You know, it’s funny. Someone said to me recently that I must have a bunch of new customers in because I have been in rare form with my morning messages. Yes, as with any new football season a bunch of novices and rookies come out of the woodwork looking to turn their $1,000 bankroll into $100,000 by the end of September. I get it too…I was once one of them back in the 90’s during high school. Somehow I convinced myself that my $20 bets would lead to a steady weekly income where I could buy a car and have anything that a high school student could dream. When that sort of thing doesn’t happen…the novice feels the reason can’t be their stupid ideology about gambling that was the problem.
From April through July…there is no need for this sort of discussion. The people who are with TSP Live in those summer months are my people…true degenerates…veteran gamblers! They celebrate the wins, they brush off the losses, and they know this whole thing is a long-term game. A losing month…no big deal…the wins always come…that’s how a summer TSP Live subscriber operates. These true degenerates love the action, but they also trust the process and have patience. Come football season, a whole new batch of wannabe sports millionaires shows up. You can surely turn a very healthy income in sports betting…trust me, I know…but not without accepting reality…and being patient. Yes, 31 years ago when I placed my first bet offshore…underaged…I was a newbie too with an idea as to how gambling was “supposed to work” and that somehow despite my inexperience I would immediately be successful at a profession where the math is slanted strong against you…and math is a tough opponent.
I am not trying to be a dick by putting down these newbies…it’s more that I am trying to give them a blunt wakeup call. The goal being to open their eyes in a way nobody did for me in my early months and years gambling. In the process, I hope to save these newbies money and a lot of stress along the way.
These newbies come into something like TSP Live after having navigated social media for weeks, months and years…seeing all the bullshit pictures of stacks of money, big tickets and easy wins posted by so-called professional bettors. They see how some flashy idiot who has a Game of the Year every week just has racks upon racks of cash…so if that moron can do it…surely our newbie can too! The problem is, you are only seeing a small portion of the picture…but like a good drug dealer, the unsavory tout has sold you on the high, but left out the side effects. You would be surprised how many of the pundits and “professional bettors” who show up on TV and radio are losing degenerate gamblers who piss away money at a hysterical pace. I laugh when I see some “professional” brought on a TV or radio show as the hosts bow down to this person for their incredible gambling intelligence. Little do they know a friend at their favorite book told me how that guy is one of their biggest losers!
So don’t buy the hype. Accept and realize that sportsbooks and casinos have all the math on their side. DraftKings doesn’t have an EIGHTEEN BILLION dollar market cap because the majority of people win! No my friends, only 3-4% of gamblers qualify to earn the “professional and profitable” bettor badges! If you want to be one, you can get there, but you need to realize it will require effort!
Unlike those on social media who just want to suck you in by showing the glamour side to gambling…here at The Sharp Plays, the goal is to let you know about the side effects like losing, cold runs, large drawdowns, etc., because that’s a part of gambling. If you only want to see the good and don’t accept the bad…this whole thing will be a very bad road for you.
So, leave your preconceived notions about professional gambling at the door, come with an open mind and I can show you how much fun and profitable this business can be…but there will be losses…lots of them. It’s just over time there will also be wins…and the wins will outnumber the losses. Patience is a virtue and it is also the key to being a pro.
We all start somewhere! I started betting in the 90’s with an average bet of just $5. A big bet for me at the time was $20…and $50 was like betting a million! I called 1-900 numbers for “winners” from Jack Price, Johnny Demarco and MANY others…paying $10, $20, $50 per call…none of it worked. I kept losing and losing. I lost the hard way. Then someone tried to teach me the business when I got into the offshore industry in the late 90’s. I thought his ideas were bullshit as to how professional gambling worked…and I fought him HARD despite his incredible experience and success. Finally, I relented and did it his way…I have never had a losing year since and I realized that the power in winning at sports betting is not trying to win 60-80% of your bets…nobody does over the long-term. However, you can make MILLIONS with a 55% win percentage, a 5-6% ROI and some patience! Fast forward 30 years…and while I do not discuss numbers…my average bet is no longer $5, but an amount I never would have imagined achieving back in those early days. You can get there too!
Lesson #1: The TSP Index…the ULTIMATE sports betting barometer!
