How Betscope Got Us Limited At Almost All Books
Different books have different risk tolerances for exploiting their soft lines. Here's how it went with each of them.
Betscope’s ROI calculator is one of our favorite features: we take a lot of pride in doing the difficult distribution-based calculations that no one else does at the speed and scale we do to ensure we’re always recommending the most actionable and accurate betting recommendations. To give you a little peek behind the curtain, we have some internal tools we use to test and refine the accuracy of these calculations, doing mass simulations of what the most common use cases are for our users and seeing what bets come out as a result. Most often times, our recommended bets are heavily on the props and alternate spreads/totals fronts, since that’s where most of the mispricings are in the betting markets. Backtesting is great and all, but there’s only one true way to know how these recommendations will hold up in the real world, and that’s to actually bet the simulated results into the betting markets to see how they perform. We were hoping to get a healthy set of data to see how our results do in the real world under common user scenarios and use those results to enhance our product.
Instead, a more interesting thing happened after we started betting our simulated results into the markets. We got limited at just about every sportsbook in the state.
This was not an unforeseen outcome. One of the sports betting world’s worst kept secrets is sportsbooks will limit or ban you based on your betting history: things like what sports you bet, what types of bets you make, what your average closing line value is all play a role in their profile of your account and whether or not they decide to limit or ban you. People have written helpful guides about how to disguise your action to sportsbooks so your accounts can last longer, but right now that’s just as much art as it is science (with plans on our parts to convert the art into science as much as possible.) We weren’t trying all that hard to disguise our action; in fact, one of the secondary goals of this exercise was to stress test some of the more common sportsbooks and get a sense for how quick they would be to limit us. Here’s a summary of our experience at each book:
PointsBet: Hands down the most aggressive in how fast and how severely we got limited. Within one week of opening our account, we went from being able to get $100 per bet down on any market we wanted to a limit of anywhere between $16-$60 per bet. Alternate spreads and totals have a little more leeway than that, but they are by far the most aggressive in limiting based on heavy action in prop markets and alternate lines.
Draftkings: Surprisingly the second fastest to limit us, despite our Draftkings account not actually showing a profit at the time. We were limited by them about a day or two after PointsBet, suggesting both these places have about a one week delay time before they assess your full history and implement their limits. Their risk tolerance is still a little better than PointsBet; a limited account can still get down anywhere from $30-$90 per prop bet, with some more tolerance in the alternate lines markets as well.
BetRivers: Limited after about 2 weeks, slightly longer than the other books. Their limits are close to Draftkings, usually in the $40-$90 range for prop markets, but alternate lines have a higher tolerance and our accounts can still get $100 bets down.
Barstool: Despite using the same Kambi backend (and thereby nearly identical lines) as Rivers, we were still able to get $100 bets down on most props 2 weeks after blitzing their markets, with some soft limits in the $80-$95 range afterwards. Alternate spreads and totals have no issue here either, so Barstool seems to be in the sweet spot of having exploitable lines and relatively slow responsiveness to player profiling. You can fire here much more freely than other places.
MGM: Took about 3 weeks to get limited here, but once we did, now it’s tough to get more than $30 down on a given prop bet. There’s a short window where you can fire as hard as you want here, and the lines are on par with Kambi’s exploitability, but once your window is gone, it’s gone. Great candidate for a churn and burn book.
Caesar’s: Still not limited here. This is consistent with other players’ experiences as well, where their risk tolerance is still decently high and you are still able to get down a decent amount even after betting props and alternate lines exclusively.
Fanduel: Still not limited here. Unknown what it will take to trigger their limiting procedures.
The usual caveats apply: this is uniquely our experience, and we were all but trying to trigger each book’s limiting procedures to see how fast we could get it to work. Sadly, it’ll be a little tougher for us to reap Betscope’s rewards on our accounts now, but it’s all in the name of science. So how should you incorporate these findings into your sports betting habits? A couple things to consider:
If you’re concerned about account longevity, you have to understand the risk profile you’re presenting to the books. Jack Andrews at Unabated did a fantastic video of how to manage your risk profile and be aware of how you’re perceived at each book. He recommends sending the books a mix of square-looking bets, including parlays, standard spread/totals bets, and not to rely too much on obscure sports to get your profits. Firing all of the positive EV bets Betscope surfaces as hard as possible will probably get you limited, but that’s a good problem to have: it means the product is working as intended.
Knowing the limiting patterns of each books will help you prioritize which books you want to attack. If PointsBet is showing you lots of opportunities, knowing that they’ll be the first to limit you should dampen your willingness to attack them hard and/or stress about attacking their vulnerable bets. If there are 5 bets available and you might only have a minute to get down on 2 of them, knowing which ones are safe and which ones are risky from a limiting standpoint will help your long term returns.
Learn other sports to keep your betting diversified. If you’re an NBA only bettor, your NBA risk profile will be very different than your NFL risk profile, up to and including sport-specific limits. And even if you do get limited across the board, it’s still possible to produce some healthy income on $20 bets at a time, you just have to be willing to increase your volume across all the sports you can manage. If the sports betting environment is trending towards stricter limits, sport-specific specialists will have their ceiling capped much harder then generalists.
While it’s a bummer that our test accounts are limited right now, it was a productive exercise: it means our ROI calculator is in fact producing results sportsbooks don’t like seeing, and that’s exactly what we’re optimizing for at Betscope. The best we can offer now is the guidance from the lessons we’ve learned, until we’re able to incorporate these lessons formally into our suite of tools. Until then, we’ll find plenty more ways to improve our product to make sure you’re getting the best and most actionable betting information to help you win.