Broner Guest Blog - Reviewing The Masterclass
So this is my first "guest blog" as Broner reached out and asked if I would have any interest in publishing something written by someone less funny and less clever than yours truly. Although the time of year when it's good to help those less fortunate has come and gone, I decided I still had some charity left in me.
Everything written below is the work of Broner. You can follow him @bronerp4p. I know, the tag is really stupid. I think it has something to do with boxing, which was cool like 30 years ago. He should have picked something way more relevant and hip, like a movie from the 80's. Also, how stupid is it that I tagged his Twitter as if the person reading this doesn't already follow him? The only people that read this shit are gambling Twitter participants and already know who he is. It's like when Field Yates retweets Adam Schefter - buddy, how many people do you think follow you but not Schefter?
Anyways, joking aside, I think his review is a very fair assessment of the infamous sports betting Masterclass. I know this was topic was hot in the streets a few weeks back, but now seems like a good time to revisit as some of the initial snark and vitriol reactions may have eased up.
Lastly, before I copy and paste this thing below like all of my students do (future blog coming) when they turn in a big paper, I want to throw out the idea of more public writing samples. Writing is good; it makes you think. It makes you string together several coherent sentences and reflect on what you truly believe in. I know we're mostly past the written word and need dozens of podcasts, played at 1.25X speed to keep our attention, but really good writing feels like such an awesome throwback. I introduced one of my first blogs by saying I grew up on the SportsGuy's Page 2 column on ESPN as I sat in a cubicle (or stall, more likely) trying to avoid corporate America at all costs. Please, consider writing at some point. I will publish it anonymously if you wish and my editorial standards could not be lower. Here's Broner.
Master Class Review
When Master Class announced a sports betting class, the comments were divided between congratulating the participants or shitting on the whole idea, sight unseen. So I figured I’d actually watch it and form opinions instead of watching a promo and then forming some bad opinions. Below are my thoughts and criticisms and plaudits, I understand this is behind a paywall so I’ll keep it general and try not to give out any “sauce” that may be intended solely for paying customers. I also understand that this is aimed mostly at the beginning bettor, and so my review will be through that lens of how helpful it would be to someone who did not know much about betting on sports.
Minor note: the actual MasterClass website is a nightmare to navigate/click through.
There is a beautifully shot 45 second introduction, and then a cold open of Pizzola, Andrews, and Fiore talking about Mayweather/McGregor (note: Ferris told me that if I discuss any actual boxing here he will hit me in the head with a hammer), with video clips interspersed. Right away I’m furrowing my brow, as there are a couple of good points to be made here (markets are efficient but sometimes there are exceptions, find a reliable source of truth to determine your edge) but they get kind of glossed over for “You can win a lot of money!” even though Mayweather-McGregor-type events are exceedingly rare. We repeat this pattern of being told a story with no real point later in the class when we get into National Anthem betting, where Fortenbaugh discusses how his connections got him rehearsal times for the 2018 Super Bowl. This is a common angle/bet for well-connected pros or even recreational sharps, most people reading this have probably bet on this and heard 2nd/3rd/4th hand what the Anthem time is. It’s not clear what the supposed audience – beginning bettors – are supposed to gain from this. New bettors are extremely unlikely to have Fortenbaugh’s connections with people inside the stadium, and I would’ve tacked on to this that the Anthem edge is getting tougher with every passing year. This story takes about 2.5 minutes, or roughly 3.6% of the MasterClass’ run time.
Fiore states that you can make money at betting if you treat it like a game and “solve” it. I am going to harp on a lot of seemingly minor points like this but its really the crux of how I feel about this Masterclass overall, and that is that it’s often misleading, and therefore undermines the goal of providing solid foundational knowledge of sports betting. You cannot “solve” betting: markets get pulled, the “sources of truth” shift, the players in the market change, new information gets incorporated. You know who else thinks this? Rob Pizzola, at the 22 minute mark of this same video. “Sports are very dynamic” and “edges come and go.”
Kostos gives an anecdote about how before the 2023 NCAA playoffs, they were going to use a new ball, and the “edge” was that teams wouldn’t be used to the new ball in the first half, so totals would be lower, and they’d get used to it, and scoring would go up. Then the sportsbooks would realize this and adjust. Now I’m not going to go deep into the lab for the purposes of doing a free review on a blog, but if you blind bet the under 1H on every first round tournament game, you would net roughly 1.5 units over those 32 games. 1H college basketball totals are typically set at around 47% of the total full game total, so it’s assumed that the 2H will be higher scoring. This ratio remained consistent throughout the tournament. There was no giant edge to be had, just what seems to be pure speculation that was not borne out.
