Your First Week of OddsJam: Introduction, Guide, and Tips for Your Sharp Betting Journey

Welcome to OddsJam! I’m Ray, and I put this guide together to help those of you who are thinking about subscribing, on a free trial, just subscribed, or even existing subscribers wanting to learn more.

If you haven’t subscribed to a plan right for you yet, you can do so here.

In this guide, I’m going to explain why OddsJam has literally changed the lives of myself and so many other users, how it can change yours, the nuts and bolts of the tools, and trying to answer questions or concerns you may have.

There will be embedded examples with screenshots from the tools, links to other comprehensive articles, and embedded videos if you prefer to learn that way.

If anything is not answered, you want to hear more about my experience, or want some specific tips for your betting situation, my email is [email protected]. Do not hesitate to reach out and I’ll be happy to assist you.

Introduction

Studies show that about 3% of sports bettors are able to sustain profits and win on a long-term basis. If you follow this guide and use the OddsJam tools as they are intended, then I want to welcome you to the 3%.

Depending on which tools you use (more on that later), there will be a wide range of highs and lows. There are weeks when I feel like every bet is winning and then other weeks when everything is going wrong. It’s all part of the process.

If you’re hesitant about spending money to help your sports betting success, you’re not alone. Before I joined the OddsJam team, I was a subscriber. Before I was a subscriber, I was a losing sports bettor.

At the time, I didn’t really care too much because I would be betting tiny unit amounts just for fun. Betting wasn’t hurting my day-to-day life, but I certainly wasn’t winning.

I discovered OddsJam because I realized that different sportsbooks have different odds. Like driving through a town with multiple gas stations all with slightly different prices, I found myself scanning all my apps and accounts looking for where I could find that extra half point in the spread of a -105 line instead of -115.

It would take my a few minutes to do all this, and I thought there’s got to be a better way. So I googled around and found OddsJam.

At the time, I had no idea that OddsJam would completely change how I bet.

I was just looking to get the best price on whatever square bet I was placing. Now, I only bet with the market value that the OddsJam tools reveal.

The sports betting landscape is a unique one. Sportsbooks all set their lines independently of one another, and sometimes they are vastly different. It could be that their models are off, or that they’re trying to balance their books and have a disproportionate amount of money on one side of a bet so they’re trying to balance it out.

Either way, these discrepancies in the market are how we win.

Let’s think about it in terms of the stock market. If there are 10 sites selling Apple stock for $100 a share, but the 11th site is selling it for $85, you can be confident that buying it at $85 is a great deal.

Nobody knows if the stock will go up or down in the future, but you paid much less for it than market value.

You could hold it at $85 and have a lot of value and hope it grows, or you could turn around and sell it on another site for $100 and make $15 in profit.

That essentially explains two of our most popular tools: the Positive EV tool (place bets beating market value) and the Arbitrage tool, where you place both sides of a bet (buying and selling the stock) and lock in some risk-free profit.

To maximize our tools, you need as many sportsbooks as possible. That leads us into step one of your journey.

Signing Up for Sportsbooks & Setting Up Your Bankroll

The first step of becoming a successful sports bettor is to sign up for as many sportsbooks and daily fantasy sports sites as possible.

This link is where you need to go, and it takes you to a page where you can see all the sportsbook sign-up bonuses in your state.

In the top right corner of this screenshot, you’ll see my state is set to AZ (Arizona). So all the sign-up bonuses for sportsbooks in Arizona are listed here in this screenshot.

Of course, that will change if you’re not in Arizona. Different states have different sportsbooks and DFS sites because the states have different regulations about what is and is not legal.

All of these books are completely legal and regulated. They may ask for personal information like an ID photo or a social security number as any bank or financial institution would to verify your identity.

These sportsbooks love being in business, and are not interested in scamming you out of your money. If they do, they would violate everything that allows them to operate in your state.

I understand it’s hard to trust a website with your money, but I have never once had a problem withdrawing it. Sure it may take a few days to process, but the money always comes back when I want it to.

It’s completely safe to deposit your money into any of these books on OddsJam.

Anyway, it’s extremely important to customize OddsJam to fit your specific situation, and that starts with the location.

Remember, about 97% of sports bettors lose in the long run. Because of this, the books desperately want your business and are willing to offer fantastic sign-up bonuses.

Even if you start with a small bankroll, churning through all these bonuses and quickly give you a head-start on your journey.

We have tons of existing resources for how to best take advantage of these offers. I’m going to drop two of the best ones below:

How to Take Advantage of Sportsbook Sign-Up Bonuses: Weighing Your Options

With the majorities of these offers, you are given bonus bets if your initial bet loses. Bonus bets are not cash because you can’t withdraw them, and when they win you don’t get your stake returned.

For example, if you have a $10 bonus bet and win a +100 odds bet to win $10, you get $10 in cash added to your account, not $20 (stake + winnings).

However, they can be converted to cash through hedging on another sportsbook with our Bonus Bet Converter tool.

