00:00 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Hey everyone, I'm Rob Pozzola, pro Sports, veteran CEO here at the Hammer. Today I'm going to be doing a reaction video. A lot of people asked for it. You're going to get it Now, before we hit play. A bit of context.
00:10
I have watched a Linemaker Sports video before and I reacted to it a few years ago. Candidly, it was quite bad. The advice was not sound and what really threw me was the comments. A lot of people thought it was groundbreaking advice. That was very disillusioning because I know how this stuff works for real bettors and that advice would lose over time. So I want to be transparent with you up front.
00:32
I am a little bit biased going into this Now. I have not watched this video just yet. I do not know what we're about to see. Maybe it's good, maybe it isn't. If I had to guess, it will likely be bad advice, but I'm going to give it a fair shake.
00:45
If you are a fan of line maker sports and that YouTube channel, I'm asking you to stay open-minded. Don't click away. I'm going to watch in real time, pause in certain spots and I will explain things in plain English. The goal here is very simple Help bettors understand what actually matters when you're trying to make money betting on sports and why some strategies that sound easy maybe aren't all that easy. Maybe this video does that, maybe it doesn't. We're going to see Quick promise about the tone here. I'll be firm on the ideas. If something is wrong, I'm going to say it's wrong and I will explain why in a way that anyone can follow. If something is right, I'll probably say that too. One more thing by the end you feel like you learned something, or you saw betting a little bit more clearly. Consider hitting like and consider subscribing to the channel. No pressure now decide after you watch. All right, let's get into it.
01:49 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
In this video, I'm going to show you how you can win all your running back player props in the NFL. Stay to the end of this video so that way I can share with you guys the website that you need exactly to be able to find this information that I'm going to give you. This is the strategy that I use to literally win 80% of my running back plays in the NFL. So, first thing, what we're going to do is we're going to focus, obviously, on the running back. Okay, just quick pause here.
02:09 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Next thing is going to be on their play Really quickly before we get into it. Already there's promises out of the gate, right? It's in the name of the title the NFL bet that wins 80% of the time. You can win 80% of the time, but it all matters. Only thing that matters is what the price is on those bets, right? Like, if you are betting minus 10,000s and you're winning 80% of the time, you're going to lose in the long run, right? So already I don't like the fact that price isn't mentioned. But I'll give it a fair shake here and we're going into it.
02:37 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Looks like we're doing running back player props, it's going to be on their player prop for their rushing to go under. Focusing to be on their player prop for their rushing to go under, focusing on the under here. Okay, number two what we're going to do is we're going to go and we're going to write down, on any given week, the top five rushing defenses. Okay, top five rushing defenses. You're going to write those down you're going to.
02:57 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Okay, I said I'd give it a fair shake. I don't know where this is going yet, but it sounds like some sort of system out of the gate. I'm not a huge fan of systems. There is a place for them here and there. But if this is going to be a system based off bullet one and two of betting, running back unders when they are playing good rushing defenses or top five rushing defense, that is going to be a very bad strategy in the long run Because this stuff is already priced in. Opponent is already priced into market. So we'll hit it up here. Let's see where this goes.
03:32 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Also write down who the running back of the opposing team is. Okay, so you're going to write down the opposing running back, so that way you should have a list of five running backs that are going against the top five rushing defenses in the league. The next thing we're going to do here is we're going to take their yards per carry and write that down. We're going to times that by how many carries they get. Okay, how many carries they get. Forget this right here you can literally predict what their average of what they're going to be around is. All right. So let's do an example here. Let's say I'm going to use Derrick Henry as an example, but this isn't derrick henry's numbers.
04:11
All right, let's say derrick henry averages four yards per carry and he gets an average of 15 carries per game. So what does that equal out to? Four times 15, that's going to be 60 yards. So that would equal out to 60 yards. So right there you get an average of what they should average in a game, based on the carries that they get. Okay, pause for a second.
04:27 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I have so many questions already. I hope we get into more of this. But you're taking the top five rushing defenses. He doesn't really explain what that means, right? What metric is he using If this is just like a yards per game that I have so many questions? Because that's a very, very noisy statistic.