You will hear me talk about the TSP Index a lot! The TSP Index is the output of a calculation which assesses the performance of ALL the money across ALL leagues active that’s placed by public rated bettors and sharp rated bettors at two large offshore sportsbooks. How does it do this? Each sportsbook rates their bettors using various tiers of public and sharp rating. The ratings are done by the sportsbook’s systems based on a variety of factors and for every player in their system. My calculation, which is done automatically at the end of each day by a program, looks at combined ROI of all the sharp rated bettors who were in action for the previous day (both by league and overall) and compares it to the combined ROI of all the public bettors (again by league and overall) who were in action for the previous day. It then dials this performance down and rates it on a scale. The scale runs -5 to +5. A public market is negative, a sharp market is positive. Most markets will end up in the positive because the public as a whole always loses and sharps as a whole always outperform the public by comparison. However, even though the TSP Index reading might normally be a positive number, there are still fluctuations up and down that occur within that number. These up & down fluctuations help us to see which side of the market (public or sharp) is on a run. There is a moving average on the TSP Index chart which helps to see who has the momentum. Sometimes the TSP Index line is above the moving average which indicates sharps are on a run, sometimes the TSP Index line is below the moving average line which indicates the public is on a run. For more details, and to see the actual charting and data, visit TheSharpPlays.com/the-sharp-plays-index/.
All this might seem complex, but I do the job of reading the Index for you each day in TSP Live if you don’t want to do it yourself. You can find a TSP Index table on the TSP Live Dashboard (link in the website menu, in every TSP Live alert, on Telegram with every alert, on the home page, and directly at https://tsp.live/tsp-live-alerts/). Under the “Informational Links” menu on the TSP Live Dashboard page, you will see the second link contains “TSP Index” in it. Click that and scroll down for the TSP Index table. The table tells you the current trend of Index (UP or DOWN), what that trend means, my comments on the Index, and how each league is trending along with an indicator (1, 0, -1) that illustrates how active sharp money is in the league…details on the table itself. The TSP Index is a great tool, but if you are like the haters, you will dismiss it immediately because you can’t understand it. Followers who spend the time to monitor the Index will say that its predictive power for catching hot and cold runs right away is far too consistent to be dumb luck. The Index was the first analytical tool I launched at the website back in 2019 and it has been running every single day since for a reason!
The TSP Index operates on a theory I came up with when enjoying the casino games of craps and primarily baccarat. If you have ever played baccarat you know it is a game of playing the runs. You play the bank run, you play the player run. There are patterns to the game that players try to predict. In your own gambling, do you ever notice that you have runs where you can’t hit a bet and all the breaks go against you, and then that run is eventually followed by a run where you can’t miss a bet and all the breaks go in your favor? Every time you walk into a casino there is usually a point where you are up money because of this cyclical dynamic. Imagine if you had a tool that could give you a high probability of knowing when a hot run is getting started? You could expand you risk, you could press on games, you could take shots on more exotic wagers and ride the run! What if you could know that the first bad day is the start of a potential cold run…you could tighten up your action, have lower risk out there and protect bankroll. The TSP Index aims to provide this early warning system for your betting. Check it out at the links above!
Lesson 2: The purpose of reporting sharp buys, group action, and other intel along with having various analytics tables is to make you a more informed bettor, not to prompt you to place a wager on every bit of content published.
If you are new to TSP Live…for the first couple weeks after joining…just follow the action in the TSP Portfolio and ignore ALL THE OTHER CONTENT for wagering purposes. While you will be ignoring the other content for wagering purposes, please do not ignore all the other content altogether. Educate yourself on the other content through the resources on TSP.Live (there’s even an “Education” section at https://tsp.live/education/ which is also in the website menu) and TheSharpPlays.com. Then take the time to read through the alerts, learn the type of information that gets posted, check out the logs and records at TheSharpPlays.com so you can analyze the angles, view the analytics tables in TSP Live like the TSP Live Radar, KB Consensus and Book Needs each day, learn about TSP Insiders paid and bonus content, etc….but when it comes to what you bet during the early days of being a TSP Live subscriber or TSP follower…just follow the TSP Portfolio wagers. The TSP Portfolio action is always in an easy to locate green box in every TSP Live alert. The Portfolio action is SPECIFICALLY designed for the novice bettor to be low risk, high reward/ROI and with low volatility.
After a couple weeks of educating yourself and reviewing all the content, or for some just a couple days, you will then have a good idea of how you prefer to view what gets reported as part of TSP Live and The Sharp Plays. You might see free and/or paid angles reported that you would like to add to your own betting portfolio and regardless of what the TSP Portfolio is doing OR you might decide that all the other content outside of the TSP Portfolio is not for you. Maybe you don’t quite understand it, maybe it seems like too much noise, maybe it all sucks to you…whatever! So, you decide to stick to the TSP Portfolio and that’s it. Perfect! Just decide how much you want to wager per 0.1 units of TSP Portfolio risk, ignore all the other content…and grind! It sounds like an excellent strategy to me because it sounds like it fits you…and that’s the key to any strategy!
I covered a couple lesson to get relatively up to speed on TSP Live. Now let’s discuss the key rules to being a professional or advantage bettor.
The first rule of sports betting as an advantage player is not to press or chase off a loss or during a cold run! Sure, we are all degenerates and we all will have little lapses in judgement, but the key is keeping those in check is VITAL to long-term success.