Key numbers are discussed, and Fortenbaugh goes on to explain that 7 is a “key number” in the NBA, which is the most common point differential. Your mileage may vary here, but I would quibble with qualifying the most common outcome as automatically being a key number. I don’t think there are analogs in other sports to the 3 and 7 in NFL, but I realize this is a semantics argument, as is Kostos saying an NFL spread moving from 4.5 to 5.5 “doesn’t matter at all.” If there’s a book that prices -4.5 and -5.5 the exact same, I’m not aware of it.
We get into props, and there is an extended segment with Rufus that is absolutely brutal. The gist of it is that Rufus refers to lifetime having made “85-90%” of his bets on unders and “no’s” when betting props. Now I assume that’s regarding the SB for the most part, and not as much as of late, where prop markets are starting to reach some semblance of equilibrium. But the way it’s phrased/edited, Rufus, who states earlier that he’s made millions of dollars betting sports, says that most of his bets are unders/nos. From this, one can infer that winning a lot of money is very easy, not that prop markets used to be extremely inefficient, and have gotten much more efficient in recent years. And that prop betting is now a day-to-day endeavor, not just a one-off for pros who used to bet mostly main markets except for the once-a–year occurrence when literally hundreds of very profitable Super Bowl bets are made available. Again, I chalk this more up to bad editing/writing than lack of knowledge on Rufus’ part, the latter I do not doubt. But again, I think this is incredibly misleading to a would-be new bettor. 25 minutes into one’s sports betting “journey” and we’ve already hit several half-truths and just outright falsehoods.
Still, the very basic nuts and bolts are often covered pretty well, and during the 2nd half of the class the ship gets righted for the most part, mostly via Andrews and Pizzola, who I think are relied on quite a bit to distill some fairly basic sports betting concepts, not surprising as they both lead companies whose job is to do exactly this. Top-down betting, parlays, different types of bets, and live betting are all discussed ably and in a way that’s easy to understand. The 2nd half of the MasterClass is fairly solid, especially the last third or so, where the ship gets righted after some of the aforementioned disastrous/useless sections of information.
There are some really solid bits here, Pizzola talks about keeping notes on noticing that scorekeepers in NHL grade differently what a shot on goal is. Fiore makes a good point about making sure to read the Terms and Conditions for bonuses. Jack has an extended analogy about using the scientific method, and talks about a burnt edge where he was able to tease college hoops across the most common outcomes. This does not help the person directly who is watching this, as pricing has been adjusted, but it gives the viewer a good example of how to think outside of “Just find out the Anthem time ahead of time” or “Bet the boxer against the UFC guy who all of the UFC bros are irrationally piling money on to.”
The modeling section gets an overview by Pizzola, Andrews, and Peabody, who does a better job here discussing regression to the mean and steps for building a model. Pizzola and Andrews do a good job of explaining that it’s difficult winning with modeling, and finding factors that are not already accounted for in the market. Andrews explains qualitative and quantitative handicapping, and although I’d quibble a bit with the point that “there’s no number attached” to qualitative handicapping (I sense Ferris behind me, hammer raised), overall it’s a really good passage. He gives a good concrete example of betting live based on a player who might pick up a minor injury.
Limiting, bearding, and priming are all covered down the stretch, and we round off discussing the future of sports betting. I can see this being interesting to someone who is curious about sharp sports betting. One thing I’ve been thinking about is how in sports betting, we usually get our start in one area, and that opens up other avenues to other things: top-down bettors sometimes naturally merge into moving, originator/modelers become bookmakers, etc etc. You learn along the way, piecing things together, filtering out the bad information and keeping the good nuggets. I’ve been to the last three Bet Bashes in Las Vegas, and the biggest revelations I’ve had have been in tossed-off conversations after dinner in a hallway, or in a blackjack pit, or up at the Legacy Club. I do not think that the Master Class concept’s really an “organic” way of starting off to becoming a betting expert, but maybe someone will prove me wrong someday, although I doubt I’ll ever know. As such, I would rate this as a 6/10.
