Is Right Angle Sports the Square Route to Betting Profit?

Like Doctor Bob Sports, Right Angle Sports has consistently beaten the betting market racking up 56% winning percentage in both football and basketball for years. This success has given the service quite a following and has captured the attention of the casinos. A release from RAS will not only move the line a point as with Doctor Bob, RAS lines are very often two points away from the original release.

Unlike Doctor Bob, which relies heavily on statistical models, RAS gets much of its performance by focusing on smaller conferences and fundamental analysis by reviewing games as well as doing some statistical analysis. It makes no claim to using successful math models and its edge has not shown much deterioration in recent years.

Any amount of reading of subscriber comments will often point to the fact that subscribers cannot get the lines released by RAS despite the services best intentions and strategies. As discussed in my posting “Adjusting Doctor Bob,” this is a prime consideration for any bettor wishing to follow RAS as it can mean the difference between winning and losing.

The following are the performance records for RAS college basketball for the last 5 years and its entire history of college football. Both have been solid 56% performers.

CBB: 864-668 .563
CFB: 571-453 .558

RAS does not publish its record for pushes but we can conservatively estimate 2 pushes for every 100 bets and estimate a subscriber performance level. The adjusted returns:

CBB: 804-698 .535
CFB: 551-473 .538

Both adjusted returns are still profitable after accounting for losses and lost wins due to line movement although these numbers are likely a bit higher than can be expected because of the amount of 2-point line movement with their bet announcements as compared to Doctor Bob.

According to RAS own reporting, line moves reduce performance roughly 2 percentage points for football which is in line with my estimate.
http://i.imgur.com/Qxz4rcJ.png

Basketball could be a bit of a problem, however, as line moves reduced performance a full 5 percentage points on average according to RAS reporting. This could make RAS bets a loser based on its long-term performance record of 56%.
RAS self reporting

RAS subscriptions are quite expensive at $1,195 per season for football and $2,395 for basketball. For a $10,000 betting portfolio, we can expect a record of 160-140 with college basketball and 31-27 for college football. The RAS web site recommends betting 1% per bet for an average handicapper under its money management information but 3 to 4% if you are extremely confident in your picks and can expect a 55 to 56% success rate. Given our confidence in RAS achieving that rate, we’ll assume a 3.3% weighting for each bet.

Betting $330 on each game, we can expect a profit of $8905 in college basketball with a $6500 profit after subscription fees. That’s a clear 65% profit so it seems we might still make good money betting with RAS for the college basketball season. A $100,000 portfolio would do much better with a $89.050 gain or 89%.

College football gives us a $390 profit on $10,000 which will provide a loss of $805 on a $10,000 betting portfolio. With a $100,000 allocation, a $4,000 profit can be expected which would be reduced to just $2,805 after the subscription and a solid 28% return.

Based on my rough estimate, it appears RAS is still profitable after adjusting for the line assuming you are rich enough to afford the amount needed to bet with them profitably keeping in mind that these numbers could be substantially reduced by significant line movement which might well cut profits in half or even eliminate them altogether.

It should be noted that RAS self-reporting is based on very high performance levels which it has not reached on average over the years. Adjustments to lower numbers could be quite ugly in college basketball and could be a reason RAS has been careful to report very high performance figures over a selected timeframe of 3 years. This seems a valid reason to proceed with caution as it seems to confirm my suspicion that much larger line movement greatly reduces its adjusted returns which are difficult to estimate. A 5%-point reduction in performance seems entirely reasonable for the average bettor.

In the end, while RAS' success rate is enviable, it seems that this service should probably be limited to high net worth gamblers with the sophistication to use automated betting technology which allows for the input of bets within seconds of release. Anything less is not likely to be particularly profitable long term, including betting pirated service play posts after the line move.