When I started as a bettor I was a total degenerate. There were times I chased on my bets (many times) until I basically could not bet anymore and ran out of credit and/or cash! Ugly shit, but most (likely all) of you know what I am talking about. However, as I became an advantage player, I began to have a different outlook on betting. I no longer saw the need to get even today because I trusted that as an advantage player, my run would be coming. So…no biggie that I lost today…maybe not tomorrow or the next day…but I will get mine! I believed that the cold run was a good thing because it meant another hot run was ahead…I just had to be smart and weather the ice storm to enjoy the heat once again.
There will likely be a lot of occasions in the future where you chase, but hopefully those chases are very minor compared to the past. I am absolutely guilty of chasing at times…still. However, the difference now than when I was a maniac is I have accepted the truth that today may suck, this week may suck, this month may suck, but things won’t always suck. Every day of cold action that I can survive is another day closer to the hot run. Going through a cold run is like counting down the days to Christmas as a child…it’s coming and each day passed is a day closer to paradise…and presents!! Like Christmas, a true hot run is a drug like no other…and why all of you are here…to savor those hot runs and all the profits, excitement, adrenaline, and dopamine highs that come with it!
Since going from total degenerate to partial degenerate, I have embraced patience over urgency to get even. I have embraced faith in the long-term performance of the content to provide me a hot run after every cold run. I trust that when the content delivers that hot run, it will erase my losses and provide me a sweet profit on top. The trust in the future has DRAMATICALLY removed the need/desire to chase in the present. Once you lose that desire to chase…gambling can be so much more enjoyable, less stress and profitable! Burning up bankroll by chasing during a cold run destroys your potential profit margin for the INEVITABLE hot run to follow!
The second rule is to accept gambling reality. The longer you hold inaccurate preconceived notions about how professional gambling works…the more financial pain, stress and frustrations you will experience in your betting.
The third rule is to get used to losing…because it is going to happen…A LOT! I have probably lost around 50,000 bets in my life! The good news is I have won more than I have lost and that’s the simple math that works in this game.
You MUST get used to handling losses. I recently had a discussion in TSP Live because of a handful of maniacs who were beside themselves due to losses in the TSP Portfolio during Week 1 of NCAAF. How big were these losses? Well, the Portfolio was down as much as 0.66 units in September. Not exactly a lot given the average bet lifetime for the Portfolio is around 0.16 units. Still…despite the incredible ROI for the TSP Portfolio…people just could not handle what is really a very minor loss.
When faced with losses, inexperienced gamblers automatically assume that something was done wrong. The goal of your gambling was to win…you did not…so you did the math wrong or didn’t analyze the games properly. No…that’s really not it. How about simply that in a game of luck, even the best gamblers and strategies will have losses. So, accept those losses and keep grinding…the wins always come in the end!
The other thing inexperienced gamblers tend to do is they want to search for a system that never has losses. These guys try to perfectly time the ebbs and flows of their betting. If you can’t handle losses in betting you are probably not experienced enough to perfectly time the ups and downs of the TSP index and know when is best to fade the sharps and follow the public. Instead, STOP THINKING! Stop trying to do something that is IMPOSSIBLE in gambling which is removing losses. Find a winning strategy, be happy that because you have a winning strategy that you are better than 96 out of 100 people you see in the sportsbooks…and just ride the good and the bad…knowing that everything will workout fine in the end!
The TSP Portfolio truly blows away ANY gambling content ANYWHERE. The wagers are logged, the results are calculated and the ROI blows away all the competition. Not to mention, following the TSP Portfolio takes less THAN FIVE MINUTES EACH DAY!! Last year saw losing months of -3.37 units, -3.11 units, -1.90 units and yet the Portfolio is +33.8 units lifetime…the method works. There will be losses, but the Portfolio will eventually grind those losses back and put some profit into our pockets on top!
As I told someone recently…you have Margot Robbie in front of you…and she is all yours. Stop trying to make her hotter or sexier…just enjoy what you have! It doesn’t get better than the TSP Portfolio…you can search…you’ll eventually see for yourself. So, stop trying to lessen the losses of content that has a lifetime ROI over +17%! It’s light years away from the next profitable service out there. It does not get any better, just sit back and ride the ups and downs! Stop trying to make Margot sexier.
There’s not a lot of advanced strategies and techniques here because this is the “newbies guide”. However, if you can master the simple things in this article…your time as a newbie will be brief and you will have a strong head start to being a consistent and long-term profitable bettor…earning that legitimate “Professional Gambler” badge that is so coveted among degenerates.
If you have questions, please reach out on Telegram (t.me/TheSharpPlays) or use the Contact form here on the TSP.Live website!
Good luck!