Dr Bob goes fraud tout, now deletes losing records
groovinmahoovin
Senior Member
As Dr Bob has been cited here and elsewhere as an "honest tout" I figured this is relevant. I'll break this down into a few posts as it's long.
Several years ago Dr Bob hired a tout Gill Alexander to sell MLB picks; a strange choice as Gill had previously sold on Pregame and lost, while also promoting all manners of charlatans. (Years after leaving Pregame, Gill still touts former Pregame tout Vegas Runner aka Greek Gambler aka Gianni Karalis aka Ace aka whatever name he's using this week, one of the most obvious frauds I've ever seen, as "the sharpest market reader in Vegas.")
Not surprisingly, Gill lost during his time with Dr Bob, and now Bob has purged Gill's losing records off his site with the excuse "Gill is no longer selling picks here." This is of course dishonest because:
1) Selection bias: had Gill gotten lucky and won, he would likely still be selling there and the records would still be on Dr Bob's site
2) The performance of Dr Bob's other touts demonstrates Dr Bob's ability, or lack thereof, to identify winners. I am obviously a lot less likely to follow a Dr Bob tout if I know he had several previous touts that lost, whereas I might be more willing to identify a Dr Bob tout if I know his previous touts won. I regularly cite Wong's Sharp Sports Betting as a tout service that was mostly honest, and they displayed every tout who ever sold picks there, win or lose.
3) A financial firm isn't allowed to press the reset button because one of it's underperforming analysts left.
I and several others asked on Twitter why the records were deleted and he gave the excuse of "Gill has moved on to bigger and better things," and when we mentioned reasons why the records should be maintained like the above (plus, anyone who hears Gill on the radio show, his podcast etc should be able to find Gill's past records), Bob ended the conversation and blocked me, and others have reported also being blocked simply for inquiring about the records.
Several years ago Dr Bob hired a tout Gill Alexander to sell MLB picks; a strange choice as Gill had previously sold on Pregame and lost, while also promoting all manners of charlatans. (Years after leaving Pregame, Gill still touts former Pregame tout Vegas Runner aka Greek Gambler aka Gianni Karalis aka Ace aka whatever name he's using this week, one of the most obvious frauds I've ever seen, as "the sharpest market reader in Vegas.")
Not surprisingly, Gill lost during his time with Dr Bob, and now Bob has purged Gill's losing records off his site with the excuse "Gill is no longer selling picks here." This is of course dishonest because:
1) Selection bias: had Gill gotten lucky and won, he would likely still be selling there and the records would still be on Dr Bob's site
2) The performance of Dr Bob's other touts demonstrates Dr Bob's ability, or lack thereof, to identify winners. I am obviously a lot less likely to follow a Dr Bob tout if I know he had several previous touts that lost, whereas I might be more willing to identify a Dr Bob tout if I know his previous touts won. I regularly cite Wong's Sharp Sports Betting as a tout service that was mostly honest, and they displayed every tout who ever sold picks there, win or lose.
3) A financial firm isn't allowed to press the reset button because one of it's underperforming analysts left.
I and several others asked on Twitter why the records were deleted and he gave the excuse of "Gill has moved on to bigger and better things," and when we mentioned reasons why the records should be maintained like the above (plus, anyone who hears Gill on the radio show, his podcast etc should be able to find Gill's past records), Bob ended the conversation and blocked me, and others have reported also being blocked simply for inquiring about the records.
Comments
There is ZERO chance that Dr. Bob was unaware of NBA Guru posting here, because when Guru joined Dr Bob, Bob quoted a selectively datamined Guru BettingTalk record. Guru did poorly on 1 unit plays here but did well on higher rated plays, so Bob advertised his previous record on higher rated plays while ignoring the 1u plays. Nevermind that it's rather dishonest for a tout service to consider it acceptable to advertise a partial datamined record from a previous site for one of the touts in their stable, while considering it fine to purge losing records from other touts that were achieved while the tout was part of his tout service, but he's flat out lying claiming that the NBA Guru on BettingTalk isn't the same NBA Guru selling on his site.
At least RAS bets a ton of money on their picks.