04:44
Right, there's so many dependencies. So, for example, if a team was playing from ahead a lot in a previous game or previous two games, say they blew two other teams out, obviously they're going to give up less yards per game. It's a very noisy stat because the other team is going to be throwing the ball more often when they're trailing, which is why we use other metrics to determine what good rushing defenses are, primarily success rate, epa per play, things of that nature. So he didn't really explain that and now he's kind of getting into. You're getting like a baseline for Derrick Henry, which is he's averaging 40 yards per carry. But there's no context there. You don't know what the schedule was previously like in in his previous games. Was he going up against other good defenses? Um, you know, projecting the carries out right like this is assuming that in this instance it's probably a good assumption because derrick henry gets the majority of the carries. But what happens in two back systems where the amount of carries can be noisy? Right, this is looking at things in the past without the context of what happened in the past and, I think, potentially using them to bet in the future. But not having that context is extremely important.
05:58
And early in an NFL season, I mean, top five rushing defenses are going to be extremely noisy. Season, I mean, top five rushing defenses are going to be extremely noisy. It's going to change rapidly on a week to week basis and it's not because, like, one defense is going to just ascend to the top, it's because of the schedule. There's all sorts of crazy, crazy things that happen. It's not as simple as just going back to last year either. Right, there's lots of personnel changes in the off season. There's coaching changes in the offseason, so already we haven't even got to what we're going to try to do here. But the premise is extremely flawed out of the gate here. So we have this baseline for Derek Henry of 60 yards per game right now. Let's see where this leads to.
06:42 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Once you have this written down for each of those running backs, now you're able to gauge what number you could use Because again, we're looking at the under here for rushing yards. Okay, rushing yards under.
06:54
This isn't an over prop, this is an under prop and it's going to be an alternate prop Because we're going to make this number what we want it to be to be able to grab actual an edge and be more successful over the long term with it. So if they're averaging let's say, for example, this guy's averaging 60 yards per game pretty much because he gets four yards per carry at 15 carries then we know he's going to get one of the top defenses in the league at defending the rush. What are we going to do here? We're going to inflate this number a little bit.
07:24 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
All right, we're going to inflate it Now how?
07:26 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
can we inflate this number? Because what do we know what to gauge it to? So, on average, for a sportsbook it'll look like this so, if this is his average, the minus 110 line for over-under will probably be in this range, probably going to be around what his average is. Okay, so if we go to 70 yards, that'll probably be like 150. If we go to 80, that'll probably be minus like 210-ish. We go to 90, that'll be like minus 280. All right, so obviously, the lower we go on the list odds-wise, the higher the yardage gets. Okay, so we have to find which one of these is gonna give us the best edge. Now, how do we do that? Well, that's what I'm gonna explain. The best edge, now, how do we do that? Well, that's what I'm going to explain to you guys.
08:05 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Now, if you guys want to fast forward through all this, I kind of do want to fast forward through a lot of what's going on here because already I see a lot of problems. So first and foremost, again one, running back systems. They barely exist nowadays in the NFL. There's not a lot of workhorse backs, so I don't know how you necessarily price individual backs when they're sharing workload for one. Now we're getting into an alternate strategy here which I'll hear him out.
08:32
But understand the way that alternates are generally priced. They are just a derivative of the main market, right? So what I mean by that is when a sports book is pricing a prop in the early going, they're essentially running some sort of simulation based off of the game side, the spread, the total, and the reason that these books can offer stuff like SGPs, where you can kind of pick whatever you want nowadays, is they've simulated all of this out and they figured out what the appropriate price on the 70 yards is relative to the 60 yards and 80 relative to the 70. So it's very rare that you're going to find like an extreme edge on just one of these alternates overall. So again, curious to see where we go with this one.
09:22 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
You just want the best ones being sent to you every single day and you want to learn all the strategies that I have in the NFL. Make sure you guys click the link down in the description.
09:30 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
All right, so let's go ahead and write down our different garages here.
