CREATE A MIDDLE, SLEEP WITH THE FISHES.

Whenever there is an arbitrage opportunity, there will be people who discover it and act on it.  Sports betting, where for one reason or another, the point spread and all the other derivative securities such as over-under, total points, what have you can change from when betting opens until the game starts.

Middling isn’t a term that many who are new sports betting are familiar with. The opportunity to middle a game is when a point spread or total moves in a game. Bettors can middle a bet when a wager is placed on different sides of the same game.

One of the reasons new sports bettors aren’t familiar with middling is because it involves multiple wagers on a game. Most new bettors are usually just interested in wagering once on a game. A middle opportunity often presents itself to bettors at different times of the week leading up to a game.

Sportsbook operators are very aware that there are bettors looking to middle a game. They often have this in mind when setting and moving lines during the week. That said, there are still middle opportunities.

If the book is being run by the local don, it's not a friendly act to create a middle, if I remember my crime novels correctly.

The Michigan lottery might be a different story.

In 2003, an unusual lottery game, Winfall, was released.

The premise was simple:

• Pick six numbers between 1 and 49

• If you guessed two, three, four, or five numbers, you get a prize in increasing amounts.

• Guess six, you win the $2 million minimum.

If nobody won, the lottery purse went up each week. After 6 weeks, or when the jackpot hit the $5M dollar cap, they did a “Roll Down”.  A Roll Down occurs when winnings are spread downwards to lower tier winners, at 5, 4, and 3 level matches.

The State Lottery made a mistake in all this. They listed the odds of winning that was associated with each combination of numbers.

The math explanation could fill an article itself. But the short version, [party store owner and mathematician Jerry Selbee] studied those winning odds, and the timing of those Roll Downs. He realized that, statistically, a single one dollar lottery ticket was worth more than one dollar in those final weeks.

What happened next might be why the Department of Government Efficiency is so popular.

[Mr Selbee] knew he’d need to bet big to create a justifiable margin. In his first attempt, he bought $2,000 in tickets, which was an uncomfortably large sum for a man who never gambled.

He ended up losing $50. He reckoned this was bad luck and within the margin of error and realized he needed to wager more.

Three months later, the next rolldown was announced. He buys a full $8,000 in tickets. His winnings total $15,700, leaving him a $7,700 profit. From here, things escalated.

Each week his bets soared higher and higher. Some weeks, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. The game required you buy the tickets in person. So when a rolldown was coming, he and his wife split up into two cars and hit countless convenience stores across the state.

The government, with its usual iceberg reaction time, didn’t notice anything strange. The Selbees continued this mission for a full decade without the state noticing. Eventually, a group of students at MIT noticed a flaw in the math too, and started buying up tickets.

And somebody forgot the most important thing to do when you have a good thing going, which is to keep still.  Only after a newspaper broke a story did the Michigan Lottery shut down this game.  "No law was ever broken. A clever man, with a mathematical curiosity, spotted a hole and stepped through it."  And nobody went to lunch at the Fox and Hounds in Bloomfield and was never seen again.