NBA Referee Betting Patterns

A story about how Haralabob made millions by finding inefficiencies in NBA sports betting markets.

"He got famous because he was a big sports bettor and famously one year, I think around 2000, he absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found arbitrage opportunities. He would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and made millions of dollars.

One year, he discovered that Vegas would set over/under totals for games and split them exactly in half for first-half betting. But in basketball, the second half naturally has more points because losing teams start fouling at the end of games. So the first-half over/under was consistently overpriced, and he would bet the under.

He also analyzed referees when nobody else was. He identified which refs were foul-prone and knew certain teams would score more than their normal average with specific refs. He actually figured out before the NBA uncovered that referee Tim Donaghy was cheating because weird things were always happening in his games.

He made millions doing this, and then Mark Cuban hired him to be his secret weapon for the Mavs. He worked there for a year or two before leaving, with articles coming out saying everyone in the company hated him because he had too much Cuban's ear and too much power for his position as special adviser."