Guaranteed Profits in NBA Futures?

In our first newsletter, I showed you how to calculate the sportsbook’s edge on any given bet, and we made NFL futures bets in markets that were MUCH easier to beat.

Find that content here if you’d like a refresher.

Today, we’ll use the same approach to find and bet some killer NBA futures.

Here’s the thing though…

Some of these markets are so good, the house edge is negative. You can bet with no risk and lock in profits!

I’ll recommend a betting approach with a bit more gamble, but as the Robin Hood of sports betting, taking from the house and giving to the bettors, I’m psyched about this opportunity.

In addition to our “Bets of the week” below, we’ve got our first sponsored section from a fantastic newsletter I read every day.

Let’s get after it!

Best and Worst Futures Markets

The house edge on big, multi-way markets, like “NBA championship winner”, is very high. This is even more true if you’re betting with only one sportsbook. Since books offer betting on so many teams in these cases, they protect themselves by building in a large margin of safety.

By contrast, the house edge is very low, and in today’s case, negative, in markets like “regular season win totals” or “division winner”. This is especially true when different sportsbooks have different opinions on how teams are likely to perform.

Here are two great examples:

1. Example 1 — Oklahoma City Thunder Season Wins

Using Juice Reel to compare lines across the New York sportsbooks, I found that I could bet the Thunder to win over 57.5 games on DraftKings at +115.

I can bet the opposite way, Thunder to win under 57.5 games, on BetMGM at -110.

Presuming you could access both sportsbooks, you are set! If you chose to guarantee and maximize your profit, you could allocate $100 as follows and lock in a 1.12% return:

As fun as it might be to grab $1.12 from these sportsbooks for every $100 you bet, I do not recommend betting this way.

The NBA season is 6 months long, so you’ll be better off financially by parking that hundy in a high-yield savings account, and taking a couple cold showers to FEEL ALIVE.

This is, however, a great market to make a wager in, as you know it’s an easy one to beat. I’ll suggest a specific bet below.

2. Example 2 — NBA Southwest Division Winner

Juice Reel shows me the following lines to win this division:

Using the methods I describe here, we can see that the house edge is again negative, at -0.5%!

Here’s the visual:

NBA Southwest Division Winner

Our next step will be to narrow our considered bets within this market, but let’s sum up my research on NBA futures markets overall:

Season win totals house edge is Great, between -1% and 2%. Bet these.

Division winner house edge is Great, between 0% and 2%. Bet these.

Season player prop house edge is Decent, between 3% and 7%. Consider these.

NBA Champion house edge is Terrible, between 14% and 22%. Avoid these.

How to Choose a Side in a Good Futures Market

Once I’ve found a great futures market, I care about three things in choosing what bets to make, two quantitative and one more anecdotal.

On the quant side, I want to check two boxes.

First, I look for “outlier” lines.

When one book is offering a line that’s meaningfully more attractive than the other books, it’s often a positive sign of value, and I’m inclined to grab it before it moves. Here’s an example:

FanDuel is offering me 29% more profit than the next best option to bet on the Nuggets winning their division. That’s a big deal!

Second, I skew my bets away from teams with very long odds.

While the house edge might average 2-3% on a bet like this, it does not apply evenly. The book is often taxing extreme longshots at three times the rate of the favorites (think San Antonio to win the division at 30:1).

On the anecdotal side, I am wary of betting on teams that have been “talked up” heavily in the offseason. In fact, I like to bet against them.

To use a live example:

No one is a bigger NBA voice than Bill Simmons. When last week’s Bill Simmons NBA podcast began with a rant about how the Thunder couldn’t possibly win fewer than 60 games, it got me very curious about betting against the Western conference favorites.

Let’s bring all these themes together and make some bets.

Bet of the Week $$

Last week we bet two ladders. We won all three rungs with the Lions (!!), but took some bad luck in the second when Chase Brown scored a late TD instead of going down at the one yard line. Overall the six bets won 0.6 units — I hope you joined me!

Since starting the newsletter, bets given out in this section are now ahead 3.7 units, at a positive 30% ROI. We’ll update this regularly.

Based on the research above, I am making the following bets:

• Oklahoma City Thunder Under 57.5 wins @-110 on BetMGM for 3 units

• Dallas Mavericks to Win the NBA SW Division @+170 on FanDuel for 3 units (this line got better while I was writing this newsletter, grab it!)

• New Orleans Pelicans to Win the NBA SW Division @+400 on ESPN Bet for 2 units

• Houston Rockets to Win the NBA SW Division @+800 on DraftKings for .75 units

If any of the three teams wins the division, we’ll end up with a profit, but we’re skewing toward the Pelicans as our top choice.

Next week we’ll get back to the NFL and talk about a bet type that has a bad reputation but can produce good results when deployed correctly.

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