Here’s a great video breakdown of how that tool works:

This tool will be useful to you your entire career is a sports bettor, because sportsbooks are constantly running promotions with bonus bet components.

Once you’ve signed up for as many sportsbooks as possible, pause and take inventory of your current bankroll.

How much money do you have across all your accounts?

Is that amount evenly spread out between the accounts, or is the majority at one book?

You never know which books profitable bets will come up at, so it’s important to be prepared with portions of your bankroll in each book.

Once your bankroll is all set up, you’re ready to take full advantage of the betting tools.

I highly recommend betting using the Kelly Criterion. That link has a full breakdown, but essentially it determines your bet size based on how much expected value there is in the bet.

Before you start betting, you’re going to want to go to bankroll settings and input your amount as well as preferred Kelly multiplier. I use 0.5, which is a bit on the aggressive side. If you’re just starting out, I recommend something like 0.25.

The Betting Tools and How to Use Them

In this section, I’m going to break down the purpose of each tool and how to use them.

Tool #1: Positive Expected Value

The Positive Expected Value tool shows bets that are mathematically profitable at one specific sportsbook. The profitable bets are bolded and highlighted in green, making it easy for you to identify the bets worth placing.

If you don’t know what Positive Expected Value sports betting is, I’ll explain briefly here but I urge you to watch this breakdown from Alex:

Essentially, +EV betting is taking bets at odds better than what the fair market probability is.

Imagine you are betting on a coin flip. Over a massive sample size, 50% of the time it will land on heads and 50% of the time it will land on tails.

The fair price for $10 bet on a coin flip would be to win $10, or +100 odds. Over 100 flips of the coin, you’ll be expected to lose $10 50 times and win $10 50 times, coming out even.

That’s even expected value.

But what if your friend was offering you $11 in profit for every time you win that $10 bet?

Now over 100 flips, 50 times you’ll lose $10 (-$500), but the other 50 times you’ll win $11 (+$550). All of a sudden, you have $50 in expected profit over those 100 flips.

If you were to flip it 1,000 times, you’d have $500 in expected profit.

10,000 times…$5,000 in expected profit. That small edge of an extra dollar in the payout adds up.

That’s what we’re doing here with sports betting.

To be clear, the vast majority of bets available on sportsbooks are negative EV. Think about an NFL spread. Each side will be listed at -110 odds, meaning you are risking $110 to win $100. According to the market, the bet has a 50% chance to win, so 50% of the time you will win $100, but the other 50% you will lose $110. Over time, you will lose money.

But what if the whole market is listing a bet at -110 but there’s one sportsbook at +110? Now, you flip it. 50% of the time you will lose $100, but the other 50% you will win $110. Over time, you will win money.

These unique betting opportunities where sportsbooks are off from the rest of the market create this Positive Expected Value, and OddsJam scans millions of odds every second to find them for you on the tool.

This bet here is exactly what I mean!

Every sportsbook has these odds at -110 (on both sides, so implying a 50% win probability), with Pinny even at -114. Except for Fliff.

Fliff is offering this bet at +115 odds. This bet is going to win about 50% of the time. If you place 100 bets like this worth $100 each, you will lose 50 of them (-$5,000), but you will also win 50 of them at +115 (+$5,750). After these 100 bets, you will be mathematically expected to be up $750.

Of course, not all these bets will win at exactly the rate expected. There will be cold streaks and hot streaks, but the bigger the sample size, the closer to true expected value you will be.

Tool #2: Arbitrage

Arbitrage happens when sportsbooks literally cross their lines. If two sportsbooks are offering +101 or bettor on opposite sides of a line, that’s arbitrage.

If the plus odds on one side are higher than the minus odds on the other, that’s arbitrage.

Think back to our stock example from the very beginning of this article. This is equivalent to buying a stock and immediately selling it somewhere else for profit.

Let’s take a look at an example. Here, Caesars and Fliff are way off. The plus odds on Fliff (+435) are higher than the minus odds on Caesars (-374).

When there’s an opportunity like this, you have to move quickly. The books will likely realize their mistake.

Click the calculator icon next to the bet on the tool, and input how much money you want to risk on one of the two sides. I only want to risk $100 on Fliff, so the calculator spit out $422.13 on Caesars.

That creates a total stake of $522.13. No matter what happens in this game, I will get paid out $535 for a profit of $12.87.

If Southern Mississippi covers the +30.5 spread, my bet on Caesars wins and I have $535 there. If South Alabama covers the -30.5 line, Fliff gets paid out $535. As long as the game is played, one of the two literally has to cover. One book will lose, one book will win, and I just made $12 risk-free.

If I place 10 of these bets per day, that’s $120 in profit every day, which is $43,800 over a full year. Now that’s a nice side-hustle.

Tool #3: Middles

What’s even better than a bit of guaranteed money from the arbitrage tool? A bit of guaranteed money with a small chance of hitting it big.

This concept is similar to arbitrage where two bets are being placed, but at different lines.

This example is actually from the same game as our arbitrage example, and on the same books!

