Of course the boiler room touts, Feiner, et al don’t have “inside information” but don’t kid yourself, it is out there.
I will tell you flat out, one that you will have to take my word—so I may be full of poop or not. The other can in theory be publically corroborated.
Years ago, long before the Internet, I worked for a scores gathering organization—well actually a few, but one where the light bulb came on. This was also the days before DirecTV and what not.
Most of our college basketball scores came from calling the SIDs at courtside. It was all prearranged of course as we were a legitimate (kind of) sports information and scores service.
Especially at the beginning of the year, we’d make one pregame call just to make sure we had the right phone number and to verify we were whitelisted to get scores.
One time—either an SID or intern volunteered a star player just was scratched because he just found out his dad died. Next call was to the bookmaker. I think it covered.
But the bigger picture was a big light bulb flashed on. From that point on, before every game we’d make that call and ask, “oh, any last minute line-up changes, injuries we should be aware of?”
The goldmines were not as frequent as we would have liked and did not always guarantee success, but we had an edge.
Contacts in that same industry: before you send that baseball starting line-up out on the wire (that you got directly from the teams), please call me if a stud is scratched. You tip me, I’ll tip you.
The more public one--and one that I to this day am floored how it stayed under the radar for several years.
Adam Caplan (who is now on ESPN, formally of NFL Network) and Steve Cohen (who I think is now on CBS) years ago did FootballInjuries.com, a great site for injuries for fantasy players.
They emailed Sunday morning injury info that beat the screen by 5-10 minutes almost every key injury, every week. How DonBest was oblivious to FootballIInjuries is beyond me but the books were at the mercy of Best. Yet anyone who paid like $30 effing bucks a year to Caplan and Cohen were beating the screen.
