Each installment of Isaiah’s Methods & Opinions (IMO) is brought to you by No House Advantage, a cutting-edge daily fantasy site that allows users to risk little and win big in over 30 states. Bet VS. THE HOUSE to win up to 21x your money or play in PICK’EM CONTESTS against other users! New players can secure up to a $100 deposit match by registering with No House Advantage today! This week’s column will focus on unit structure and bet sizing — along with the Los Angeles Lakers.
March Madness is fast approaching. Once that’s over, the NBA playoffs will have almost arrived. It’s set to be a crazy month, so let’s start getting ahead of things. I’ll be here every week for two installments of Isaiah’s Methods & Opinions (IMO)! You can trust me to break down the betting trends and sports news that will give you an edge on the sportsbooks.
No bettor can hit every bet, but the key to profitable sports gambling is to develop a successful process — or method — for identifying sharp wagers. It’s the application of sharp opinions to that method that separates the wheat from the chaff in the sports gambling world. If your priors are wrong, you’ll end up sweating more bets than you must.
This column will help bettors develop sharp methods and come to well-informed opinions.
Isaiah’s Methods: Unit Structure & Bet Sizing | Sponsored by No House Advantage
If you bet on sports or play at daily fantasy sites like No House Advantage, you are going to lose. Sometimes you will lose a lot. If anyone could go undefeated in sports gambling, the industry wouldn’t exist. Note that this doesn’t mean you’ll lose money long-term. Plenty of gamblers win more money than they lose. Professional gamblers exist.
The key to sports betting is to approach it with a long-term view. Let’s say you have a bankroll of $1,000. You also have an angle on 10 of the games played on a given day. If you place one $1,000 wager on the game you feel the strongest about, you won’t (1) won’t have any way to hedge that bet live, (2) won’t have any exposure to your other angles and (3) won’t have a way to make up your losses if you lose.
Even betting $100 on all 10 of those games is too risky. Even if you’re right half the time, you’ll still lose money because the books pocket something called the vig (or juice) to cover their operating expenses. You’re exposing yourself to the possibility of 100% loss — a risk no good investor would take.
Instead, view your bankroll as you would a stock or bond. You have $1,000, and your goal is to increase that $1,000 by, say, 10% over the course of a year. You can go up 2% one quarter, down 3% quarter, then get hot and go up 11% over the back end of the year. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose — cold spells will happen. Make sure you aren’t betting enough to chew through the bankroll you could have used to do things like hedge out of plays, get exposure to different games and make up your losses.
Unit structure is a useful way to structure your gambling. Take the total amount you’re willing to commit to gambling and divide it by a certain amount. Some sharps recommend a minimum bankroll of 100. Personally, I think 25 or 50 are doable if you’re very deliberate about not over-exposing yourself. If you’re a volume bettor, consider dividing your bankroll into 150 or 200 units.
Touts and bettors approach unit structure differently. Because I have a larger unit size but a smaller overall bankroll, I am likelier to make partial-unit wagers. I will rarely bet more than enough to profit a full unit. In contrast, other touts with smaller unit sizes but larger overall bankrolls feel comfortable about placing 20-to-30 unit plays. Those can also be profitable — but make sure to understand what a unit means to the tout in question. The same logic applies to DFS lineups or prop lineups at No House Advantage: only wager as much as you can afford to lose.
Also, make sure that the tout you’re tailing has a profitable record. That’s why I keep mine in my Twitter bio.
Isaiah’s Opinions: Lakers Can Make Playoff Push Without LeBron James
Some analysts wrote the Los Angeles Lakers off after the LeBron James injury news. The team announced that James didn’t need surgery but would be evaluated again in late March, forcing the Lakers to play without him for much of their late-season push. However, those analysts forgot that the NBA is inherently relative — after the trade deadline, there aren’t 10 better Western Conference teams than the LeBron-less Lakers.
The Lakers find themselves only three games behind the fifth-seeded Golden State Warriors, who they just beat on Sunday. They are 2.5 games behind the sixth-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves and are tied with the ninth-seeded Utah Jazz, who appear to be tanking, and the 10th-seeded Portland Trail Blazers. Only the 12th-seeded New Orleans Pelicans, who the Lakers are also tied with, seem to pose a legitimate threat from below.
I wouldn’t have spoken out in support of the Lakers before the trade deadline. However, the team added some much-needed depth and diversified its roster, which, before the trade, consisted of far too many point guards. Now, even without James, the Lakers have a starting five of D’Angelo Russell, Malik Beasley, Troy Brown Jr., Jarred Vanderbilt and Anthony Davis. Dennis Schroder, Austin Reaves and Mo Bamba all both provide meaningful value off the bench.
The team’s trade-deadline moves shore up most of my problems with their roster. James said it himself early in the year — the Lakers lacked the necessary 3-point shooting to keep up in the modern NBA. Instead, they had a surplus of ball-dominant point guards who struggled with long-range accuracy. But adding Malik Beasley, who is averaging 2.9 3-pointers per game on 35.6% shooting for L.A. so far, has helped. D’Angelo Russell, who is currently working back from an injury, averaged 1.5 3-pointers on 35.3% shooting in four games with L.A.
L.A.’s recent nine-game stretch without James isn’t quite representative of what the team can do without him. Russell missed all of those games. Davis missed one. The coaching staff is adjusting to life with a lot of new pieces, but the talent is there for this team to succeed. The Lakers did enough to beat the Thunder without either Russell or Davis. After Davis returned, they topped the Golden State Warriors without Russell. The Lakers ranked a steady 18th in net rating (-1.7) through that stretch, ahead of the Blazers (-4.2), Pelicans (-6.1), Jazz (-7.1) and Clippers (-7.2).
Even though LeBron James is likely to return before the playoffs, the Lakers currently own odds of 34-1 to come out of the Western Conference. That’s worse than the Pelicans 30-1, whom they currently lead in the standings. Those odds rank eighth in the conference. Although they would likely end up playing the Denver Nuggets in the first round, strong enough play could lead to a first-round matchup with the Sacramento Kings. At 55-1, the Kings have worse odds than the Lakers to come out of the West. Once the play-in arrives, backing the Lakers’ players to make some noise in the play-in tournament at places like No House Advantage could prove profitable.
