Location Matters: 6 Days, 273 Bets in The Mile High City
The history of sports betting legalization in the US has led to a fractured market for sports books across the US. After New Jersey (apparently something DO happen in New Jersey) won its Supreme Court case against the federal government's countrywide ban, individual states were handed the power to regulate sports betting. While there has been some consolidation since legalization in 2018, there still exist differences in the sports books that operate in each state.
These geographic differences in sports betting markets poses a practical question for sharp bettors: Where would one like to be located for sports betting? I am based in California where sports betting is technically banned. However, we have our own versions of legalized “online venues where you can wager on sporting events that is somehow NOT sports betting” which operate based on every loophole in the book to circumvent the ban. While the current “sports wagering” operators in California have presented sharp bettors with plenty of opportunities to profit, there are greener pastures in other states.
The most obvious factor for location selection is how profitable we expect each location to be. Profitability, as any good business school graduate can tell you, breaks down into our expected revenue minus expected costs. Our revenue is entirely correlated with the degree to which we can place positive expected value (+$EV) bets. This breaks down into a couple of categories:
How many books are there? The profitability of a location is heavily correlated with the number of books that operate in that market. This is due to:
Sign-Up Bonuses. Almost every book offers some sort of signup bonus. For any bettor this is free $EV.
More books = more bets being offered = more opportunities for books to make mistakes. Every book has to set their betting lines independently and the more lines there are in absolute terms the more opportunity there is for something to be mispriced.
How sharp are the books?
Sports books exist along a spectrum of skill in their abilities to correctly set odds. The more likely it is for a book to make errors, the more profitable that book will be.
How long will my account be allowed to bet for?
All sharp bettors will eventually have their betting action limited. Some books are faster than others at figuring out if you are sharp or not.1 The slower they are at limiting sharp bettors, the more profitable that book will be.
What is my unit/bet sizing?
Understanding your planned unit size for a trip is critical for both bankroll management and estimating the profitability of a location. The larger your unit size, the more $EV you can generate.
With this information you can back of the envelope how much $EV you have the potential to generate. For example, if you’re operating on a $100 unit size and estimate the ability to find 50 bets at an average of a 3% edge per day then your daily $EV will be $100 * 50 * 3% = $150. The $EV of sign up bonuses can also be estimated and added. These bonuses, if fully taken advantage of by someone signing up new accounts in a market, will likely make up a significant % of $EV for a trip.
The cost side is a lot easier to figure out and anyone who is familiar with trip planning can get can estimate of travel costs to a particular location. Obviously if your sole goal is profit then don’t travel somewhere where your projected expenses will be greater than the $EV you can generate.
The other factor to consider is a little less tangible: how much will we enjoy the destination? Don’t forget that we are going to have a decent amount of downtime outside of placing bets and we will want to be somewhere that we can enjoy when not “working”.
Colorado: Sports Betting Mecca?
In March of 2024 I embarked on my first sports betting trip. The timing of the trip was not a coincidence. For college basketball enthusiasts, the eponymous “March Madness” college basketball tournament takes place in late March. This time of year also coincides with the start of the Major League Baseball season and the NBA basketball season is in full swing. More sporting events means a larger surface area for each sports book to cover which means more opportunities for errors and profitable betting opportunities.
The first places that come to mind when we think of cities associated with sports betting in the United States are Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Our trip, however, does not involve pilgrimage to either of those places, but instead the mile high city of Denver. Colorado as a whole got on my radar as a sports betting destination for a few reasons:
The Youtube Algorithm. Early in my sports betting career, I was recommended a video by Youtube titled “Infiltrating a Sports Betting Operation”. The video gives us a peek into how a sharp sports betting operation functions. There is one particular moment in the video at 12:55 where the head of the group is talking about how they estimate their edge and he says “you can get down here [Colorado]… a lot of money on 10%+ edges and you can get mass volume”. A 10% edge is massive! This planted the early seeds to do more research on Colorado as a betting destination.
Many sports book operators. At the time of my trip in 2024, there were about a dozen sports books that operated in Colorado. As we’ve covered before, more books, more lines, more potential for the books to make errors that we can then take advantage of.
