Stealing Lines 2023 plans, 2022 review

After a successful first year, here's what's in store

You haven’t heard from me much this offseason, but that’s only because I’ve been gearing up for the 2023 season. Dalton touched on our slower summer in a recent post, and talked through our goals to be deliberate with our decisions, something that’s been central to the Stealing Lines ethos since Day 1. There are a lot of places you can find picks, and there are a lot of ways to do it wrong in this industry; our number one goal here is to do it right.

The implication there is we care more about being on the up and up than even winning, which is true, but luckily that isn’t an either/or proposition. The 2022 season was a huge success, and I’ll get into a review of all the action shortly.

But first, more about what Stealing Lines is, and set out to be. When we launched this project, I got asked a lot about in on podcasts and through similar avenues. And my line was always something like, “We’re just two guys explaining our process and sharing our bets, and we invite subscribers who think the process and logic is sharp to follow along.”

My idea from Day 1 has been that I don’t want to be in the business of claiming to be a soothsayer, like so much of the grimier part of the betting content industry leans into. For me personally, I don’t even want to necessarily claim I have an edge, because I don’t use models and don’t have a way to quantify that edge other than the amount of time I spend watching and analyzing football every week, month, and season, and then past results.

When we fired this up last year, I was coming off two consecutive profitable seasons picking only sides and totals as a freelancer over at OddsChecker. I wrote about the trends in that published betting history in depth before my Week 1 picks last year.

For Dalton, it would be easier to claim a real edge, because that dude is a grinder in markets that are easier to beat, as evidenced by books’ decisions to sometimes limit. Books have also gotten sharper with their offerings, something we experienced in the NFL draft market this year, where they had taken a beating in the past and responded in 2023 by being more cautious with what they released, and when. They’re in the business of making money, too.

But the idea here from Day 1 was simple: I’d pick sides and totals, Dalton would crush props, we’d maybe occasionally stray into each other’s territory, but mostly we’re working in tandem, covering the other side of the coin from one another’s specialty. There are pros and cons to both sides; I’ve always said if your whole goal is profitability, to make sure you are following Dalton much more closely than me, but obviously sides and totals are markets that are much more liquid and easier to get bets placed into, and plus there’s an entertainment factor — who doesn’t want to be betting sides and totals?

But again, with liquidity comes a more difficult market, and we need to be responsible with these things. Despite two years of profitability on publicly-available bets, I was very clear last year that I don’t claim to have a consistent edge to beat the books in these markets. As Dalton laid out about our decisions to prioritize quality over quantity with our bets, I was selective last year, averaging 5.1 plays per week from Week 1 through Week 17.

I need to shout-out Dan Rivera here, who tracked all of our bets last year in a handy Google Sheet that you can view here.

Ben’s results

On 101 total bets on spreads, totals, or the moneyline for the 2022 season, I went 54-44-3, resulting in +6.34 units and a 5.83% ROI. On 14 futures plays, I posted another +5.28 units for a much higher ROI that isn’t really important; a lot of these were correlated plays on the Chiefs.

It wasn’t all peachy; I did give some of that profitability back in the few props I bet, which I decided to quickly pack in and didn’t pick any props after Week 5.

[As an aside and in the interest of full transparency, with it being our first year, we were trying some things early that weren’t necessarily a good fit, including a system of “tailing” each others’ picks. You’ll also see those in the tracker, with the “Unique/Originator Play” column denoting where that occurred. But while my tails of Dalton were technically profitable, I wasn’t a fan of that “tailing” system, so while those picks live on in our tracker for posterity (you’ll see the differences in the two tables, one labeled “Spreads, Totals, ML only” and the other “All Plays”), that’s something we went away from after Week 5 and won’t exist in the future of Stealing Lines, where only unique plays will be tracked.]

As far as my in-season prop picks, I pivoted to sharing those with Dalton and letting him decide whether Stealing Lines subs should play them, as he has a far better feel for those markets. If I ever find something I really love, I won’t hold it back, but it’ll likely go through him.

I’ll do a more in-depth look at the various elements of my 2022 betting record soon — including how I did on sides vs. totals, where my biases were, etc. — but to sum my total results, on 112 unique plays, I was +5.84 units for a 5.09% ROI. If you were betting $20 on each of my plays, you more or less paid for your Stealing Lines annual subscription just through my plays (of course, these are the more liquid markets, and I know some of you were playing a little more), which is hilarious to consider when you see how Dalton did.

Dalton’s results

First of all, this dude is an animal, giving you guys 1,071 plays over the course of the 2022 football season. Yes, some of the props markets move quickly, and yes you get limited in some. Dalton does take a lot of longshots and ladders and those things, and you’ll see a lot of bets in his tracker that are for very small unit sizes, including literally 0.05 units and those types of things.

