Cats, Mice, Handicappers, Touts, And Sportsbooks

Twenty seconds. That’s how long subscribers to Right Angle Sports have to find their game, open their bet slip, enter their stake, and hover their finger over the submit button.

Edward Golden, founder of the handicapping service that sells picks, has just sent them a text: “Set up UC Irvine minus 11.5.”

They wait. Why? Because the bet might be a real play, or it might be a decoy.

“So what we started doing about five or six years ago is our ‘set up and go’ release,” Golden said. “Everyone has the play in hand, they just don’t know if it’s real yet. Then we say go, and all they have to do is click submit.”

If it’s real, they have maybe one to 10 seconds before the line disappears. If they’re lucky.

This is what it looks like when you’re good enough at sports betting that sportsbooks fear your action and respond to it. And it raises a question the industry doesn’t like to answer: If books are this sophisticated about identifying and limiting sharp bettors, what does that say about everyone else they’re happy to take action from?

ID it

Rex Beyers, a longtime bookmaker who’s worked everywhere from Costa Rica to Caesars, said identifying sharp action is straightforward.

“The most important thing in the short term isn’t winning a bet, but it’s beating the number,” he said.

Books track patterns. They know which accounts consistently beat closing lines. They know which groups bet simultaneously. And yes, according to Beyers, they pay for subscriptions to tout services to stay ahead.

“We had people offshore that were subscribing to that stuff,” Beyers said, describing his time in Costa Rica around 2010. “We made sure that we were getting the goods as it was being released.”

Beyers assumes the same thing is happening now at the largest U.S. sportsbooks — “the ones susceptible to thousands and thousands of bets, definitely FanDuel, DraftKings, probably to an extent Fanatics … I would say that those people have multiple people that have access to all the tout stuff.”

But not everyone gets the sharp treatment.

Beyers describes a different category of handicapper entirely, the kind who might be living off a contest win from years ago, or running a service where subscribers consistently lose money.

“The tout business as a whole, if you go back to the start, I view it with some disdain,” he said. 

He recalls an offshore bookmaker who would look forward to football season specifically because a high-profile tout would get subscriber money and “they would immediately start blowing it. I mean, it was like football season was a cash register for this guy.”

That type of bettor — big following, poor long-term results — gets a completely different response from the books.

“If I know that you’re just a tout, if I have talked to you and can deem you’re not a player that can beat me in the long run, I’m not going to tell it to your face, but I am going to tell my boss,” Beyers said. “I’m going to say, ‘This guy can’t win. I’ve seen enough. I’ve talked to him enough. He’s not going to win. Whatever he wants to bet, put him on and we’ll just monitor.'”

They’re not afraid of the pick. They’re happy to have it.

Golden said every sportsbook operator he’s talked to has told him the same thing.

“I think they welcome any action that’s not deemed sharp,” he said. “So I mean, it might reach a certain tipping point where it’s just so many dollars that they have to react in some way to it to protect themselves. But I think as a general rule that they want that. They want as much of that as they can get.”

In short, Golden doesn’t think the books are paying much mind to the @AlexCaruso types, with their legions of social media followers. (Caruso didn’t respond to a request on X for an interview.) If the books think they have the right side, they’re happy to take the action.

The contrast is stark. Books spend money to track the sharps. They build sophisticated software to limit them. They create entire systems to identify and neutralize winning bettors before they can do damage.

And then they promote same-game parlays to everyone else.

“FanDuel will post their own — ‘hey, this is the same-game parlay that we’re promoting and there’s 18,000 people betting it,’” Beyers said. “So they’re clearly not afraid to take on a lot of action when they know that they have it good.”

Establish the props

Adam Levitan, co-founder of the fantasy analysis site Establish the Run, has watched the window shrink in real time. His service specializes in NFL and NBA player props, and when they release a play, they’re racing against the books.

“At the beginning, maybe you had 10 or 20, maybe sometimes 30 seconds to get something,” Levitan said. “And now, for most stuff you probably have one to 10 seconds tops to get something, depending on what it is.”

Do the books subscribe to his service?

“I don’t know for sure, but there’s been speculation that they are in there,” Levitan said. “After our full stat projections get released, which is after we’re done releasing official plays, you can see the lines move to basically what we have.”

The books, he said, “are not going to let us get in there and beat them for 10 percent or 15 percent or 20 percent. That’s just not the kind of business that they’re running.”

How does Establish the Run keep winning? Specialization and volume.

“If they’re going to post thousands of lines every week, we’re going to look at every single one,” Levitan said. “And we do look at every single one every week, and we find 20 or 30 that are the best each week. I mean, that’s always going to be there.”

DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has been unusually candid about which customers his company wants. At a November 2021 investor conference, he put it bluntly: “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players we want.” (He did clarify his comments later, saying he was talking about the true professionals.)

When pressed by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in September 2024 to explain the practice of limiting bettors, sportsbook representatives defended it as necessary risk management. An executive from Fanatics told the commission that “nearly half of the small population of limited customers were actually net losing with Fanatics at the time they were limited, which I really think drives home the point that we’re not looking at the results. We’re looking at the way they’re wagering.”

The message was clear: It’s not about whether you win. It’s about whether you’re trying to win the right way.

JeffBets

If I started JeffBets.com tomorrow and hit 60%?

“You would be irrelevant at the start,” Beyers said.

Detection doesn’t happen when you win. It happens when your subscribers move the same numbers at the same time.

“The only way that they would detect who you are, depending if you’re starting from scratch, you would not get detected until two things start happening,” Beyers said. “Certain accounts, the same accounts, started betting the same stuff and/or winning at an amount that would raise a red flag as an operator.”

The books then dig deeper: Are all these accounts betting the same thing? Are they in the same state? Do they fire at the same moment?

“And a lot of these people bet their own stuff on the side, so they’re going to bet your stuff that you send out and then they’re going to bet their own stuff,” Beyers said. “So then I have to find a way to differentiate. Well, this customer’s betting Jeff’s stuff, but he’s also betting his own stuff, and I don’t think he can win. So then you put a note in his account like, don’t move it heavily off of his own stuff. But if he’s betting the tout stuff or he’s the first one in, be ready to move it.”

Cat and mouse

Right Angle’s “set up and go” system wasn’t invented to be clever. It was born out of necessity.

“That’s kind of how betting groups would do it,” Golden said. “Like people get in a chat and they don’t want to give the play to certain people because they move it on everybody else, so they kind of have everyone get ready.”

Books adapted. Sharps adapted back.

Levitan said Establish the Run has tried “five to 10 other things that have worked, and they work for a limited time or a decent amount of time, and then we have to change something else.”

Golden has observed the market getting significantly harder.

“Even this year, I’ve noticed a pretty significant jump in the market,” he said. “Like if you go back 10 or 15 years, there’d be something like a 60 percent play, like something pretty obvious, and we would just sit there all night, we’d sit there all morning, and you could bet it. And as the years go on, more and more of those just get bet.”

The flip side is that books keep posting more lines, as Golden notes. More lines mean more opportunities for sharps to find edges. Which means more need for sophisticated limiting systems. Which means more innovation from the sharps.

Battle lines

Strip away the jargon and what’s left is simple: Books need two kinds of bettors.

The sharps help shape the lines. Everyone else provides the profit margin.

The first group gets watched, tagged, frozen, delayed, limited, and quietly respected.

The second group gets bonuses, boosts, and a same-game parlay button dead center on the home screen.

The system needs both.