March 27, 2025
Tired of sportsbooks rigging the game against you? In this article, I break down why peer-to-peer betting is the only fair and sustainable model for sports bettors who actually want a chance to win.
Like it or not sports betting isn’t going away anytime soon, we are only hitting the precipice of the gold rush we have been witnessing over the past five years. It is now completely impossible to watch any major American sporting event without hearing about DraftKings’s misleading sign-up bonus, Fan Duel’s juiced odds that are still minus EV, or God forbid Prizepick’s latest garbage disguised as “betting”. The current model is broken. Sports books don’t want winners. They ban sharp bettors, manipulate lines, and thrive on preying on losing players to keep their shareholders happy. The industry is designed for maximum extraction, not fairness.
Peer to peer betting (P2P) offers a solution for the sports fan who likes to have money on the games he watches and wants to win. In this article, I’ll take an in-depth dive into why you should only bet peer-to-peer, breaking down why it offers fairer odds and a level playing field, how it eliminates predatory sportsbook practices, and why it’s the only sustainable model for the long-term future of sports betting.
Let’s start with where this problem we come across stems from, the house. Sportsbooks have been around for ages but generally have not been socially accepted. As this notion has changed and the legalization around the matter has progressed even more forward, corporations have put their foot in the door after they realized how much money there is to be made in the digital betting world. Similar to when any industry is shown to be lucrative and the suits come in, it usually gets damaged for everyone but the shareholders. We went from seeing sides of -110 to sides of as bad as -130 on a regulated Montana sportsbook. I truly feel bad for the poor seventy-year-old sucker who has his pension on that site.
To make sure that you can follow along with the numeric points I am making I will now explain the basics of odds within books. If you were to play a game of basketball one on one versus your friend and wager $10 each, the winner would take away $20. This equivalent in American odds is +100 or EVEN. Say you and your friend played a game of basketball and had to bet your money through a third-party exchange (a sportsbook) and they took your bets at -110. The winner would receive back $19.09 total. Now this ninety one cents may not seem like a whole lot, but imagine a wager of $100, $500, or even $1,000 dollars! These entites make 91 dollars off of essentially doing nothing but providing a landing platform.
