Finding the Perfect Handicapper

Last week was part 1 of a three part series on problems in the betting advice industry and Juice Reel’s game-changing Elite Bettor Marketplace.

We covered the history of “touts”, or people selling betting advice, and the challenges for great bettors and those who want to find them.

This week, we’ll go deeper on that topic. I’ll walk through my “Robin Hood Guide” to how I research and identify the right bettors to subscribe to and tail.

More specifically, today we will cover the contrast between “seller-first” and “buyer first” marketplaces, I’ll share a “how to” on finding bettors to tail, and we’ll identify a few top bettors in different categories.

As always, we’ll look to continue our winning ways with basketball bets of the week!

Let’s get after it.

Marketplaces for Betting Advice

Juice Reel is not the first marketplace to support handicappers offering betting advice to an audience. They are however, doing something different.

Nearly every other such site prioritizes ease of use for their sellers, instead of transparency and trust for their buyers.

Here are two examples of sites prioritizing sellers rather than bettors:

1) A good friend of mine subscribes to a handicapper called the “Tennis Monster” who, not surprisingly, sells Tennis betting picks.

The subscription is managed via Patreon, and the “store” looks like this:

While the Tennis Monster seems like a stand up guy based on his bio, it’s impossible for a buyer to assess his skill in betting tennis. Even my friend who tails the Monster’s bets was unsure if he was a long term winner!

There’s no historical betting information provided, and a buyer must pay the $9 per month to even gain visibility into past posts from the handicapper.

That cost gets a lot higher when you invest money tailing their picks and find out you are not betting with an edge, yikes!

I’m guessing Patreon has a fantastic infrastructure in offering business tools to creators given their billion dollar valuation, but it offers no value to those looking to identify winning bettors before opening their wallet.

2) I stumbled upon a handicapper who sells picks on Whop under the handle “Advantage Sports Betting” by Michael Fiddle.

Here is the storefront:

Whop does a bit better than Patreon in helping potential subscribers assess this purchase, offering a subscriber count, reviews and ratings, and FAQs.

But I still have no idea what Mr. Fiddle’s betting record is — and I’m being asked to pay $99 or more, up front, to allow myself a chance to find out!

These two sites clearly focus on their sellers, and provide tools for great marketers to monetize an audience, regardless of their betting skill.

In the rest of the newsletter, by contrast, we’ll explore the tools available to assess handicappers before subscribing on Juice Reel’s Elite Bettor Marketplace.

Juice Reel is inserting themselves as a layer of trust, accountability, and verification between bettors and handicappers.

This product operates in a completely bettor-first fashion.

Phase One: Browsing and Filtering

As mentioned last week, all sellers have transparent track records and are not able to hide losses or manipulate stats. Their records come straight from linked betting accounts at FanDuel, DraftKings, PrizePicks and dozens of other sportsbooks.

The first action I take is to use filters to narrow the list of sellers down to those skilled in the sport, bet type and price point I am seeking. Here are the available filters:

Once I’ve applied filters, in this case seeking a top NHL Bettor, I can scroll through profile snapshots to see weekly subscription cost, profit, and ROI.

Here’s the visual:

Mike10693 has impressive numbers, but his ~42% ROI seems unsustainably high, so I’ll click his profile to do additional diligence.

Phase Two: Initial Handicapper Diligence

My initial profile level diligence gives me three pieces of information:

1. How does this handicapper describe themselves?

2. How many bets do they make daily, and what results have they been achieving?

3. Do subscribers have a positive experience paying to see their bets in real time?

Let’s take a look at each element, sticking with NHL leaderboard member Mike10693.

Here is his bio:

Notable to me is his assertion that betting is about making money, not winning individual legs (I agree!), and his confidence in betting college basketball (not NHL, but still valuable).

Looking at his recent activity, we see the following:

Mike seems to make 10 -150 bets per day — a wide range!

His daily pnl mostly seems to follow the ups and downs of a bettor with a small edge, but his massive win on Feb 22 leaves me curious if he’s betting long-shot alternate lines or multi-leg parlays. We’ll go deeper on this.

Finally we’ll look at the experience his subscribers are receiving. Here’s the information we have:

Mike is highly rated in “Tailability”, which means he syncs his bets into the app immediately after placing them.

His renewal rate is also “Very Good” indicating those who have subscribed to his betting feed are renewing their subscriptions week to week.

