Good morning, everyone, the simple handigap for Wednesday, December 29th.

Thank you for making me a part of your morning.

Three more days to go until 2025 more days to go until week 17 kicks off.

And that day count of five, all of the sudden becoming much more relevant in terms of NFL betting than it has

been up to this point in the season. The first game on the board is Las Vegas on the road at

Indianapolis. There's a lot to talk about in this game based on what happened yesterday.

However, I'm going to start with just a little bit of talking about bookmaking,

how it works, and the misconception that bookmakers fix the lines to take advantage of

betters on the, quote, insider trading that I saw a lot of people referencing yesterday

when this game went on. And the easiest way for me to do this is go to my most basic example

of bookmaking to somebody who's new into betting. And there's going to be like 20 to 30 people on the podcast that listen to this and start

groaning and complaining and that's not how it works and like everyone does when they're

bitching online on Twitter.

The point of what I'm about to explain is just breaking it down in the most simplistic

way that I can. And I'm not like, this is not getting

incredibly detailed. And so, yes, there will be stuff that goes on top of this other layers,

relax. That's for another episode. So the hypothetical that I give is, let's say, you listening to

this podcast, you go to bed tonight and you wake up

in the morning and all of the sudden you're in a hypothetical world where you're a bookmaker

at your local bar, there's no internet, and you have 100 customers that bet. And your job now

for the foreseeable future is to set odds on every NFL game.

So let's pretend that the odds are not up for week 17 yet. Right. So you wake up, you have to go

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