Denver is a nice place to be. Colorado is just a more pleasant place to be with more things to do outside of gambling/partying compared to Vegas and Atlantic City. As someone who is not really into the other things that Sin City offers, I would prefer to do my sports betting in a locale where I’m not constantly having my psyche eroded by hedonism.
Over 6 days in Denver I won $4,219 over 273 bets. Here is how I did it.
Day 0: Preparation
Every good heist starts with casing your target and preparing to execute. While being a sharp bettor doesn't (usually) cross the line into grand larceny territory, being prepared to hit the ground running is important for success especially on a limited amount of time.
Before I set foot in Denver, there were a few things to take care of:
Signing up for an account on every sports book that we were planning on placing bets on.
Depositing into each of the accounts and ensuring I had enough cash on hand in order to take full advantage of any additional promotions that were offered to us and the ability to reload in case we had a bad run.
Understanding all of the sign up promotions and having an idea of how I was going to maximize the return from those.
In retrospect I could see this type of preparation being harmful to account longevity. It might look weird to the book that someone from another state is depositing money so far in advance from out of state before they start betting, but hopefully there’s not enough signal there for them to identify me before I arrive. Thankfully this did not appear to be an issue for this trip.
In addition to setting up the accounts, it also pays to understand the workflow and tooling one will be working with. In my case, I had already been using OddsJam’s2 fantasy optimizer to beat the books in California and planned on using their +EV odds screener in Colorado. As described in my previous sports betting post, we will be taking a top down approach to making profitable bets.
The screener makes identifying opportunities a lot easier, however, it is still up to the user to execute properly. This includes the more obvious things like making sure you are placing the correct bet and less obvious things like making sure you’re not placing negatively correlated bets.
For this trip I planned on betting in $100 increments (e.g. $100 unit size) on a $10,000 bankroll. There is some flexibility in that size for higher edge, higher probability bets where I can make a reasonable tradeoff between more $EV and the risk of busting our bankroll.
Day 1: Promos
I landed in Denver late on Monday March 25th and was very generously picked up by my friend Ryan (shoutout Lentillion) whom I met through the Twitch simracing community. Sometimes making friends on the internet works out. Before going to bed I scope out the available promos on the books we plan on betting.
Sports books operate a largely fungible business. Outside of the odds they are offering on a particular bet and the types of bets they offer, there isn't really a way to differentiate the underlying product. One way that sports books try to differentiate themselves is by offering promotions to attract new users and retain existing ones. These promotions generally involve the sports book effectively giving users money in the form of profitable or free bets. The most common types of promotions include:
Risk Free Bet - If your bet loses, the book refunds your bet in the form of a bonus bet of the same amount.
Free Bets - The book gives you free bets if you fulfill certain conditions.
Profit Boosts - If your bet meets certain conditions, the price you get is “boosted” such that if you win your bet your payout is boosted by a multiplier.
Our first day of betting involved figuring out a workflow for screening and placing our first bets. The highlight of the day was using our $1000 “risk free bet” on the highest EV bet in the screener courtesy of Bet365 and hitting:
Knowing what I know now I would have chosen a longer odds bet to use our risk free bet on, but it is nice to start the trip off with a decent win.
Day 1 Summary:
Bets Placed: 13
Daily $ Wagered: $2,290
Daily Net: +$1787
Day 2: Arbitrage
Our second day in Denver involved doing a walking coffee & food tour of RiNo while monitoring our odds screener and jumping on profitable bets as they came up.
I also tried my hand at a pure arbitrage bet for the first time. Sometimes the odds between different sports books diverge by so much that it is possible to lock in a profit by taking both sides of the same bet across two books. In this case the OddsJam arbitrage screener found the following pair for Nikola Jokic’s assist line between Bet365 and FanDuel:
For this arbitrage pair, I had wagered a total of $450 between both books and no matter what I was guaranteed to at the very least profit - the third outcome here is that if Jokic does not play then both bets “push” and I get my money back. If Jokic goes over 9.5 assists, I win $460 from Bet365 for a $10 profit, if Jokic goes under 9.5 assists, then I win $469 from FanDuel for a profit of $19. In this case I won the bet on the Bet365 side and made $10.
