This is a follow-up question to a Fezzik Friday discussion about how the books lost so big three weeks ago. If the books get beat, it has to be because they weren't "balanced." But we've always heard that they do balance their action and don't care which side wins. Do the sports books really gamble like that?
Sports betting guru and LVASportsboards moderator Fezzik responds:
How hard can it be to balance your action and take no risk? A simple example shows how hard!
You have five games. All five are going simultaneously. Your locals have bet your exposure up to $11,000 on the favorites in each game, so you move your lines up a bit and get $6,600 in action back on each of the dogs from wise guys. Meanwhile, you have $20,000 in bets on 3- to 5-team parlays, all on the favorites. You inch your lines even higher and take more action from the pros, getting balanced on all games. Maybe you want to move more, but you know that if you go any higher, the pros will bring a blizzard of money against you on the dogs. You also increase the risk of getting middled -- paying the pros' bets on the dogs along with all the early bets that caused the imbalance in the first place. All you can do is sit tight.
If the faves go 3-2 or worse, you do OK, winning the vig on the games, and knocking down almost every parlay. But … if they go 4-1, you take a beating. And if the favorites go 5-0, now you're staring at that $20,000 in parlay bets beating your brains in for $200,000.
What's the solution? There really is none, other than to move the lines early in the week to anticipate which games the bettors are going to pound, and that's often easier said than done. A good example was this week's Thanksgiving-night game, Patriots -6 at Jets, where there was zero reason for a locals book to deal the game at market. The entire world was poised from the start to parlay the Pats, so the books might as well deal the game a half-point high from the start. But even if a book shades all of its lines, if all the favorites cover, as they did in the week you reference, they'll get crushed by the parlays (including money line and teaser parlays) simply because that's the way the public bets.
The good books look ahead and use their knowledge of betting tendencies (along with their informed prognostications of how the games will play out) to put themselves in the strongest overall position. These books don't mind being unbalanced at times, recognizing the inherent risk that they'll get torched once a year. Those that play with jelly in the belly deal donk lines and make it harder for the recreational players to win, but they give up value on the other side to the pros, which will cost them more in the end.
Bottom line: There's no way to keep it completely riskless, especially when maximizing profit over time is the goal.