09:33 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
This is how we're going to be able to depict which ones to do. All right, let's say, this one's 60 yards, this one's 70 yards, 80 yards and then 90 yards All right yards and then 90 yards.
09:46 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Alright, so we're going to get an implied probability, obviously, with all these.
09:47 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
So the implied probability here is going to be 52% for the minus 110 and then for the minus 150 it's going to be 60% Minus 210, 67. Minus 280 is going to be 73%. So now we have that gauged, we know what our implied probability is here. These are our implied probabilities. Now, true probability. We have to figure out the difference, right. We've got to be able to figure out which angle we're going to be able to have the best edge at.
10:09
All right, so let's say, for example let's use 10 games as an example here 60 yards. For him to go under 60 yards on the season, he is 5 for 10. So 50%, all right. Here that's a negative 2% edge. All right. So obviously we wouldn't be doing that one, right? Let's say for him to go under 70 yards let's say 70 yards is going to be 6 out of 10, 60% Okay, we have no edge, zero edge. There's nothing there. Okay, so we're going to cross that one out. Now let's go ahead and go to 80 yards. How many times was he able to go over 80 yards? Let's say 7 out of 10 times. Okay, we've got 70% here. That's giving us a plus 3%, okay, so that's a possibility. Now let's do the 90 yards. How many times did he go over 90 yards? I mean, let's say, for 90 yards he wasn't able to surpass that. We're going to say 9 out of 10 times.
10:57 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Now we're getting up to higher levels here, like I, said this.
11:00 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
This isn't real stats from Derek Henry, Trust me, because he goes over 100 like it's nothing, but I'm just using an example of a running back. So 9 out of 10, that'd be 90% Okay.
11:09 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I want to stop it right here. That's a 17% edge. Okay, so this is extremely flawed. First of all, I don't know where he came up with the sample size of just using the past 10 games in looking at things. I don't know if this is going to be like an evolving number. What happens when you're three games into an NFL season? Do you use two from this year and then eight from the previous year? That logically wouldn't make any sense. What if the running back has changed teams? What if there's a different coach in place? What if they're passing more rushing, more Like there's so much noise that that's a horrible, horrible idea.
11:47
With the 10 game sample, let's say I flipped a coin and nine out of 10 times I flipped it, 10 times, nine out of 10, it came up tails. I wouldn't say that 90% of the time moving forwards that coin is going to come up tails. No one would say that, unless you were using some sort of weighted coin or something like that. But he's taking a small sample with no context of what happened in those previous games who the opponents were, anything like that, and he's just basically saying because they're facing a top rushing defense, it looks like he's going to bet some sort of alternate unders here. Now what he does get right is for every bet you need to know your break-even points. So when he lists the yardage with the percentage next to them, you can find calculators online where you can convert odds to a percentage. So, minus 110, 52.4%, you know that you need at least that percentage to break even. 10, 52.4%. You know that you need at least that percentage to break even. And generally you want to compare your fair value, your true number, to that break even percentage to find out your edge. But the way he's calculating an edge here is nonsensical. No professional sports better would ever calculate an edge this way, 0% of the time. You would see someone who knows what they're doing pick a random sample of games past with no context and just throw out those numbers there and say this is the probability of it happening. Moving forwards, that just never happens. This is extremely noisy. He's using bad metrics.
13:18
I already talked about, you know, the rushing yards per game. There are a lot of problems here. As I see it now, I imagine he's going to say okay, you have edges on. You know, 80 yards minus 210, under 80 yards minus 210, under 90 yards minus 280. Those are the ones that you should go out and bet.
13:37
But the reality is, the number you've come up with is probably not an edge, it's just a random dart is really what it is. I'm actually curious to see how he tells you to stake these, if he even says that because you have a 3% edge here and a 17% edge here. I mean you would go really hard on the 17% edge assuming it was real, and much smaller on the 3% edge. I wonder if that'll come up, but already this is an extremely flawed process and you will not win this way. I feel very confidently in saying that this is absolutely not an NFL winning strategy and if it is a bet that wins 80% of the time, like it says in the title, well, relative to what the break-even point is on those bets, I would say that this is most definitely a losing strategy. But let's keep it going.