1) Bob had previously purged his own losing MLB records from years ago. I didn't know Bob used to sell baseball, but in the course of the Twitter conversation, he defended the deletion of Gill's records telling noted gambling industry watchdog VegasWatch "I had a great record in MLB and I took those records down when I stopped handicapping it too." However archive.org shows that he actually lost -17.5 units in the 3 years he did baseball:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040402172258/http://drbobsports.com/baseball/baseball.cfm?p=1
I was unaware that Bob had ever sold baseball. Bob did not ever reply to the guy who shared that link and I suspect blocked him too, as he blocked myself and VegasWatch. Additionally, he is currently advertising a record for his MLB model for plays that he did not even share publicly!
https://drbobsports.com/baseball/
"Our MLB Math Model went live on June 20th of last season and produced very good results (+43 units on sides and -12.2 units on totals). I started posting the MLB Math Model plays at no charge after the All-Star Break and Best Bet sides were +16.04 units (1 unit per play) while totals were -12.20 units."
So the model went +30.8 units but only +3.84u of that was posted publicly; it's relevant to advertise that, but his previous records on the picks he sold are not relevant, nor are the picks Gill sold.
2) He announced he stopped handicapping NFL after the 2013 season and has purged those records; there's still a tab for NFL but nothing is there:
https://drbobsports.com/dr-bob-past-performance/
His NFL from 1999 to 2013 was -35.7
http://web.archive.org/web/20160316045331/http://drbobsports.com/pastperformance.cfm
3) From 2013-2015, he had some tout Mike O'Connor selling NFL who lost and those records were also purged.
4) However, he is happily advertising his 100-69 (nice) record on NFL in 2016:
https://drbobsports.com/nfl/
Yes, the last few years have not been kind to Dr Bob. It's difficult to add up his records because in addition to the purging, he also often buries poor current season records in the middle of an epic Homeric tome where he explains how he's gotten unlucky this season, but if my math was correct, when I added up his previous 4 years past performance (I could only go back that far as I hadn't yet found the purged NFL records on archive.org), he was down -138u across all sports. We've seen this before with Fezzik, winning at first, then losing, then going full on fraud.
Aside from everything else i mentioned, he's now touting selective samples of his record. He's currently down -58.7u in the NBA but his last tweet advertised his 55% record on free plays. The pay plays should be stronger, so touting the performance of the weaker plays is RJ Bell-esque, as is touting his CBB record over the past 12 weeks after "recovering from a slow start."
I read your posts across the street and have followed along on your tout busting trail for a long time now. I wosh I knew about you 10 years ago when I was dumb enough to give into these cowards. My question for you is why do you contine to exert so much time and energy on this type of stuff?
With respect, because you do a lot of good as an unofficial industry watchdog, your anti Dr Bob rant seems a bit hypocritical when you consider that you give a public testimonial to Dr H, who everyone knows does not keep a record of all his past plays under past names (names that are not dissimilar to Vegas Runner being John Karalis in a prior touting life)...
Here is your testimonial on Dr H's site:
In an industry full of scam artists and coin flippers, Dr. H is one of the very few that keeps a legitimate record, looks out for his clients, is fully transparent, displays long term records, and actually wins. The Groovin Mahoovin, industry watchdog and advantage player
Just as Gill brought in a prior record from Pregame to Bob's site, Dr H did the same when he launched his site. At one point, it was right there on his records page, stating that he brought in a half season record of Betting Talk plays. Are you suggesting that Dr H would have included the records if he was losing at Betting Talk? History suggests he would not, as past records under a different name don't appear on his site and never have.
Your criticisms of Bob are fair and valid, but just noting the inconsistency. Your participation in helping to build Dr H up is not dissimilar to how others have built up Gill in the past, and we all know how that turned out as you've documented above.
I get this question all the time, and find it a bit odd only because I wonder how much time and energy people think I devote to this stuff. Even Scott Van Pelt of all people said to me "spending all day every day on this seems like too much" and he's the guy who gives Stuckey shoutouts on the air. It is a strange world where Stuckey is an asset and I'm wasting my time. I actually spend WAY more time answering tweets and Twitter DMs from newbies than I do talking about touts, but I kind of feel obligated to answer sincere questions, which most of them are, and it sucks that the RJ Bells and Todd Fuhrmans of the world are too incompetent or too busy promoting touts to answer basic newbie questions. RJ Bell thinks MLB HFA is worth 12% over a 7 game series and Fuhrman thinks a NFL dog of +3 = a ML of +175, so I guess the former.
