Gambling With House Money

I am doing emergency service behavioral health on-call work this weekend, which is why I made my picks early this weekend and I may have to run off.  I have two weeks left in my fantasy sports career.  Nobody took me up on my offer to join their fantasy football league.  Cowards!!!  Nonetheless, I somehow made the championship final fantasy baseball as the #4 seed.  I have the rest of the MLB regular season to go.  I am so happy to be walking away.  I have enjoyed the football season so much more by being able to focus my attention on the teams and players I care about and not whether or not someone slings the ball backwards on the one yard line thus causing someones team to take a gut wrenching fantasy loss.  I get to simply suffer when my team loses, not my fantasy teams.  I began to care more about my fantasy teams then real teams.  That was disturbing to everyone around me.  I was checking everyday for a hour a day (or more) to make sure my four fantasy football teams last year were doing ok.  My significant other wanted to send me to rehab...in South Korea where apparently they have inpatient rehab programs for internet addiction.  I am not busy on Sundays with my lap top refreshing fantasy scores every minute while one TV is playing whatever insipid game the networks were carrying in my region of the world.  I am glad I'm not doing that anymore.  I am not even giving fantasy advice to people who are still lurking the net looking for fantasy football nuggets.  It's over.  Done.

Like Michael Jordan leaving basketball for gambling huge money on his own golf game, I have moved onto degenerate on-line gambling with play money.  I have moved on to wagerline.com, a web site where sports degenerates can gamble with play money (called units) on every thing being contested under the sun.  I have "bet" on college football, the NFL, MLB, CFL, and even the WNBA.  I place about fifteen "bets" a day.  If you earn enough units in a given sport during a week or during the whole season then you become eligible to win actual real money.  So I don't lose anything (except time and the love of everyone in my home) and have something to win if I know what I am doing.  Of course, it is debatable whether or not I know what I am doing.  I have "bet" using point spreads in every college game being played today.  I even pick some over/under games.  So far, against the spread I pick correctly around 56% of the time on college games.  In pro football I am only one game over .500.  On wagerline.com, if you lose then you lose more units than you "bet" so if you are at .500 then you are in the hole as far as units are concerned.   I have learned that I have no business picking CFL and WNBA games.  None.  Though I am tempted to pick Connecticut in their WNBA play-off game this weekend.  Why?  Because wagerline.com will assist you in your picks in two ways.  The first way is that let's you know for each game the percentage of people who have picked one team or the other.  It also allows you for each game to see what the "experts" have picked.  The experts are what the website has tallied as the best handicappers for the teams involved.  Thus, whoever knows the team the best in terms of picking their contests is considered an expert on that team.  So you can go with the crowd or against it.  It is unclear how wise this crowd is, but at least you know what others are thinking even if you don't know anything about the teams that you are betting on.

I know that this is like one step away from on-line or real gambling with actual real money.  It is like the guy who is an alcoholic who goes to the bar and orders an O'Doul's.  It's just not that big of a leap towards the Coors.  Possibly the same thing here with on-line play gambling.  I will say that there is not as much excitement as in real gambling.  However, I think this is more fun because you really aren't losing anything (except time and maybe sex).  So since I have now a more vested interest in the Akron-Army game on ESPNClassic (I took Akron and the points), I'll click onto that game while looking over my shoulder for Sarah Palin's Terminator robots who I am sure are still after me.