14:30 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
A 17% edge there. So what did we just do? We literally were able to depict which one of these plays is going to be the best to do. The first two obviously aren't going to provide any type of edge for us whatsoever, but 80 yards and 90 yard play guess what happens there? We have a 3% edge there and a 17% edge here. All right, so what you could do is when you go and depict exactly which edge you have for the running back and he has that matchup going against top five rushing defense, now you make the decision you either go with the 3% edge or you go with the 17% edge. Obviously, the odds are a little bit better on this choice than there is on this one, but what you also could do and sometimes you're able to do this, and it's called the ladder challenge oh, my gosh, so you could ladder.
15:18 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
both of these plays so you could play both, because both of them have positive edge. So you can play both and take a unit and put a unit here and a unit here.
15:28 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Yeah, that's the same unit on both. Obviously. What happens here? You win both. Okay, if he surpasses 80 and gets like 85, well then at least you don't lose both bets. You lose a little bit and if okay and if.
15:36 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
But that's pretty much playing to try to get both of them to end up hitting.
15:40 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
That's what the ladder challenge is there, or you would just take a risk of 2% or 3% and you would just fire it right here because you have the biggest edge. Doing this consistently, you're hitting 80% or more in your running back. Player props.
15:55 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Okay, so it did go where I thought it was going to go here we got a few more minutes left in the video. So, generally speaking, when you have a higher edge, you want to bet more. I mean, that's just common sense in life, right? If you were going to again use a coin flip example it's a 50-50, any standard coin flip. If someone was giving you plus 110 that you'd flip a heads, you'd take that bet. Bet, but you take it for a small amount. Someone who's giving you plus 200, you take it for a larger amount because your edge is bigger. So, generally speaking, when you have stuff like this, you probably want to fire the most on the largest edge. Of course, this is not a good strategy, so you probably don't want to fire on any of this at all.
16:35
I have so many questions on on just like the arbitrary um sample sizes that he picks. What do you do if it's week one of the football season? You're just using previous year's data the past 10 weeks, including week 17, where some backups play, some starters only get a few carries Like I don't. None of this really makes sense in terms of projecting like this is all backward looking. That's not going to help you project moving forwards.
17:00
What you can do to project carries that would be even better than multiple like looking at the past five games, which is completely random, is probably just even checking some fantasy sites that are out there big ones. What are they projecting for player carries moving forwards? I mean, it's not going to necessarily help you beat the prop market, but it's going to give you a more accurate number of carries moving forward than just looking at the previous five games. Like this is really bad advice. There's nothing sound about what's happening here right now and I don't know if there's going to be anything that redeems itself over the end of this. But this is literally just throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks, because none of this makes any logical sense.
17:51 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Now let's go ahead and go through that one more time. Let's do it All right. First, running back. We're looking at the alternate under rushing yards. Okay, have that down.
18:00 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Number two, top five running defense, because surely the market doesn't know they might be going up against a good rushing defense.
18:06 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
All right, and then we're going to compare. You're going to opposite those defenses and put down the opposing running back, so you know who the running back is Certainly there can't be more than one running back.
18:13 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Then yards per carry Number three yards per carry times the carries.
18:20 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
This is where you're going to get the average of what they are averaging every single game. This should give you pretty much almost what that minus 110 line is probably going to be around, because that's how the sports books come up with it.
18:28 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
So, just so you're aware, like yards per carry. Right, let's say you have a running back that hat gets 20 carries. One of them goes for an 80-yard run and every other one goes for zero. That running back has accumulated 80 yards on 20 carries, four yards per carry. Now let's say you have another running back that gets 20 carries and produces four yards every single time. That is very different in terms of success rate, right, they're more successful on more of their runs. That is a better indicator going forwards of that being repeatable than the person who just broke off one huge run.