Anyway to answer your question, 1) I find this stuff hilarious. Even before I was aware of Dr Bob purging records and thought he was still +EV, I loved it when people would send me his 3000 word wakes about why he got unlucky over his last X picks. In the aftermath of the Deadspin article, RJ Bell admitted he lied about being the valedictorian at Ohio State when he actually was only 1st out of ~200 people in the finance department. He said "someone interviewed me and referred to me as the valedictorian and I thought it sounded good so I added it to my bio" He even laughed when he talked about it on the radio a bunch of times and acted like Deadspin was lying about him for calling him out, as if it's completely normal behavior to change "first in your department of 200" to "valedictorian of one of the biggest schools in the country." Vegas Dave posted a picture of "the 2 milly he won betting Falcons 75/1 to win the NFC" and he had obvious $1 bills inside what supposedly were straps of $100s. You can't make this stuff up.
But more to the point 2) I think the media incessantly promoting these shitty touts as "pro bettors" is bad for the industry as a whole, and the negative perception about sports betting inhibits legalization of sports betting. Vegas Dave sells a freaking MLB martingale system and none of the dopes who report on his "winnings" find it at all suspicious that he claims to be 157-4 in MLB or whatever.
3) A substantial number of these fraud touts also do other shitty things. For example there are lots of stories about Gill's "pro bettor" Vegas Runner stiffing people. Johnny Detroit from Wagertalk, formerly of Pregame stiffed me for 10k, was an agent for BetPhoenix and got his super agent to leak him my password, IP address, etc, which he tried to trace to my BetPhoenix account, but I'd been tipped off so I'd emptied out the money I had in there. (Not huge since their limits are low but still.) Lots of these fraud touts promote sportsbooks that will stiff winners, and in some cases have stiffed me. It really angers me that people could see an offshore book promoted by one of these tout services, think the book is legit because the tout is featured on ESPN or whatever, win at the book and then get stiffed. And in some cases the tout is also getting a cut of customer losses.
Not even sure where to begin here. I wrote that testimonial prior to the 2014-2015 CBB season and wrote a similar one for Procap around the same time. I had heard of both through this forum,--people I knew posted here said they had subscribed, the lines were widely available and the records accurate, and both told me they would let me monitor the plays. Since Dr H sells CBB and Procap sells CFB, both are are sort of "competitors" of RAS (I put "competitors" in quotes because I'd consider a +EV CBB totals bettor to be more of a "competitor" to RAS than some random clown selling CBB totals on Pregame, but you know what I mean). I figured that verification of the lines/records from people I know and trust, the ability to monitor the picks myself, the fact that they were allowed to post on a "competitor's" forum, and the fact that the picks had shown positive CLV was a strong indicator of both transparency and winning going forward.
In the two years since, the only criticism I've gotten on any forum or Twitter for that endorsement, aside from a few people criticizing that the DrH MLB plays are overnight and "not for real limits" (the overnight plays are clearly labelled, and I have a hard time conceding that 5k on Pinny and CRIS are not "real limits" relative to the service charge), almost all come from people with no posting or Twitter history, aside from that guy "BigKahuna" who's banned from here, and several people said the randoms with no history were probably him.
Prior to mentioning my endorsements, Kahuna followed me on Twitter. For those not familiar with Todd Fuhrman, he's like RJ Bell in worthlessness/fraudulence, and one day when I flamed Fuhrman for his usual BS "the syndicates I know are betting these games" Kahuna bitched at me to "Shutup already." When I said "uh, your complaint should be with Fuhrman" he replied "C-ya enjoy saving everyone from touts." This is not consistent behavior with a person who is actually interested in sharing accurate information about touts.
Anyway, searching back I see Kahuna ranted a few times about DrH "selling picks under another name" and when I pressed for details, he couldn't provide any and just kept ranting and raving about "a scam artist using multiple names and fake records." The only details he remotely provided after saying "his record is not for his service, but u endorse. huh ? #hypocrisy" and I said that I'd personally verified his record, he said " "oh brother ! His records include posts on BT not only his service. Those r not service plays, those r posts.He combined em." The free forum records were explicitly labeled as free forum posts and it was him starting his service in the middle of the season, not the tout freeroll of giving some picks for free and others for pay and advertising whichever subset does better. I fail to see why it would possibly matter if the picks are free or for pay as long as there's no datamining being done, i.e. "here are some free plays along with my pay plays and I will advertise them separately based on whichever one does better." There is obviously a bit of selection bias in that someone who does well posting for free is more likely to go tout than someone who loses, but if the records are explicitly separated, this is clear to the reader.
Scott Kellen didn't sell his NFL picks for several years after he'd had a losing streak, and I recall him giving seasons of picks for free because subscribers had lost purchasing a previous sport, and you'll notice I never once objected to him including the free picks along with the winners. On Wong's SharpSportsBetting, they would advertise how their newer touts had done on the free pages but clearly separate the records, and I never objected to that either.
