Status: Attempted | Dates: 3/19/2021 - 3/21/2021 | Location: Circa Sportsbook in Las Vegas, NV | Partner: @2bermz
Inspiration: Compound interest. If you take any investment and increase it by 10% consistently over 24 periods, you will have nearly 10X'd your investment. So I thought, could I make this happen in 24 hours? And just to give myself some wiggle room, I decided to allow myself a full weekend. Resources: We created a modified version of this spreadsheet pulled from Australia Sports Betting - massively helpful What happened? I can think of three different ways to 10X your money in such a short period - buy a lottery ticket, gamble, or something illegal. We decided to try our luck at gambling. Given that we only needed to increase our winnings 10% every hour or so, our strategy was to bet on a lot of relatively high likelihood outcomes (-300 or better) while sprinkling in a few low likelihood outcomes in the hopes of getting lucky with a massive win. Over the course of 5 weeks or so, we tracked 100+ hypothetical bets in a spreadsheet, determined outcomes, and then reviewed our performance to glean insights about various sports, bet types, etc. Once we felt confident in our strategy, we decided there's no better time to win big than the first round of March Madness! So we booked two seats at the Circa Sportsbook, showed up at 7 AM with coffee in one hand and laptops in the other, and handed them 10 crisp Ben Franklins. By about 8 PM, we were down to $112 and change... (dammit UCSB, you let us down!) The next day we won back some of our money on ensuing bets but overall it was a long shot, so we threw a Hail Mary on roulette and somehow ended the weekend at ~$500. We agreed to cut our losses and live to fight another day. Back to the drawing board!