Lastly, let’s go deeper on some of the things that caught our eye in this initial exploration into Mike’s handicapping.

Remember, we’re able to do all of this research in order to get comfortable with this handicapper before pulling out a credit card.

Phase Three: Deeper Handicapper Diligence

The last things I’ll examine are as follows:

1. How consistent are Mike’s results over time? What is his risk profile?

2. How does Mike perform by sport? We found him on an NHL leaderboard but he mentioned NCAA basketball.

3. What happened on Feb. 22, and was Mike’s big win luck or skill?

Let’s again take a look at each element, starting with Mike’s results over time.

To gauge this, I’ll click over to the Analytics tab, and select the bar chart icon at the bottom right. Here’s what I see:

Based on the last year, it seems like Mike has frequent days of small losses mixed in with winning days of 2x to 5x the magnitude. Based on this chart, I’m guessing his bets will include parlays.

I’ll scroll down on the same analytics tab to gauge Mike’s performance by sport, and reconcile his strong NHL results with his self-claimed skill in NCAA basketball.

Here’s what I see:

Mike is a pretty balanced winner across the board! He has over 500 NHL bets leading to his $7400 in profit. He does have a larger track record of NCAA basketball bets, validating his claim.

I’m guessing Mike is skilled and finding attractive lines to fire at across different sports. His chart looks very different than a single-sport specialist who “originates” their own value opportunities like Juice Reel’s #1 bettor Calvin.

Here is Calvin’s chart to see the difference:

Finally, I’ll move to the “Settled” tab and run a Juice Report on Mike’s last year of betting, filtered to NHL bets and sorted with his biggest profit bets at the top.

Here are the filters I use:

Here’s Mike’s NHL chart:

This chart looks like a bettor who has an edge over sportsbooks, and deploys that edge by betting long-odds parlays. That’s my guess because his pnl declines gradually over time before spiking up in big ways.

I can confirm my suspicion by scrolling down to Mike’s big win on 2/22, a four-leg “shots on goal” parlay that came through in a big way:

Based on all of the free research I did above, I’d feel very comfortable paying $10/week to see Mike’s betting feed in real time and tailing his NHL bets, if not all of his primary sports.

This is why Juice Reel’s marketplace is such a game changer for people who want to buy betting advice, and for great handicappers. The amount of transparency and trust is unprecedented.

PS – if the Tennis Monster, or Michael Fiddle read this newsletter, and want to link their accounts, and use Juice Reel to validate their skill — we’d be thrilled to have you on the platform!

Now let’s make some bets.

Bets of the Week $$

Last week we went 1-0 and won 1 unit. San Antonio showed up well at home in their first game without Wemby and defeated Phoenix outright.

Our potential live bet on Duke did not action as they led Illinois by 33 (!!) with ten minutes remaining, outside of our betting range. If you had made a live bet at that point, though, you’d have won.

Since starting the newsletter, bets given out in this section are ahead 14.1 units, at a positive 25% ROI. A $100 bettor would be ahead $1,410! We’ll update this regularly.

Based on my research, I am making the following bets this week:

• Rutgers +10.5 against Michigan on ESPN Bet @-120 for 1 unit

Rutgers men’s basketball has performed significantly better in games where both of their star freshmen, Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, have played together compared to games where one or both were absent.

They are 11-8 straight up with both freshman present and 2-6 with one or both missing. This trend is even stronger against the spread (ATS), with Rutgers going 13-6 at full strength vs 3-5 ATS with an absent stud (or two).

Michigan, on the other hand, has not won by more than 4 points for six weeks, with their last eight wins coming by four or fewer.

That’s enough for me to bet Rutgers will stay within double digits of the ranked Wolverines.

• Over 240 points in Denver vs Milwaukee on DraftKings @-115 for 0.5 units

The Nuggets and Bucks are playing some of their best ball of the season.

Since the Bucks traded for Kyle Kuzma, they’ve won four straight. Denver has only lost once in the past month, and is #2 on offense since January 1.

I anticipate a lot of scoring in this one, and I’ll bet the “over” in this game based on recent trends (Juice Reel’s SharpMush agrees).

Next week we’ll close out our series on the betting advice industry with a detailed guide on how to most effectively leverage subscriptions in the Elite Bettor Marketplace.

Please fill out the survey about today’s newsletter and let me know your thoughts!