Sportsbook Con 101: The Bogus Boost
All that glitters is not gold
Note: I was recently featured in a great state of the industry video on sports betting by More Perfect Union that I cannot recommend enough. Not only is it very informative (mostly thanks to the host, David Hill, one of the best writers on gambling), but it’s incredibly well produced and a very enjoyable watch.
Sportsbooks need their customers to make bets. Usually this takes very little convincing. If a guy (and it’s usually a guy) wants to bet on the Yankees, all the book needs to do is offer that bet and he’ll go place it.
But sometimes it’s not that simple. Some gamblers aren’t sure whether to bet, or what to bet on, and it’s the sportsbook’s job to nudge them into a decision. Sportsbooks also want to encourage users to place more bets. More bets means more profit, and their goal is to maximize profits.
Modern sportsbooks nudge their customers in various ways. They add new and exciting markets, allow gamblers to watch live streams only for games they’ve wagered on, and send push notifications to promote upcoming bets.
They also sometimes alter the odds to make certain wagers more appealing. One of the most common ways they do this is via odds boosts, which increase the odds of a specific bet chosen by the sportsbook.1 These boosts are often large enough to render the wager profitable for the bettor. Sometimes they’re literally free money: last year, when launching in Vermont, Fanduel offered users an even money bet of up to $50 that the Bucks/Celtics game would have more than 0 points.
Even when a boost isn’t big enough to make a wager profitable, it’s usually enough to make it more appealing than most other wagers in a sportsbook. Betting on odds boosts is kind of like shopping in the sale section: usually it’s stuff you don’t want, but sometimes there are great deals. And it’s usually cheaper.2
Unfortunately, too many modern sportsbooks are operating like JCPenney. They advertise sales based on original prices that never existed, with the intent of tricking customers into thinking they got a deal when all they really got was an overpriced piece of garbage.
Here’s one recent example, from last Tuesday on Hard Rock sportsbook:
At halftime in the Magic/Cavaliers game they offered an odds boost on each team’s star player, Donovan Mitchell and Franz Wagner, to score 13 or more points in the second half. This is an appealing wager: you get to root for the best players on both teams, and 13 points isn’t that many, especially for them. Plus, the odds are “boosted”: Hard Rock is telling you that the odds were +150, meaning a $10 bet would profit $15, but now they’re +225, meaning that same $10 bet will profit $22.50. Sounds like a good bet!
But Hard Rock is lying. That wager never had odds of +150. They’re just saying it did to encourage you to bet the +225, which is still an absolutely awful deal.
How do I know? At halftime, Mitchell had 5 points. Hard Rock had his projected point total at 17.5, meaning to go “over” he would need 13 or more points. Wagner, meanwhile, had 8 points and a projected total of 18.5, meaning to go over he would need 11 or more points.
Hard Rock allowed users to combine these two bets—Mitchell scoring 13+ points and Wagner scoring 11+ points in the second half—for odds of +220.
In other words, Hard Rock’s listed odds for one player scoring 13+ points and the other scoring 11+ points were nearly identical to the “boosted” odds for both of them to get 13+. That +150 was simply made up.
Moreover, those 2 points matter a lot. The “boosted” odds bet was significantly worse than the bet users could have created by clicking the overs themselves.
Calculating exact probabilities for bets like these is hard. So I asked Kirk Evans, a professional basketball bettor specializing in NBA player props, for some help.
He told me the “true” odds for Mitchell 11+ and Wagner 13+ were around +255. Hard Rock was offering +220, meaning that bet had an expected return of roughly -10%.
The true odds for both players getting 13+ points, meanwhile, was around +330. Hard Rock was advertising +225, meaning the bet—which any reasonable person looking at the promotional banner would’ve thought was pretty good, if not super profitable—had an expected return of roughly -24%.3
What Hard Rock did isn’t rare. It’s also not illegal, and ensuring the accuracy of odds boost promotions shouldn’t be a priority for regulators.
But it is, like so many other marketing practices modern sportsbooks engage in, scummy.4
Gambling has and always will be a pretty scummy industry. The interests of the casino and the gambler are diametrically opposed—one winning more means the other losing more—and operators will necessarily tend towards doing things that screw over their customers.
But there's a difference between a business that profits from mathematical advantage and one that profits from lies. Hard Rock and others want us to believe they're the former while acting like the latter. Offering horrible bets is fair game. Falsely advertising your horrible bets to make them seem like great deals is not.
To adapt an old saying: modern sportsbooks are pissing all over their users and telling them it’s raining. And millions of Americans are so dazzled by the rainbow they can’t tell the difference.
Not to be confused with profit boosts, which allow users to boost the odds of a bet of their choice. (Profit boosts are often restricted to parlays or same game parlays, bets which have a much higher edge for the sportsbook).
If it’s not clear, I am generally a big fan of odds boosts. Obviously they can be very bad for the people who get sucked in and become addicted, but for the vast majority of users it’s a genuinely enjoyable addition to the betting experience.
Each player had a ~50% chance of hitting their over in isolation, and one player going over increases the other’s likelihood by ~ 6%, making the implied probability ~ 28% (.5*.56), aka +257 (adjusted down to +255 to account for Wagner’s odds being skewed towards the over). After his 11th point in the second half Wagner’s odds of scoring each additional point are about 91%, making the fair odds ~ (.28*.91*.91) = 23.2%, or ~ +330. For more betting insights like this I recommend checking out Kirk’s newsletter.
It’s especially scummy because in Florida the Seminole Tribe has a monopoly on regulated sports betting, meaning Hard Rock is the only place Floridians are (legally) allowed to bet. In competitive markets, consumers have power and can vote with their feet (and wallets). But when states grant exclusive licenses or make the barrier to entry so hard as to discourage new and innovative operators, they remove the strongest incentive for honesty and fair dealing.