I can't recall the names off the top of my head of the Twitter accounts with no posting history who were bitching about Dr H so I can't search the posts, but as I recall, the complaints I got were always trivial, for example there were a couple times that the overall records were right but a couple picks weren't displayed because of a technical glitch or a site redesign, and I think the site had been hacked at one point and had to be rebuilt, but the errors were always corrected in a reasonable amount of time once Dr H was made aware of them. It's essentially trolling for someone to bitch at me "hey his July 9th picks are missing he's a fraud" when they haven't even brought that to his attention.
So you are claiming that "everyone knows [Dr H] does not keep a record of all his past plays under past names (names that are not dissimilar to Vegas Runner being John Karalis in a prior touting life)" yet the only person who has ever mentioned this to me in 2+ years is a troll who's banned from here. Ok then.
Well see here's the funny thing. Notice that I never once objected to Gill bringing in a "prior record from Pregame to Bob's site," so you were obviously reading a conversation that someone else was having with me on Twitter where the other person mentioned that happened and I was still in the process of confirming that, so I didn't mention it here. So you being aware of the Twitter conversation and I guess confusing what you read on Twitter and what I posted here indicates that you are aware of my Twitter presence, and your join date here is two years ago. So this "multiple names like Vegas Runner" is such a big issue that you never felt the need to mention it to me until I started a thread exposing Dr Bob?
Checking your post history, I see that in two years, you have 12 posts that almost entirely involve derailing threads about other touts with these "Dr H multiple names" accusations. I dunno but if it was such an important issue that "everyone knows" about it, it seems kind of weird that you would only discuss it in the middle of threads about other touts. This forum has very strict rules about people using multiple accounts. Some readers might recall a handful of posts where Edward and I engaged in some intellectual discourse about different people using different accounts, and unfortunately someone I knew years ago from SSB was inadvertently temporarily banned from BettingTalk because of some IP address confusion. So I have a hard time believing that if picks were being sold under multiple names and "everyone knows it" that I would have literally never once seen a thread about it in the time since I'd written the endorsement. New posters who post free picks here are held to a very strict standard where they can only use certain books for picks and have to use +4 -110 if Pinny is hanging +4 -106 at the time or whatever, so if BettingTalk considered there to be some sort of serious issue with someone here who runs a service, I cannot believe I wouldn't have heard about it by now.
Well see I never objected to the inclusion of Gill's Pregame records. Of course it's less likely Dr H would have gone tout in the first place if he were losing at BettingTalk. However to answer the question about Gill's Pregame records, I do object if Dr Bob did import those records. I was told secondhand by someone who appears credible to me that Gill joined Dr Bob midseason and they imported his partial Pregame record from that season, which is enough evidence for me to personally believe it's true, but I wouldn't post that until I found a link proving it and I hadn't had time yet to check archive.org. The issue here is that 1) Dr Bob didn't import all of Gill's losing seasons/other sports on Pregame 2) Pregame uses complete fairy tale lines whereas BettingTalk has strict grading standards 3) You'd have no way of knowing those records were imported from Pregame, as Bob always said "Gill has been with me for X seasons."
Obviously I am doing a poor job of bringing attention to my endorsement if two and half years in, no one has mentioned this serious "multiple names like Vegas Runner issue" to me. And there is just a slight difference between "Dr Bob selling Gill's picks to make money off them" and "Groovin providing an unpaid endorsement of a service because he checked the records." I suppose I have no way of proving I wasn't paid for the Dr H endorsement, but even Kahuna took my "it's not a paid endorsement" at face value in our last exchange.
The biggest issue is whether Dr H is providing a +EV service, and between the records and the CLV, there is solid evidence as such. A drunk and blind money could have told you Gill Alexander was not selling a +EV service when he joined Dr Bob, simply from claiming that Vegas Runner was one of the sharpest market readers in Vegas. The exact quote from Gill the first time I listened to his nonsense was "No one knows what's REALLY happening in Vegas better than Vegas Runner... I could listen to him talk about his bowel movement." If Dr H starts talking about RJ Bell's bowel movements maybe I'll reconsider whether he's running a +EV service.