So while he does hit on some of those, his numbers aren’t juiced by full-unit bets on huge longshots that you weren’t actually able to get a full unit down on. Again, this is all reviewable in the publicly-available tracker, and I never want to seem like there’s anything other than full transparency.

All this preamble is because Dalton’s record for the 2022 season put him at a ridiculous +75.66 units, for an 11.96% ROI. If your unit size on his props picks was literally only $10, and even if you couldn’t get all of these bets down, or get the exact prices he listed when they moved, you still paid for your Stealing Lines subscription multiple times over.

A huge part of that was on futures, which Dalton crushed for +39.95 units. On top of that, he crushed in-season prop picks for a +35.71-unit figure.

And then into the offseason, while the NFL draft didn’t offer as many interesting markets this year, he was profitable there, too, netting +3.1 units on 21.9 risked for a 14.16% ROI.

As Dalton wrote about going into last season, and will assuredly hit on several ways again this year, his W-L record won’t always reflect these successes, as he’s going to be hitting into markets with low probabilities of hitting for potentially big payoffs. Those are markets he had demonstrable success grinding before we launched Stealing Lines, and they are markets he continued to hit in at a high rate in 2023.

That said, out of 259 bets during the 2022 season with a potential profitability of 2 units or more (i.e. +200 or greater on a 1-unit bet, or even longer odds if the unit size was smaller than 1), Dalton was more or less breakeven (-0.79 units, by my count). I share this because I had conversations with a subscriber last year who felt we were taking too many longshots, and that it was important to clarify the ups and downs of that type of betting style. I agree about the clarification note, but that individual also seemed to believe Dalton’s profitability was juiced by only hitting on longshots.

In fact, Dalton grinded out that record one unit at a time, with your far more typical prop bets. That doesn’t mean he’ll stop playing longshot markets; Dalton’s going to play whatever market he thinks is profitable, as he recently wrote about. But the point I’m driving home is his profitability was in no way dependent on big hits, for anyone who might have sustainability concerns related to that.

Other results

I mentioned that Dalton was also profitable on the NFL draft, which is split into its own tab in the tracker, and we also offered an NBA product last year from Mikey Braude, at no additional cost to subscribers. Mikey did incredibly well, clawing back from a bit of a slow start to turn an +8.87-unit profit on 339 bets through the NBA season.

We’re not yet sure whether we’ll run the NBA stuff back, mostly because we’re not yet sure whether Mikey wants to do the grind of these types of bets all season again, but we’ll continue to look for spots where we can offer more value to subscribers as we see fit.

One other way we did that was with some NCAA basketball bets, not tracked here but written up on Substack, which included a 0.2-unit bet on +1800 Connecticut to win the title (as well as winning bets on them to make the Sweet 16 and Final Four for another 1.5 units risked). I’m not sure if we ever broke down the final totals of all the bets in that one-off writeup, but I’m pretty sure that was profitable, as well, thanks in large part to the Huskies taking down the title.

2023 plans

While it was important to review 2022 in the most transparent way possible, all of this is mostly just preamble to say we’re back for Year 2, and things will look a lot like you remember them from Year 1. We’re still a pretty small, boutique shop offering picks from two guys who are hopelessly addicted to this stuff. While the lines can sometimes move, we’re not such a huge enterprise that you can’t ever get money down on our picks because there are so many people slamming a line the second it’s given out.

And we have a pretty sweet Discord community, which if you’re a new sub that’s not yet in there, directions for accessing the private Discord channels can be found here. While we’ll write up plays here in Substack whenever possible, 100% of the official plays will be found in Discord, where you can get the alerts immediately to get your money down. In some cases, and typically for Dalton on props, the play needs to be sent out quickly as a reaction to news, because the line is going to move. So that is why Discord is the No. 1 source where 100% of the plays will be, while the Substack plays are a little more casual and are likely to be our weekly best bet writeups like you saw last season.

One thing we do want to note is that our prices will be going up. For those of you who subscribed last year and have already renewed for 2023, you’re locked into the 2022 price. Within the next week, though, our $25/month and $125/year prices will adjust to $39/month and $199/year. We understand any concern on this, but between our displayed success in 2022 and then just to keep pace with the market, this is the move we’ll be making. We understood last year we needed to prove ourselves in the market, but we ultimately felt like we were underpricing ourselves relative to comparable products out there, particularly when you consider some of the additional elements our product offers.

That change will not take effect for new subscribers until at least tomorrow, because we want to give any free subscribers who were planning to upgrade to a paid subscription an opportunity to do that at the currently available $25/month or $125/year prices. Consider it an early bird special that won’t last through the weekend.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back with more props before Week 1, but we’re really looking forward to providing our in-season picks for you all year long! While we’ll never guarantee profitability, we’ll also hopefully repeat our results from 2022.

The season is right around the corner — I’m stoked!