Greedy sportsbooks

Now that the World Series is long over, I feel a bit more comfortable writing about this. Offshore sportsbook Olympic usually has props on "which team will hit the first HR in the game?" and "which team will hit the first Triple in the game?" Triples don't happen very often, so both teams are usually listed as -115. HRs are much more common, and if the two teams are even, the away team will be a bit of favorite. Olympic deals these props on many games during the year, so they have learned to put up fairly accurate lines. Especially given their 30-cent line, it is tough (IMO) to find an edge in these props at Olympic. Plus their limits are fairly low on props, so even if you find an edge, you can only bet so much.

During the playoffs, and especially the World Series, other books decide to put up props too. Too often, they do it the lazy way and just copy Olympic's lines. In Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting, I wrote about a mis-labeled prop in the Seattle/Pittsburgh Super Bowl where the sportsbook that copied Olympic's lines got screwed because they incorrectly labeled the prop.

It happened again in the Red Sox / Rockies World Series in game 1 - this time at a different sportsbook. The greedy sportsbook not only "cheated" by copying Olympic's lines on "Who will hit the first Triple in the game?", they also decided to make it a 3-way line and add a "No Triples will be hit". Usually this is good for the book to make a 3-way line because they increase the total vig on the three-way action compared to the two-way action.

In this case, Olympic had the following line:

Who will hit the first Triple in Game 1:
Rockies -115
Red Sox -115

If there was no Triple in the game, then the bet would be canceled and all bets refunded.

The greedy sportsbook added the "No Triple" because they wanted to clean up on both the Red Sox and Rockies bettors if no triples happened. That may work in other props, but it didn't work in this one. They had the following line:

Who will hit the first Triple in Game 1:
Rockies -115
Red Sox -115
No Triple +400

Unfortunately for the greedy sportsbook, triples are rare in baseball, in particular Fenway park where there really is only one part of the field where a triple can occur (deep center field in the triangle area). The No Triple should be worth -400! The greedy sportsbook had mispriced the No by an incredible margin.

Greedy sportsbooks should get punished, especially if they are copiers too. They did learn their lesson a bit as they did not offer the "No Triple" in the other games of the World Series after having to pay out my winning wager.