Here, we take Southern Miss +27.5 at -274 at Caesars while we take South Alabama -27 at +290.

We can treat this like the arbitrage example and have a risk-free $4.28 no matter what happens…

But here’s the best part. If South Alabama wins by exactly 27 points, our Caesars bet wins and our Fliff bet pushes and we get our money back. It’s like we just won our single bet on Caesars and got paid out in full, but without taking on any risk of losing.

To learn more about middle betting, check out this video:

Tool #4: Low-Hold

This is the same concept as arbitrage since you’re placing bets on both sides of a line, but it brings in bets with a 0% win/loss and slightly worse.

You aren’t going to make money on these bets, but they have a couple key purposes.

The first is to churn through rollovers and promotions. A lot of sportsbooks require you to bet through a certain amount of money to take full advantage of a deposit bonus or promotion.

Using the Low-Hold tool, you can do that while hedging on another book to break even or for a tiny loss.

The second purpose is for rewards programs. Many sportsbooks offer rewards programs that have tiers based on how much you bet in a given month or year.

For example, I’ve been able to stay at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for free because I have rewards points from Caesars Sportsbook. I also got to a high tier in their rewards program and was given a free nice dinner at one of their restaurants.

Alex has been to the Bahamas for free as well:

The more money you bet, the more cool rewards you get. So using the low-holds tool, you can bet lots of money towards these rewards programs while not losing any actual money.

Here’s a great example from the tool:

Barstool has Montreal’s team total over 2.5 at -130, and Fliff has the under at +130.

I can bet $100 on Fliff, $130 on Barstool, and come away with the same $230 I invested and perhaps rank higher on the rewards programs.

Tool #5: Bonus Bet Converter

Sportsbooks often offer free bets as part of promotions or rewards. Because you don’t get your stake back on free bets if they win, it NEVER makes sense to use a free bet on something with minus odds. Think about it. If you have a $10 free bet but you put it on a -200 moneyline, even if it wins you only get $5!

That’s 50% of your original free bet!

Using the Bonus Bet Converter, you can convert your free bets to cash at a rate between 65% and 75% depending on the current opportunities.

Let’s say you have a $10 free bet at Caesars that you want to convert.

As you can see here, I selected Caesars from the dropdown and the tool shows me the best conversion rates.

The top rate is in the North Texas vs. Tulane game, and it’s with the hedge bet on DraftKings.

I plugged my free play amount into the calculator and it tells me to hedge with $42.59 on DraftKings.

No matter which side wins, I’ll come away with a profit of $7.41 in cash.

Tool #6: Fantasy Optimizer

The Fantasy Optimizer is for bettors with DFS apps like PrizePicks, Underdog, ParlayPlay, and more.

You can see all the sites in the header of this screenshot below:

This screenshot is from the PrizePicks page of the optimizer. The way the optimizer works is it highlights in green the picks worth including in your entries.

Six-man flex entries are optimal on PrizePicks, so that’s what it’s set to in the filters.

For a full breakdown of how to use the optimizer, check out this video:

OddsJam Tips & Tricks

In this section, I’ll go over some of the other parts of OddsJam that are crucial to use, and other tips for being a sharp sports bettor.

Tip #1: Track Your Bets

I can’t stress enough how important this one is. It’s important to hold yourself accountable and know exactly the success or failure you are having. Tracking your bets also helps find ways to improve.

To track a bet on OddsJam, simply click the plus sign on any of the tools and input the amount risked.

Your bets will go into the bet tracker, which looks like this:

The most important aspect of this tracker is the CLV column. CLV (Closing Line Value) is what determines if you are betting successfully or not. Take my USC -6.5 bet above…I got it at +110 odds and its current fair odds are -109. The Trojans may not cover, but even if I lose I know that my process was great and I will win in the long run beating the closing line.

I have a profit margin of 2.5% per bet placed while beating the closing line 68% of the time.

Cold streaks happen though! To be transparent, I am currently on one. In October, I have lost $988 while beating CLV 87% of the time, which is way better than I have all-time.

That’s just bad variance, which happens. I will keep trusting that beating CLV will give me success in the future, as it has in the past.

The bet tracker also has cool graphs that can teach you a lot about your betting.

Maybe I should stop betting as much baseball, or at least change my strategy, while basketball I’m dialed in:

Tip #2: Turn On Notifications

In the overview section of your account settings, you can enable notifications so that you can instantly know when the best plays are available.

Tip #3: Experiment With Your Filters

I currently have three filters on here on the EV tool:

I have set my percentage to a minimum of 1% EV, have selected the six sportsbooks I currently have my bankroll in, and set the maximum odds to +200. This eliminates a bunch of longshot bets, and is just a matter of personal preference. If you’re new to OddsJam, I highly recommend turning on recommended filters in the top right of the screenshot.

I hope you learned a lot from this guide. Again, feel free to email me [email protected] if you have any questions, concerns, or something you feel should be added to this guide. I’d be happy to help.