Do APs retire??

Mickey used to travel the US and he used to pick off some of the Oklahoma spots I used to also sweep.  Ole Win Star in Thackerville being a particular example.

Not sure if he's only Montana now.   

At the time when I knew of him (never met him), I was living in Montana, and I would visit the few casinos that had live poker, as that was my spring-and-summer AP activity. I heard his name mentioned several times, and not at all fondly. Apparently, the owners of those little casinos--they were all sole proprietorships in those days--didn't like Mickey showing up and sucking the money away from the good progressives, which would discourage their regular customers.

Given the sheer breadth of the territory he would have had to cover in the course of a weekly (?) "round," I didn't think he would have been able to operate in other states, especially since only South Dakota was a neighboring state that also had gambling. So if he was in Oklahoma later, Montana must have dried up for him. But Montana or Oklahoma, in the winter, his profession must have required an aawful lot of driving. Yuck.

Mickey would crush Kevin in the AP game.  

No matter what one does in this life, there is someone who does it better. My ego is not so fragile as to be disturbed by that basic truth.

Mickey can be followed on Twitter. I think he's quite good, maybe the best, at what he should be doing as defined by me, but has issues when he himself defines what he's expert at. I'll get back to this (dinner time), but it's an interesting subject that broaches the theme of "When and how do APs really know that what they're doing is APing?"

Too many -- it seems to me most -- and especially mickey, of the "AP" crowd seem to believe they are, as I like to say, Leonardo Da APs, namely the masters of all they survey. They wind up using hammers on things that require screwdrivers, and don't seem to know the difference. Bottom line -- college sophomore probability abilities don't make you a master of the world, but if you've never made it to college junior status, you don't know that.

At some point, I'll do a lengthy monograph regarding all this, but for now I'll just go with this old parallel.  Have any of you ever gone to an academic conference and wanted to hear somebody who's a relatively famous, published name with a great reputation? So you go and listen to this person give one presentation and maybe he/she sits at a round table discussion regarding subjects that you know quite a bit about but that aren't your particular narrow field. And you think he/she is great.

Then...there are a couple of sessions regarding your narrow expertise, and the person is featured at one or two of them, and what he/she says seems simplistic, dated, and uninformed. And the light bulb comes on in your head...geez, maybe this person isn't so wonderful, and maybe he/she is wrong half the time, and I've just been too stupid. And the person you thought was wonderful is just as declarative and sure of themselves when discussing your field of expertise as they are when discussing other fields.

That's where I am with mickey. He blathers declaratively about sports gambling while having very little clue, and the people he thinks are wonderful experts might be but likely aren't. So although I THINK mickey's sharp as a tack in his machine expertise, I really have no idea. Because if mickey doesn't realize how naive he is regarding sports betting, then how do I know he's not as at sea regarding everything else?

With sports gambling, mickey is one step above civilian, and (as we all know) a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Bottom line, and this is a real standard "AP" caveat, I'm not sure mickey knows what he doesn't know.

Unfortunately, expertise in one field can lead to the self-delusion that one is an expert in a related field as well 

I had a friend who absolutely crushed VP, but also thought he knew how to play hold 'em. He didn't know. Glug glug glug.

Also unfortunately--having expertise in a field or endeavor and then spending decades pursuing that as a vocation can lead to idiot savant syndrome. Like maybe some VP expert can tell you how many penalty cards can dance on the head of a pin, but can't butter a slice of toast without seriously injuring himself.

I've gotta give Dancer, for example, some real credit. He tried sports betting and lost and reported that he lost and pretty much steers clear. I just don't get the arrogance of folks who think knowing how to play Piggybank gives them insights into sports betting. Or knowing how to play hold 'em somehow translates into hockey betting. You wouldn't ask your pediatrician to perform brain surgery, and those are much more similar than slots and sports betting. Even in sports betting, specialists reign. NFL betting and college football betting have been two entirely different things. And yet people think expertise in one thing (say, NCAA hoops) somehow provides a winning edge for baseball. It's delusional.

From the outside, it looks like people succumb to both self-deluded arrogance and the need for action, so they decide they are the proverbial Leonardo da AP.

Agree. I've been tracking my sports bets since it's become legal in Indiana, and it's painfully obvious where my advantage lies. Winning at college hoops every year; breaking even on college football, and losing at MLB (which is, cruelly, my favorite spectator sport). 

If you're ok with just hustling the bonuses/boosts, it's pretty simple to get an edge.   You'll need to calculate the value of the + plays but it's not that difficult.   I'm running about +17% lifetime. 

FanDuels boosts are almost always + money.   BetMGM's Lion boosts are positive about half the time.   ESPN boosts maybe around a quarter of the time they're worth playing.   Caesars has daily promos that make the wagers a play.   After you beat them for a while, most of the books will cut your boost limits.     FD went from $50 to 20.   BetMGM cut me off entirely from Boost tokens though they still allow the Lion bets ($57 limit).   Caesars went from $100 to $10 on my promo plays.