For someone who is properly bankrolled these arbitrage bets are not particularly lucrative. In most cases where arbitrage is possible one of the legs will be +EV and you can generate more EV while tying up less of your bankroll by just taking the +EV side of the bet. For this reason I generally do not place arbitrage bets, but it was fun to give it a try.
Day 2 Summary:
# of Bets Placed: 29
$ Wagered: $3,449
Daily Net: +$96
Day 3: Being Limited & More Bonuses
I wake up in the morning, log into the Tipico sports book, and am faced with some bad news.
After placing 4 bets on Tipico I got nailed by their risk management. In retrospect I made the fairly common error of betting too much using a new account on relatively illiquid player prop markets. It is easy for books to use this betting pattern to identify bettors like me. Tipico turns out to have fairly aggressive limiting policies which seek to limit the amount of money they lose to bettors like me.
Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t the first book that no longer wanted my business. BetRivers was also tired of me sniping their lines and limited me as well on the same day.
On the one hand, I take a little pride in being limited. It means the book acknowledges they are losing against me and are willing to risk a false positive to cut me off from placing bets on their site.
On the other hand, being limited severely cuts down our profitability. Both Tipico and BetRivers were pretty square on a ton of lines and it was disappointing to have them cut me down from my $100 units so early in the trip. There’s also a deep unfairness to being limited - sports books are given licenses to operate in some sense because sports betting could be construed as a game of skill. For this reason the limits they impose on sharp bettors is implicitly predatory. As long as you’re a losing bettor, books are completely okay with taking as much money as they can get out of you, but as soon as they think they’re losing they effectively kick you off their platform.
On the other side of the spectrum, it seems like I triggered some sort of policy on FanDuel’s side that identified us as someone they want to deposit more money. So much so that they’re willing to pay me $250 in bonus bets to deposit more. Apparently I’ve somehow convinced their system that I might be a whale.
Maybe the side of the Jokic arbitrage bet I wagered on their book looked so bad to them that they decided they want more of my business. Unfortunately for Fanduel, the whale I self identify as is Moby Dick.3
Day 3 Summary:
# of Bets Placed: 30
$ Wagered: $2,185
Daily Net: +$677
Day 4: Now I’m Cooking
Even though I got limited on a few books, the beauty of selecting a place like Colorado to sports bet is that there are plenty of other books to hammer. At the time, I didn’t think I was going to return to Colorado any time soon for sports betting so my goal became getting down as many bets as possible before getting limited at the other books.
With MLB baseball season in full swing and with me finally feeling comfortable enough to place any bet that looked remotely +EV, day 4 involved the largest number of bets so far.
Day 4 Summary:
# of Bets Placed: 76
$ Wagered: $6,855
Daily Net: +$439
Day 5: The Zoo
I spent part of the day exploring more of Denver. Out of all the places that I have traveled to for sports betting since, I would say Denver is up there as far as amenities. The River North Arts District is very walkable with no shortage of coffee shops and breweries to work out of and the weather, while a little crisp, is perfect for my preferences.
I also made a trip out to the zoo.
Day 5 Summary:
# of Bets Placed: 51
$ Wagered: $5,830
Daily Net: +$854
Day 6: The Final Day
With a flight at 1PM to head back to San Francisco I spent the morning and ride to the airport claiming any and all free bet bonuses I had left. I actually made a mistake here and really should have placed the leftover bonus bets earlier since being this time constrained limits the EV of the bets I was able to place.
The most degenerate thing I must have done on this trip was placing my last bet as my flight was taking off.
Had to get maximum value 12 minutes before takeoff.
Day 6 Summary:
# of Bets Placed: 68
$ Wagered: $7,335
Daily Net: +$366
Results, Reflections & Lessons Learned
My biggest takeaway from my March 2024 trip to Denver is that I should do it again. In fact, I’m writing this in March 2025 from one of the same coffee shops I frequented last year - shoutout Blue Sparrow Coffee in Denver RiNo.
As far as financial results go, this trip was an unambiguous success.