19:12
Right, Like, yards per carry is a very outdated stat, but also, without understanding the context of it, it's impossible to use. He's not looking at previous schedules. He's not saying this team is coming off two games against really hard rushing defenses or really easy rushing defenses. He's not coming off something where I don't know, potentially a defensive player got hurt in the game. Good, run stopper, nose tackle on the other team, whatever. There's nothing in terms of substance here.
19:53
And going back and looking at previous carries all of you that play fantasy football you can tell me how carries spike over the courses of the season. Right, Like if you take a running back that just inherited the number one job from a team. Random example, you know, let's say, let's say the number one kept fumbling. So they were like you're, you're out, You're not playing anymore, we're moving the backup into the number one role. Or let's say an injury happened and you look at their past carries, you're going to significantly under-project their past carries. If someone's going from a backup to a starter and you say let's look at the previous five games and bet the under and you're projecting their carry numbers based off of that, you are dead in the water. I could come up with a million examples of why this doesn't work. But at some point you should realize that he's arbitrarily picked some sort of angle off the top. We want to bet running back alternate unders. That's usually not where you should start with just picking an angle and then trying to make stuff work for it.
20:59
The second thing he's gone top five rushing defenses without providing any clarity on what that entails. Again, if you're just using yards per game joe buck used to use yards per game in 2004 on the broadcasts like there's a reason. We've moved on as a whole very, very messy, noisy metric. Just as an example, if a team is constantly leading in games, they're naturally going to be a better rush defense, because the other team's not going to rush the ball that much on them. Other way around, they're constantly trailing might look like the rush defense is worse because they're going to give up more yards per game since they're coming from behind. So no context there. And then, third and foremost, he uses yards per carry and carries from previous games without applying any sort of context. What happens over the course of an off season? All sorts of things here. So right now, at every point of this system, it breaks.
22:04 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Okay, that's where they get the yards from, and then from there what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to separate each of those levels for the running back and we're going to find out which one has the best true probability versus the implied probability, and we're either going to go with one or we're going to go with a couple of them. Whatever has a positive edge you still have a shot at. Okay, it doesn't matter if it's 3% or 17%. You still have a positive edge, so long-term you still will profit.
22:30
But if you're doing plays that have 0% edge or a negative edge, then you will lose, most likely on a 0% edge. You're not going to get that every single time. So, yes, you would essentially break even if you're a zero percent edge all the time, but you're not going to be able to find a zero percent edge all the time. So I consider it as you're going to end up losing eventually. All right, so negative two percent and a zero percent edge you want to stay away from. Positive edge is where you want to be. If you just follow those steps, guess what happens? You end up becoming a profitable player. Prop running back specialist okay.
23:01 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
So there's validity to everything he's saying here. The problem is he's not. He doesn't actually know what his edge is right like. This system is so broken that he's just coming up with random numbers and he's calling it an edge right. What he's saying is correct. You want to come up with fair values on everything. Compare it to the sportsbook line. When your fair value is is higher than the break-even point, that's an edge. You want to bet it, but there needs to be some sort of actual logic put into place when you're doing that, can't just be random like this.
23:34
This is a very random, broken, completely not rooted in proper mathematics system and nowadays, especially prop betting markets, it's way more competitive, especially NFL props, the amount of work people are doing in these markets. To think that you can just overcome all of that by looking at the past five games of rush defense and 10 games of like it's. It's completely not. It's. It's counterintuitive to how every market in the world, competitive market in the world works.
24:07
Is it frankly an insult to the people who are watching this? And again, I I said I attack the ideas more than the person at the beginning. If they, I don't know if he believes this stuff, or if he's just doing this to sell a product, grow his YouTube viewership. But frankly, this is nonsense and I did read his profile that said professional sports better. I would highly question that, based off of this video and the previous one that I saw here. You are, it says, running back specialist on screen. You're not. You're not a running back specialist from watching this. If anything, it's probably led you down an even worse path than what you were previously doing.
24:50 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
We'll see how this ends off here in the last minute and you're able to profit every single week betting on the running back player props.
