How To Profit When You're Limited At Sportsbooks
There are creative ways to make up for getting limited with additional volume.
A couple weeks ago, I talked about what our experience was like getting limited at most sportsbooks using Betscope. Getting limited is one of the major points of frustration when you start getting good enough to turn a profit at sports betting, and represents a major inflection point in where you need to start thinking more critically about how to win more money, whether it’s expanding your operation to additional accounts, focusing on tougher markets with higher limits, or any number of other solutions. In the meantime, if you have your accounts limited, while it will definitely put a limit on how much profit you can turn, it’s by no means a death sentence to making sports betting still worth your time. And to understand why, we can take a look at some specific betting opportunities that might come up in a game, understand why they’re there, and get a better bigger picture sense of the total opportunity available to us.
Why do opportunities like arbitrage and low-hold markets exist? You typically don’t see these opportunities persist in major markets like standard spread/moneyline/totals markets for a couple reasons: they have the highest limits, so the sheer amount of money moving through these markets is a fast signal to books to adjust their prices. But in addition to the limits’ influences on sharpening prices, these quantities are among the easier values to handicap. Handicapping average team strengths are at the core of the quantitative processes that drive these numbers, and average team strengths are fairly stable to predict. There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg here, but it also influences why limits are so much higher for these markets: there’s just a lot less risk to the books that they’ve missed something, so they can afford to take higher volumes.
The more exotic markets have much more room for error though, and that’s where you see a lot of mispricings arise. Take alternate spreads, for example: these require not just knowing average team strengths, but the entire range of outcomes for two teams playing each other. A rough analogy would be pricing stocks versus options: stocks have pretty well known factors that should anchor their average price, but options require knowledge of things like time horizons, volatility, if the stock price hinges on certain events, etc.- a much more complicated product to price fairly.
So what happens when two sportsbooks might have slight variations in their process for calculating these more exotic markets? We see a bunch of correlated opportunities. Take yesterday’s Mavs/Pistons game, where there were a ton of opportunities in the alternate spread market:
PointsBet and Wynn had a pretty clear difference of opinion on how to price these markets, which resulted in low hold markets across all of these values. And this is one key to understanding how to profit with a limited account, especially in alternate spreads/totals: if there’s one pricing opportunity in these markets, there are likely many pricing opportunities in these markets. Indeed, if you liked the Pistons to cover the spread in general, as per our correlations engine, you also like the Pistons to cover their alternate lines as well. Even if you’re limited to something like $50 on a single bet, there’s nothing stopping you from making $50 wagers at each of these lines:
In general, when you’re limited, you need to make up for it in volume. And the alternate spreads/totals markets are a fantastic place to do that: betting on all the alternate lines is effectively betting the same view of “I like the Pistons to do better than the market thinks”. While you’re not exposed to maybe the exact outcome you want, you’re exposed to the same directional outcome, just with different (and better) pricing. And in the long run, finding inefficient markets that align with your view is the reliable ticket to winning in sports betting.
The NBA prop markets are another example. One big source of inefficiencies in the markets is differing reaction times to breaking news, which happens all the time in the NBA as injuries get announced and players’ minutes get adjusted. Some books are quicker to react than others, which is a big cause of price discrepancies across books. In addition to the major props markets (points, rebounds, assists), books also offer markets for combinations of these markets (points + rebounds, points + assists, points + rebounds + assists). And if they’re late reacting to news, if they’re wrong on one of the core markets, they’ll also probably be wrong on the combination markets as well. In the same game, Luka Doncic’s rebounds market of 8.5 showed a low hold market opportunity, as well as a straight up arbitrage opportunity in the rebounds + assists market across the same books:
If you like Luka’s over on the rebounds, you’ll also like the over on his rebounds + assists as well. It’s another way to increase your betting volume on a single opinion you might have: betting into adjacent markets that are tightly and definitionally correlated to one another.
We’ve written extensively about correlations at Betscope and how you can use them to your advantage, but these types of correlations don’t require any type of sophisticated process or tool to understand: just the intuitive understanding that a bet like Pistons +11.5 will have very similar outcomes to Pistons +12.5 (and for the extra edge, some distribution-based math that will tell you exactly how much that extra point is worth). It’s just a reminder that for these more exotic markets, opportunities don’t happen in a vacuum: if there’s one opportunity, there are likely many opportunities. And capitalizing on all of them is a good volume-based approach to overcoming whatever limits might be put on your account.