[suicidekings]

This is exactly right. Once the books realize the public has identified it, they adjust. this is part of why I think people are idiots for putting systems on this site that they know work.

I was listening to Dr. Bob on Chad Millman's Behind the Bets podcast a few weeks back and he was talking about the concept of yards per point and how when he first developed and started using that metric to rate games, it was very successful. However, over time, as he talked about ypp in his releases he's seen the market shift so where he used to have a good sized window to operate before lines moved, he's now getting undercut more and more by the new middle class of more educated public bettors, hitting the early lines that used to only get hit by true sharp players. He admitted that it was a poor longterm decision regarding his profitability to talk about ypp in detail. If a concept that's grounded firmly in the actual gameplay can fall off the rails by being publicized, then the much more subjective line movement analysis of any kind was doomed from the start.

This idea of the expanding middle class (filling the gap between the true public gameday bettors and sharp money) has revolutionized how the betting market operates in the last few years. The concept of the sharp side and the square side of a particular game falls apart when you consider that the same guy might play the -2.5 opener on a game and then buy it back if the line crosses over to +3 or +3.5 because both may represent a +EV play. It gets even worse when people start talking about RLM on a Tuesday/Wednesday for a Saturday/Sunday game when the betting % are probably not even representing the true market position on the game.