It's a cliche to say all lines matter. Often they seem like they don't.
Most books eventually get steamed or chilled to effectively very similar numbers by puck drop or green flag or whatever.
Most weeks, I check the books every hour from Monday at noon or so until the last of the first lines are out on maybe Wednesday. Circa is the final bookend.
Getting those early, mispriced lines, the maxes and mins from every book, makes a huge difference.
Last week in the Cup race, I missed one. Sort of.
Monday, I dropped a raft full of DARTS or smart longshots. We hit the winner, a second-year dude in Ford named Chase Briscoe. It was a good bet. It was a smart bet.
I gave him to you at +6000. He won, and if you played the whole card for the week, it was worth 3 Units.
Awesome.
Trouble is, the rest of the Cup card was garbage. After a positive day in Xfinity, the entire Hendrick team no-showed the Top 10 or so on Sunday, and Martin Truex was terrible too. Matchups were dreadful.
But in the darts I gave you, you had the Top3 finishers in the race, priced at +6000, +5000 and +2700 to Win. Not just bracketed the target, obliterated it.
And, a little later in the week, I went and found Briscoe at +10000.......yes, 100 to 1. And forgot to update you guys in the subscriber chat. I got a couple more bucks worth of lotto tickets on that. And if we'd all gotten in at +10000 instead of +6000, it's a positive week, instead of a small loss. Would have been 5 Units.
My bad. But shopping for lines, the best lines, is critical.
We mention that the top three cars at Phoenix in Cup were +2700 or cheaper.
That's been the pattern early in 2020. More competitive cars from first to 30th. Period.
Our four winners? +450 (Larson), +6000 to +10000 Briscoe, +3000 or cheaper for Cindric at Daytona, and +2200 pre-race for Bowman at Vegas.
Denny Hamlin, perpetual Cup contender and Top 3 priced to it this year is 27th with no Top 10s. The Toyotas are awful, and are finally breaking me of my plan to make Christopher Bell a thing.
Deep field value is a thing, and in-play betting is a thing.
So, how has it taken us this deep in the page to say anything about the three Atlanta races this weekend?
Because I have no idea at all how to book them until we see meaningful amounts of practice Friday afternoon or any qualifying at all.
For Cup, it's not just the new cars and lower horsepower engine package that ruin most of the last 30 years of data.
No, they've rebuilt and changed the entire track. More banking, fresh pavement, no tire wear.
Oh, and it's probably going to rain on Friday and Saturday.
I can give you almost no smart advice yet. The Cup cars, because the new banking will increase likely speed, are being detuned down to the lower horsepower motors used at Daytona and Talladega.
So, subscribers, watch you message platform Friday PM for my inkling of what's to come. This is going to be a very light week for everything but in play calls, in all three series.
Only three guys tested in Cup cars so far in the off-season.......Kurt Busch, Ross Chastain (second last week) and Chris Buescher. Maybe throw a DART at Buescher now out in the +7000 area on FD, before practice & qualifying make him more expensive.
If this turns into a plate race analog, you will want guys like Buescher and Chastain and both Dillons as tiny darts in your pre-race pocket.
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