24:56
Now since you stayed to the end of the video, I'm going to give you guys the website that you should go to To be able to find exactly where the bottom five defenses are. So the one that I like to use is called Team Rankings. So, team Rankings, what you'll do is you'll go there, you'll go to NFL Team Stats and then you'll go to Opp rushing fence. It'll give you a list of the teams that are the best rushing and the worst rushing. It'll go literally from ranking from one all the way to last.
25:26 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
Let's pause this right now. So at least he's giving you something here in terms of, like, where to go. So team rankings I think we've all used the site before in some capacity. I'm not knocking the site whatsoever. They have a lot of good surface level stats. If you really wanted to quickly pull up, you know, yards per game for a team, third down conversion percentage, red zone percentage, they have it all. It's very easily accessible. I'm not knocking that.
25:51
But again, he is basically just looking at um, opponent rushing defense, so he's he's just looking at opponent rushing defense, so he's just looking at I don't even know, it's very confusing at this point, but he's just looking at yardage totals. Yardage totals don't tell you anything. It's very outdated. Like no professional handicappers, bettors are using pure yardage totals to handicap anything. And if we look at like right now as it stands I don't want to outdate things right now you know Jacksonville is a top five team in rush defense, new England as well. Right, I like this. This is going to be very, very noisy by season's end. You're going to see teams move up and down all over the board. So context matters when you look at this type of stuff.
26:45 - Linemaker Sports (Host)
Like I said in the previous, the top five rushing fences. Now, if it's early on in the season, what you can do is you can also be able to go to last year's data on this website as well, and that way you could see exactly how last year was. As long as there wasn't any major defensive changes, as in they added a star or they lost a star, on defense, defenses should stick around the average of the same thing, no they don't, so as long as you're able to see the data from last year as well, then you could still be able to use that for a brand new season.
27:16 - Rob Pizzola (Host)
I can't believe he actually got into it at the end. I can't believe that happened. So I mean he saved it to the end of like go back to last year. Defense is not sticky from year to year in the NFL. Just because you had a good rush defense the year prior doesn't mean you're going to have one the next year, Even if you have the same personnel. Offense is a lot stickier than defense is overall. But like, okay, you know, if they added a star player, I mean, what if they just added a good run stopper or they lost a good run stopper? Like, all of this stuff is going to matter. So that was a rough one. Honestly, I think that might've been worse than the last one I watched.
27:51
I see that there's like a lot of you know in the suggestions that have come up here. It seems like he's doing a lot of these types of videos. I'm very curious, Jacob, if we could pull up the comments really quickly for that one, if that's possible, because I wonder if people eat this stuff up or if they don't, Just looking at the comments here. Okay, you can also do the same thing for an over prop. Just flip to lowest five running back defenses Kind of obvious, but wanted to be the. Yeah, he's just flipping it around and losing money the other way. This is my new favorite channel, bro, Keep cooking. There's another one. Okay, G Rice $19,999.
28:28
That example of making two wagers, one at under 80 yards, one at 90 yards is absurd. At those prices, the under 90 has a better edge and is easier to win Great point. Why in the world did you even consider a better edge and is easier to win? Great point. Why in the world did you even consider a lower edge that's harder to win? I agree, we're all doing this math instead of getting effing jobs. Haha, love it. Always the best information.
28:52
I do something similar, but I just do money line bets on games where the best teams play some of the worst teams. Yeah, that'll do it. Like. I know I'm coming across as very condescending, but this is very bad information that's out there. You should not listen to this. I can't make that any more clear. You will not find any true pro that would back this as a winning strategy. I may do more of these in the future.
29:18
Now that I've watched another one of this, I can't even believe that this stuff is out there. Quick check on the views here. Jacob really quickly on this video 20k views two weeks ago, 108k subs Tough nowadays, it is tough out there. It actually pains me to see stuff like that. Honestly, I don't want to be a hater, it's not what I'm all about here, but I think there's valuable lessons to be learned in this space and hopefully that came across in me watching this. Appreciate everyone watching. If you did learn something here, please like. Please sub here on Circles Off More educational stuff coming up here in the future. Until next time, peace out, Enjoy it.
