All the professionals would say NFL/football, not college, as college is very beatable. If you take your average NFL point spread. Let’s say it’s 3.5. To have one play swing that points spread almost 14 points depending on what happens is brutal. That is almost four to five times the initial points spread. At the end of the game this can happen. It’s a very wacky sport. It doesn’t lend itself toward profitable betting. Now, in-game is different. In-game NFL can be profitable, but pre-game NFL is very difficult to win any money on and most of the professional bettors I know avoid it to a large degree.
The challenge with winning is it’s not just about beating the odds, you can’t have coin flip type mistakes (pick 6’s) and other types of events in a match that can significantly skew the odds one way or the other. So, pregame NFL, MLS, and NHL, where the scoring is relatively low but the markets look even, coming into the events can be very challenging.
Q: Which sport has the greatest home-field advantage?
A: Basketball has the greatest advantage by far. Basketball plays in a closed arena setting where you can really hear the crowd. It’s huge and cannot be understated as the crowd can act like a true +1 player which is more difficult for other sports. Also, the players are fed a high level of energy since the stadiums are closed and can achieve a high level of excitement when a big play happens.
Q: Which sport has the most overrated home-field advantage?
A: Any sport that doesn’t play in an enclosed dome other than football would be a sport that doesn’t have a huge homefield advantage. However, baseball seems to have almost no home-field advantage. Unless there is a reason a team performs well at home, but this not just because they are at home. Typically, there are other factors at play other than home-field advantage.
Q: Let’s talk about the NBA. What are the best kinds of best to make on basketball?
A: Home favorites are a funny thing in the NBA. I feel like they cover in particular situations more than they should. There are also situations where teams have a strategy change, which happens in tennis as well, so a player can start to hit their backhand differently for example. The same thing happens in basketball too. If there is a strategy change you can see in the short term with how they’re performing, if they’ve covered the spread four out of the last five games, or for whatever reason they are climbing.
If you can look for moments like that pre-game, that’s very valuable. The most valuable situations is in-game. If you have a home favorite that is -7 pregame, and then that home team drops the first quarter (for whatever reason home teams love to drop the first quarter). Then, you’ll get a really sweet line. Home teams and underdogs that have achieved some type of recent success due to a strategy change are usually the best bets.
Q: What are your thoughts on the NCAA tournament?
A: College basketball isn’t like the NBA. The favorites don’t typically come back nearly as much as they do in the NBA. It is for this reason, college basketball, the NCAA Tournament is highly unpredictable, and I would avoid it unless for entertainment purposes only.
Q: Can you talk about the systems we have in place, the systems that drive these alerts? What’s the logic behind these systems?
A: Obviously, we consume a lot of data, and we try to bring in as much data as possible from 30 or 40 different sportsbooks. Then we try to read scores and different things as the game progresses to make sense of what’s happening in game. What we are really looking for is high value. If you had 100 games to comb through pre-game, you might find five to 10 percent of those games to have picks with any kind of positive value. The vast majority of bets you just want to stay away from because they are too coin-flippy.
But of those five to 10 percent of the games, what we do, is we look for in-game opportunities for those five to 10 percent, where it doesn’t have to be the favorite, it can be the underdog. If it’s an underrated pick, and the underdog goes down in the first quarter, or the first set, or whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter. We will still publish that as a very high value in-game alert because it regresses back to that point spread. It always does. It just doesn’t change.
Q: The spread knowledge smart system really killed it on NHL. How profitable was it and why?
A: There are usually wide margins against the big market teams. Like baseball, any team can beat any other team on any given night, so often taking the favorites Moneyline, or with the +1.5, is a decent bet against the odds.
Q: Let’s talk NFL betting. I like futures longshots. How much does the house clean up on those?
A: The house cleans up on these because they are taking 20-50-percent against the actual odds. That’s how large their rake is. It’s really not worth tying your money up for. Unless you are doing this purely for entertainment, then it is not a good bet. If you have a favorite team or player, then go ahead and have some fun. For me, it’s different because I’m trying to expose the value in their odds. If they did this in the financial services industry, they would be arrested for fraud.
Q: What’s the best type of NFL bet?
A: In general, the NFL pre-game odds are very tough to beat. I wouldn’t recommend betting futures because the rake is very high and that ties up your money for such a long time. That money is best used elsewhere unless you want to have some fun.
More Questions about the PlayerProfiler EDGE system
Q: What is the difference between the top picks and the value props on PlayerProfiler EDGE?
A: The PlayerProfiler EDGE top picks are our heavy, machine learning algorithms that we’ve spent the last 12 years on that scrutinize a lot of data to produce those value grades. The value props are somewhat new. We are trying to get them added to be as scrutinizing of the data. I would rely on the pre-game picks and the in-game stuff to a much larger degree. We are going to add value prop in-game. Eventually, you will be able on things like, for instance, if Tom Brady is projected to throw for 250 yards, and he didn’t throw in the first quarter for whatever reason, so now his passing yards number is lower, you are going to want to take that over.
Q: What about this injury impact section? Talk to us about that for a moment.
A: What we do with the injury impact section is try to marry DFS player salaries with what the injury actually is in terms of how much it could impact the team. If you have an 8,000 dollar salary, in terms of football, that’s a lot higher than a 3,000 dollar salary, and what we try to do is marry the DFS value to the actual injury and the projection for that injury to derive a significance that we believe will impact the outcome of that player’s performance but also the team’s performance.
It quantifies the player’s value to the team against what the actual injury says because you can get those two values from different places on the internet. However, nobody brings those together and says this is the significance with where he is at with his rehab or whatever the case may be.
How do I use the PlayerProfiler EDGE system?
A: You need to go to playerprofiler.com and click the EDGE tab at the top. It is here where you can sign up to receive access the PlayerProfiler EDGE system. This is where you can access the top picks and analyses that will alert you to the best sports bets you can make. The PlayerProfiler EDGE system is one of the most innovative systems out there, so bettors should go take advantage of it!
