I don't know about that... I think there's a legitimate ground for skill to give you an edge here.
Years ago, I spent an entire season publicly posting and tracking picks on my blog. Over the course of one season (2005 or 2006, can't remember which), I was picking 62.5% ATS, and all you need to beat the vig is 55%. I think college has much more variance (and probably a lot less attention) than picking NFL, and it's a lot easier to spot places where the line is just flat out wrong.
I did this through several ways:
- I did not pick games involving Purdue or Notre Dame. Too much emotional bias.
- I did not pick weeks 1 & 2 because it's too early to know what teams look like due to the degree of turnover on college rosters.
- I primarily picked Big Ten games because those were the programs with which I had a high degree of familiarity.
- Outside the Big Ten, I looked for games where I had a gut feel that the spread might be "wrong", and if my additional research backed up that claim, I included it in my spread tracking.
Essentially what I found was that I'd be picking about 6-8 games per week. Assuming 8 games per week and betting $110 per game (to win $100, just using this for the math), I'd average winning 5 bets per week and losing 3. So I'd gain $500 per week vs a loss of $330, or $170 per week. Averaged over a season, I could've pulled down a good $1500 or so.
The follow-up question, of course, is "well then why don't you do it?"
To that I say this... It takes a lot of time and effort to put into those picks. At the time I didn't really want to devote $800 a week to a betting pool, knowing that a bad week could hit me hard. And all that work and research over a span of 3-4 months, for only $1500? It just wasn't a big enough win to justify the time and risk. If I'd actually wanted to make $1500 over that time, I probably could have found much less risky ways to do so.
To make enough money to be worth it also meant risking a lot more, and especially in 2005/2006 I didn't have a significantly higher bankroll (say betting $550 per game x 8 per week) to do it.
That said, I'd bet that a lot of us on this site could pick games at a money-winning clip. Don't you think you could do better than a 55% record against the spread if you really put your mind to it?
I learned gambling from some guys who lived on my floor freshman year. They were booking bets and I made a few small bets with them and learned from them how it worked. They absorbed WAY too much risk and ended up having to drop out and get jobs to pay everyone back.
What I learned was that it was way to risky for me to want to be a bookie and I'm generally a lot less risk averse than the average bear. The problem is this:
The bookie takes 10% from the losers but for the bookie that only works out to 5% of the total. If you are booking $10k a week in bets that 5% is only $500/week. Worse, it isn't really even that high. Bets tend to be very regional. Ie, these guys were booking bets in a dorm at Ohio State so nearly every week they had more bet on tOSU than against tOSU. Explanation for the initiated:
If I'm a bookie and bwar bets $1,000 on Purdue+10.5 at Wisconsin while badge bets $1,000 on Wisconsin-10.5 vs Purdue this is AWESOME for me. Either way I make $100:
- If Purdue wins or loses by <10.5 I get $1,100 from badge and give $1,000 to bwar.
- If Wisconsin wins by >10.5 I get $1,100 from bwar and give $1,000 to badge.
The problem for me, as the hypothetical bookie, is if badge and bwar bet the same way. Lets say they each bet $1,000 on PU+10.5. Now the possibilities are:
- If Wisconsin wins by >10.5 then I get $1,100 each from bwar and badge and pocket $2,200.
- If Purdue wins or loses by <10.5 then I owe bwar and badge $1,000 each and I'm out $2k.
The only way for me, as the hypothetical bookie, to get out of having effectively bet $2k on UW+10.5 is to pass that bet along by calling a bigger bookie and betting $2k on Purdue+10.5. The problem is that I don't make any money at all that way. Now all am is a pass-through. If Purdue wins or loses by >10.5 then I get $2k from my bookie and give it all to bwar and badge. If Wisconsin wins by >10.5 then I take bwar's and badge's money and give it to my bookie.
Thus, even if I could book $10k/week in bets I'd still have to pass a decent percentage of it on. These two kids were booking bets at Ohio State. They tended to get a bunch of bets for Ohio State from naive young Buckeye fans. If Ohio State didn't cover the spread these two kids made a bunch of cash but if they did, well they weren't smart enough to pass their losers on so they were screwed.
Then, on top of that you have the issue of collections. There is a reason that the mob breaks people's kneecaps if they don't pay. Gambling is illegal. In the US our courts cannot be used to collect money earned through illegal means. Therefore, if either bwar or badge refuse to pay I'm on my own to collect the money and my clients are not going to be interested in rain-checks or "bookie credit". They want cash.
Obviously the collectibility issue is bigger when you take bets from people you don't know well. If you keep your operation small it might not be a problem at all but you can't make any money running a small bookie operation. You could also eliminate collections issues by requiring payment upfront but again, you can't run a large bookie operation with that restriction. If you want to make a decent amount of money at it you have to be booking at least $10k/week. Even then you are going to net less than $500/week by the time you back out for bets that you have to pass on to a bigger bookie and/or collections issues. For that amount of work it just isn't worth it.
