Do sportsbooks limit winners?

It's well-known that most sportsbooks take aggressive steps to counter winning gamblers, usually by severely cutting their betting limits or 86ing them entirely. However, there has been little public discussion of exactly what triggers a book to take such actions.

theathletic.com - James Holzhauer's tips to avoid getting limited by a sportsbook

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Make Your Bookie Cry And Pull The Hair By Generating $23,187

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It’s well-known that most sportsbooks take aggressive steps to counter winning gamblers, usually by severely cutting their betting limits or 86ing them entirely. However, there has been little public discussion of exactly what triggers a book to take such actions. (Hint: it’s not just how much you’ve won off them.) How is it that some pros have been able to get the money for years and keep going?

Plug alert: I’m hosting a 100%-for-charity fundraiser in Las Vegas in August called the Game Show Boot Camp, and one of our seminars is about how to ace an audition in front of TV producers. I like to offer a thought experiment: “what would the absolute worst contestant look like (e.g. slow the game down to a glacial pace, talk so quietly that the audience can’t hear you) and how can I do the exact opposite of that?” In that spirit, let’s imagine what you’d do if for some reason you were trying to get banned as quickly as possible, and discuss how to avoid being that guy.

Size Your Bets Recklessly

I started betting on sports on the internet in the mid-2000s. There, the limits were transparent: if you were ever curious how much action they’d take on an event, you could type $1,000,000 into the wager box and see what the computer counter-offered. When I first gambled in Las Vegas a couple years later, I discovered that they do things differently here. If you show up at the window and eagerly ask how much you can bet on a prop, you immediately start getting profiled as the “wrong” type of customer. Even if they do take a sizable wager from you this time, they’re keeping an eye on you from the get-go. Think about two types of customers: one is a carefree punter looking for some action (i.e. the sportsbook’s favorite type of player) and the other has inside information that Tom Brady is coming out of retirement. Which of these guys would ask to bet every penny they’ll let him, rather than a specific round number? Don’t make yourself too obvious. (Incidentally, I discovered that at many shops asking for a $3,000 bet was a success, while inquiring about the wagering limits resulted in a $1,000 cap. This is yet another reason to play coy.) Even on an app that clearly discloses the max bet, wagering that amount to the exact dollar is the kind of move that automatically gets you on a list. While this list encompasses both sharps and gambling addicts, it doesn’t take a genius working at the sportsbook to figure out which one you are. How should you size your bets to avoid attention? Of course it depends on the sportsbook and the situation, but in general I’ve found that wagering 70-80% of the limit on betting apps is a sweet spot where you still get a good return but don’t trip the computer’s built-in algorithm to flag your account. At some point, you will still get made by a manual review, but you should last longer this way. For more sports betting coverage at The Athletic, follow our sports betting section.

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Bet Both Sides of the Same Game

Many winning gamblers bet games they don’t have an opinion on, simply because they can find an off-market price. Sometimes the market shifts enough that taking the other side looks awfully tempting–you can lock in a sure value and lower your risk in the process, maybe setting up a juicy middle. Should you?

In a vacuum, sportsbooks should love customers who take both sides: the book collects a 4.5% vig on transactions (at least in theory) and you’re increasing their total betting volume without upsetting the balance of action on each side. There are two major problems here, though: This is something pros frequently do and amateurs don’t, so it looks suspicious It’s extremely easy for the sportsbook’s computer to automatically flag your account every time you do this In the rare cases where a sportsbook has actually admitted why they locked my account, this was usually the trigger. The good news is they’ll often let you off with a warning the first time, but my advice is to never bet both sides at the same shop. (It should be fine to do it on different apps.) You don’t want to paint a bullseye on your back.

Clean the Board

It goes by many names—board cleaning, steam chasing, front-running—but by any moniker it’s the practice of watching like a hawk for a major market move or breaking injury news, then betting the hot side at a shop that hasn’t adjusted the line yet. This will earn you money in the short run, but will quickly make you persona non grata. Sportsbooks hate board cleaners, and with very good reason. The relationship between a shop and a sharp bettor is based on a covenant: your bets tell us when our odds are off, you win some money off us, and we use that information to set the point spread more accurately. At least two Vegas sportsbooks will even take large bets from gamblers who are known to have inside information about athletes’ health. To those shops, it’s worth a thousand bucks of expected value to know when a quarterback is hiding an injury, because they can now set their odds to attract action on that QB’s team. Information is king. Board cleaners take the book’s money without offering any value in exchange. Typically they’ll bet in response to breaking Twitter news or a syndicate moving the whole market—publicly available facts that the book would incorporate into their point spread mere seconds after you fire a bet. At most shops, if you’re getting the money without giving useful information back, they won’t keep letting you play. Unless you’re the type of player who finds shady ways to keep flying under the radar, board cleaning is not a long-term recipe for winning.

Focus Too Much on One Market

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It’s hard enough to consistently beat one betting market, let alone multiple ones. For many bettors the best strategy is to stick to a specific low-limit market (e.g. NFL player props or Atlantic 10 basketball) that is more prone to mispriced lines because big players don’t bother with it and the bookie isn’t too concerned with setting an accurate number. Your short-term returns may be very good, but if you focus too hard on one type of bet the sportsbook will eventually take notice. I once found a shop that priced its NHL team totals by copying another operator’s lines, but the copycat included overtime and shootouts when the originator didn’t. Since about a quarter of games go to OT, I had a massive advantage betting the over on almost every team–until the day my edge, along with my betting limits, suddenly went to zero. Even pro-friendly sportsbooks have responded to my action by removing certain betting markets altogether, knowing that there must be a reason I keep playing them so aggressively. How can you avoid killing your golden goose? It’s hard to say exactly how much you can win before the sportsbook figures you out, but you should at least try to mix in some other kinds of wagers for camouflage, and not bet every single prop on the board.

Final Thoughts

As you’re betting, consider how the sportsbook will perceive your action and avoid obvious tells. I once had a ticket writer tell me I had “sharp” written on my forehead in permanent marker as I was placing five large MLB futures bets in one trip to the window–I didn’t get to keep playing at that shop much longer. Be smarter than I was. If you’d like to meet and learn from TV trivia icons like James Holzhauer, Amy Schneider, Brad Rutter and more, the Game Show Boot Camp is coming to Las Vegas Aug. 19-21. We’ll have seminars on how to impress TV producers and be a great contestant, an official Jeopardy! audition, and opportunities to compete against the greats. There will also be a main event, the Titan Throwdown, where competitors face off against ten champions from The Chase, Jeopardy and Master Minds. All proceeds from both events benefit unhoused and disadvantaged Las Vegas high school students.

theathletic.com - James Holzhauer's tips to avoid getting limited by a sportsbook

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