I make a rule that any tout I criticize, I would happily bet significant money that they are not running a +EV service, as a bench mark at -110, I would say under 53.5% vs CRIS lines. Obviously MLB is different but I'd use the same ROI. I tried to get multiple friends of Gill's who claim to be "pro bettors" to book that action, I told one guy I'd happily escrow 7 figures, but I got crickets. Unfortunately this forum does not allow people to conduct business like that, but theoretically, I would be happy to bet that Dr H wins this upcoming season. Theoretically, is there anyone reading who thinks Dr H would not win this upcoming season? If reasonably sharp posters can made a valid claim otherwise I would be happy to listen.
Yeah they're putting some real clowns on their show. They had Aaron Schatz as a guest who is one of the scummier touts. He actually threatened to sue a guy who was tracking his records, claiming it constituted "copyright infringement." (The tracking guy wasn't posting the plays before the game or anything like that.)
Schatz also regularly justifies his -EV touting with "I reserve the right to do things to make money to feed my daughter" and when people (including me) said "You can use "feeding your daughter" to justify any sort of scam," he now frequently tweets about "The Vegas types who attack my autistic daughter on Twitter" which gains him a lot of sympathy. He recently said about me "That's one of the Vegas guys who went after my family and girlfriend on Twitter. They'll deny it, of course." I can't think of too many scummier things you could do than use your disabled daughter as an excuse to scam people. So we can add "Groovin attacks Schatz's family" to "Groovin threatened to rape Johnny Detroit's wife," "Groovin is a deadbeat dad" to the long list of bizarre attacks on me by these touts.
I see that 17 minutes after I wrote that post, our friend Kahuna attempted to flame me on Twitter for my post, but unfortunately tagged Fezzik's parody account instead of me. Apparently the crux of this claim is "Dr H used to post as tribecalledjeff on BettingTalk" which is not any sort of a secret because he said as much in the first thread "Ebirt" derailed when "he" joined BT.
Keep doin your thing Groovin, BK is a tool just like the rest of those touts.
Yes this is clearly just trolling, because the arguments now are "Dr H is on a hot streak and has just gotten lucky," "anyone could have won 2016 MLB" and "Dr H is a Groovin ghost account."
Thanks,
boom
He sells "Games of the Year" graded at 40, 45, and 50 units, advertises that he's 29-7 on those "Games of the Year" over the last 8 years, is on a 10-2 run on them, and is a tout buddy of Fezzik. Solve by inspection.
A couple months ago, customers were complaining how much money they'd lost following his picks -- supposedly he's lost 600 units the last two seasons, and enough different Twitter accounts who appear to be established, real people said as such that I'm inclined to believe they're somewhat accurate, and if not, the burden should be on Lee to show where he is honestly documented. He replied to one of those customers complaining about his losses with a sarcastic "U got bad info. I won my 40 unit College Football Bowl Game of the Year on Clemson 31-0. #HatersGotBlasted." Because all of the other losses don't matter as long as you cash dem Games of the Year.
That reminded me of the time fraud tout Marco D'Angelo of Pregame called me an asshole for posting his documented -252u record over a 4 year sample of 1, 2, and 3u plays because I'm "an asshole who hates everyone and still bashes him in the middle of 14-2, 21-5, and 42-19 runs."
You're just too touchy. Jeez, what difference does it make when you're HOT and in the middle of a run? Just have him send you those "run" plays--- on second thought-- that -252 would tend to give you the "runs".
So you endorse Dr. H then?
Almost all of your posts here are about Dr H so not sure what that's about, but yes, I can verify that the records are accurate, there are others here who can verify the records are accurate from before I started tracking, there is evidence that the picks are +EV given their performance vs the market, and I haven't seen him say anything that would belie a reasonable understanding of baseball metrics.
Of course, that doesn't mean the service is for everyone. Purchasing a tout service isn't like buying a cell phone. I get questions all the time from randoms of "Hey thanks for telling me PhillyGodfather is legit, who should I be buying picks from" and I usually respond "possibly no one." I always make sure to tell people first, you need to be betting a significant enough amount to justify the cost of the service. I remember seeing a thread on here where a guy was unhappy about RAS's performance because he was a $50 bettor purchasing a $1500 RAS service, and it's of course ridiculous to pay 30 units for any single season service. Second, you need to be around at release time to bet. I've had people say when I explain that well known services who win will have lines move quickly "Oh that's no big deal my book lets me buy points" and I explain why that doesn't work. There are a lot of people out there who complain that "why do all the services people say are legit have the lines move fast." Of course most people reading this forum know why that's the case, but there are a lot of people out there who want the holy grail of following a winning service where you can bet at your own convenience.
Thanks