Are You Running Hot, or Betting Smart?

How many bets does it take until you can be sure that you have an edge? How bad can it go? And what's the best case scenario? It's a concept sports bettor know as variance. Everything that can happen does happen somewhere. It's the idea behind the multiverse theory that you've heard about in all those Marvel movies. And in every universe, there's a bettor. We'll call him Rick. He's placing the same 200 bets at the same odds, the same sports books. Come take a walk with me across the multiverse. A random walk. Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide tools and education to help you find and place sharper bets. I've been a professional gambler for over 20 years.

I started with card counting and not a lot of money. Back then, I was the version of Jack still struggling to learn how all of this works. Early on, I read Blackjack Attack by Don Schlesinger. It had formulas for calculating your risk as a card counter. Those are my actual notes from 1999 when I tried to work it all out by hand. Because even then, I intuitively understood something that variance is the biggest liar in gambling. It doesn't just swing your bankroll, it messes with your head. Lucky Rick hits 10 straight bets and thinks he's cracked the code. Run bad Rick can't buy a win and thinks he's hopeless.

And for every bet break even Rick wins, he loses the next one and tinkers his way out of a winning model. What's really going on here?

Random Walks in Betting

Let's take a closer look. Suppose there are 50 universes of Ricks out there, but none of them have an edge. These 50/50 Ricks are all starting with $10,000 betting 1% per play on even money vigree lines. In other words, coin flips. Here's how they did. This is what we call a random walk chart. It's a way to visualize variance when you know the odds of each trial, your edge, and your stake. You can ask ChatGPT or any other AI service to simulate one of these for yourself. None of the Ricks actually had an edge, but Lucky Rick here was $3,600 to the good. Run bad Rick was down almost $2,100. And break even Rick. Well, he managed a meager $100.

In fact, even with zero edge, 26 of the 50 Ricks finished with a profit. But we don't get to bet into vigree coin flip lines. How would our Ricks do with no edge? Betting into minus 110, where you'd need to be right 52.4% of the time to break even. Well, this time only six out of 50 Ricks were profitable. Minus 110 each way gives the house a four and a half percent edge.

But what if we flipped that and gave our 50 Ricks a plus 4% edge. This time we get 40 profitable Ricks. That means we still have 10 Ricks who were betting with a 4% edge who lost money after 200 bets and one run bad Rick who lost nearly 2,700. But maybe run bad Rick is suspicious. Those results don't line up with what he thinks may be a good process. How would he know if 200 bets was enough for his edge to prove out? Or was he just catching bad breaks?

Here's something I learned back in my card counting days.

Using N0 in Betting

It's called N0, and it's basically a measure of how long it takes for skill to beat luck. The n is the number of trials or bets and n0 indicates the number of bets you need to overcome one standard deviation of variance. Standard deviation is how we measure variance. How many bets do you need to have an 84% chance of being ahead? The answer for runbad Rick is 528. Before that, anything can happen. For lots of bettors, getting to 528 bets might mean 2 to 3 months of grinding plus EV bets every day. If you're more selective in what you bet, that might mean an entire season.

But here's the cruel twist. Most Ricks don't know their real edge. Even in blackjack, where the edges are discreet and there's only a finite number of cards to work with, it's still hard. I might be a blackjack god in simulation software, but once I got to the casino, I could potentially lose the count or fail to bet what I needed to because I was afraid of being caught. But in sports, forget about it. Sports aren't played with a finite deck of cards like blackjack is. There are miracles, mishaps, and the Mets. Sites like Unabated can quantify your edge based on information you use as your source of truth. Prop betting might use player stat projections as its source of truth.

The risk is making sure your source of truth is well truthful. This is where market efficiency comes into play and actually helps you. The more efficient the market, the less likely you are to find big edges, but the more certain you can be in those edges being truthful.

The Efficiency Effect

A relatively efficient market like NFL sides allows you to be more certain than say Major League Soccer. And when it comes to N0, the bigger the edge you have, the fewer bets you need to reach it. Let's say sharp Rick has a 4% edge. Above average Rick has a 2% edge. You can see here that above average Rick needs five times as many bets as sharp Rick to prove he has an edge. MLS Rick bets in softer markets than NFL Rick. His edges look bigger, but they aren't as certain as the ones NFL Rick bets because MLS markets aren't as efficient. When he calculates his N0, MLS Rick should be conservative and divide his edge in half.

If we had a props Rick, who was focusing just on player props, he should divide his edge by something more like four. Props can have even bigger edges, but even more uncertainty. And that's not the only problem all these Ricks run into. We've just been talking about betting minus 110 lines. Longshot Rick, who bets parlays and big underdogs, has a higher end zero than chalk Rick, who likes to bet heavy favorites, which makes sense. The more frequent something happens, the more multiveres there are where it represents a winning bet. All those longshot ricks need the long run to see results start to line up with expectation.

Here's an exercise you might want to explore. Take your entire bet log and feed it into ChatGPT to give you a weighted average of your edge, amount wagered, and odds distribution. That should help take some of the uncertainty around variance away and let you become the best version of them all.

Being Sharpest

Stable Rick, you see, stable Rick doesn't panic, doesn't tinker, and doesn't chase. He understands what's luck and what's skill. He believes in the numbers and understands the patience that might be needed to see the results he wants. That's what makes him sharpest Rick. Be the sharpest Rick.