Trip Summary:
Total Bets Placed: 273
Total Amount Wagered: $27,944
Total Won: +$4,219
Expenses (Flights + Lodging + Food): $830
Total Net: +$3,389
Not bad for under 6 days of work. I will note that I ran pretty good for this trip with the $1k “risk free bet” hitting as well as being able to take advantage of a number of new user bonuses. We also didn’t have any daily drawdowns going net positive every day we were in Denver. While it would have been unlikely for us to lose money over a ~270 bet sample, it still takes a lot of luck to go +42 betting units up over that sample. On returning to Denver I don’t expect to have nearly as much of a profitable trip since I will largely be relegated to non-bonus wagering.4
A few assorted lessons from this trip:
Location. Since March 2024 I’ve taken a few other trips that have had a sports betting element and can confidently say not all places are created the same. New Jersey has a similar sports betting ecosystem to Colorado in that there are a lot of books and some of them are pretty bad at their jobs. However, Atlantic City is, in general, a pretty awful place to spend time in while Denver is somewhere I would visit even in the absence of sports betting.
The value of an identity is quite high. There’s definitely a customer acquisition adverse selection problem for sports books in that sharp bettors have a pretty strong incentive to convince their friends to travel with them to Colorado and take full advantage of the bonuses for new accounts. At some point the gravy train is going to end as the market gets more saturated, but bettors with a lot of friends willing to travel can find a lot of profit to be had. For the resourceful bettor there are certainly some strong incentives to commit some light terms of service violations in the name of EV.
Edges never last forever. The YouTube video where the sharp bettor was quoted as saying you could get down a lot of money on 10% edges said that in 2022. By the time I arrived in Denver in 2024, while there was the occasional 10%+ EV bet, they were not common and were liable to get you limited. In 2025 the edges are even smaller as many of the weaker books, including Tipico which limited me on Day 3, have since left the Colorado market. As with many other aspects of life, it pays to be adaptable - especially in a zero-sum game where participants have strong incentives to improve.
Operational improvement. If you’re going to hammer a sports book for every single one of their mispriced lines on a new account, pick a day with a lot of games such that you maximize the number of mispriced lines for that particular day. The reasoning here is that if you take every +EV bet, including the ones in more illiquid markets, sports books will be able to figure you out pretty quickly. However, sports books likely have some sort of process that runs on some fixed time interval that limits accounts which means you have some window to place as many bets as possible.5 What a sharp bettor wants to do if they’re planning on burning the account anyway is to get down as many bets as possible BEFORE their account gets limited. In this way you maximize what you can get out of your account before you get shut down.
Finally, I’ll end with a more general observation on obtaining useful information. During my sophomore year in college, I took an Industrial Organization class as part of my economics degree. One of the papers that we reviewed from that class has stuck with me is “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Professor Granovetter. The gist of the paper is that “weak ties” (e.g. acquaintances, random Youtube channels you’ve never watched before) are much more likely to provide novel information than “strong ties” (close friends and family, internet forums that you already frequent). Perhaps I would have found out about how lucrative sports betting in Colorado is from another source, but one sentence from a 20 minute serendipitously recommended Youtube video set me down this path far earlier than otherwise. Sometimes the most actionable information comes from unlikely sources.
There is, of course, a lot of useless impractical information out there. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that even though it’s impossible to predict where the next useful thing will come from, what we do have control over is spending a little bit of time cultivating our weak ties.
It is a little more nuanced than this as books are likely trying to balance targeting true positive sharp bettors and false positive whales. The earlier you limit someone, the less signal you have, and the more likely they are to be a false positive. It would be a disaster for a book to mistakenly limit someone that turns out to be a whale.
If you are interested in signing up, using my affiliate link will help support me and my writing!
We’re going to ignore that Moby Dick was *spoilers* mortally wounded in the end.
As of writing, I’ve just completed my now yearly trip to Denver for sports betting and came out +7 units over 120 bets. The variance is real!
It’s probable that books will get faster at limiting accounts as time passes, but it appears to take them at least 12 hours to limit you from my experience
Edging closer to becoming full degen the more I read this substack. Thanks for the interesting read Rudi.
zoop x