Kirk's Hammer: 2025 Reflection

Year in Review

I haven’t written a pure betting newsletter in a few months, and I was reflecting on my 2025 betting year, and thought it would make for a good one. Overall, 2025 was quite successful for me. It was not as good as 2024, but it was my second most successful year betting. It felt a lot more challenging than 2024, but I think that’s mostly because we had some significant downswings, which always outweigh the big upswings emotionally. 2024 was far more consistent.

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Prediction Markets:

2025 will go down in history as a defining year in betting, and that is because of prediction markets. It’s crazy to think that my first bet placed on a prediction market was on January 14, 2025. PMs existed in 2024, but mostly as political betting websites, and they weren’t really on my radar. Now they’re everything, and they look to be the main focus of most serious bettors for years to come.

One thing I already knew, but that was very much reinforced for me in 2025, is that trying to predict where the sports betting landscape is going past a twelve-month horizon is incredibly difficult, and likely not worth my time. Either that, or I am very bad at predicting where sports betting is going due to my warped view of only really talking to winning bettors. I remember in 2021 I won what I considered at the time a really solid amount of money betting, and in my head I thought, “I’ll never be able to repeat that—the market simply just won’t let me.” Now, in 2025, being a winning sports bettor is very much still a thing, and for many it’s a better landscape than pretty much anytime since the early legalization boom.

For the first five to six months of the year, you could essentially put up any prop as an arb to the market, only by 1c, so you were essentially just getting the price you’d be betting at FD/DK/Builder and get it filled for nearly infinite liquidity on PMs. Not only that, but Captain Jack made a video about how this person (me, and many others I’m sure) posting $20k of liquidity on an NBA prop was likely not sharp! Sadly, the Oddjammers have wizened up to that gambit and it doesn’t really work anymore, but that would have been unimaginable in 2024.

Even now, people on Twitter are regularly posting $50k+ positions on the most random shit imaginable. Flup had a fucking million dollars on ANTHONY JOSHUA TO BEAT JAKE PAUL. That sentence would have melted your brain in 2021.

There are money-making opportunities on PMs that would never have been thought possible 18 months ago. This isn’t me trying to shill, but I do think if you commit your time to who is going to go to Taylor Swift’s wedding, you should be able to get in good quite easily.

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SGPs Are Dead:

SGPs are like your uncle who told you in 2017 that if you learn to code you’ll be set for your whole life. I’m sure someone reading this who is still crushing SGPs is probably laughing at me, and I still do bet SGPs decently often, but the idea that SGPs are where you should focus is absolutely not the case anymore, in my opinion. DK will take nothing on an SGP with any under prop in it, and FD SGP prices are extremely difficult to beat. There are still some great spots, and SGPs remain solid for account health, but the truly nutty stuff is mostly dead.

A great example is the Mikal Bridges or Draymond Green games, and what would happen if those occurred today. Mikal Bridges a few years ago only played the 1Q, and Draymond Green checked out after one second because Klay Thompson was coming back. Today, you could maybe get a 5-1 or 6-1 parlay on those guys’ unders in SGPs. If it was very close to gametime, maybe you could do better on FD, but very few places are offering alt unders anymore. At the time, you could take Mikal Bridges under 11.5 points when his line was 25.5, parlay it with under 1.5 assists and 1.5 rebounds, and get a 100-1 bet easily. Those days are no longer here.

                            
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Market Efficiency:

Every year I try hard to reflect on how much more efficient the market has gotten in the last twelve months. When I started betting on NBA sides, each season lines would get much more efficient. Books used to miss very basic stuff about players resting on B2Bs, or a player being obviously in while listed questionable. I assumed that this trend would continue linearly until the market was just too efficient and I couldn’t win anymore. I’m sure that day will come, but it has been far from linear. I don’t think the NBA prop or side market is much more efficient in 2025 than it was in 2024. Once all the really low-hanging-fruit stuff got picked up, the rate at which the market gained efficiency became far slower, and I haven’t noticed much of a change in the past 24 months. The big exception being WNBA props, where I think ETR releasing projections made the market way more efficient from 2024 to 2025.

Overall, I think it’s a great time to be a winning bettor, and I don’t think I would have said that after any other year of my gambling journey. Naturally, that probably means that some unforeseen market force is about to come in and dry up my edge.

Good luck to everyone in 2026!


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