Winter is wrapping up quickly here in the desert and we suddenly find ourselves as busy as ever with events and activities. It looks like Tuesday will be our busiest day for the next few months, especially for Elise who has choir before school, Girls On The Run immediately after school, and then acting class after that! I am an assistant coach on Ava’s softball team and we have practices on Tuesday night as well, so our whole family will be running around on those days. In addition to the Tuesday night practices, we have practice or games on Saturdays, batting cage sessions on Sunday mornings, and we will eventually be playing games on Thursday evenings as well. For myself, baseball season is just getting started and I will soon be playing games on Sundays, so it’s safe to say I’ll be spending a ton of time around a baseball field this Spring.
Regarding school activities, Elise and Enzo recently completed their annual APEX fun run. They had a blast doing it last year and were even more successful with their fundraising this year. Elise’s teacher set a very high goal for the classroom and said that there would be no more homework for the rest of the school year if they achieved this goal. Apparently, that was the right kind of motivation because they totally did achieve it! Enzo set a goal for himself on the day of the run to complete 100 obstacle courses and he ended up finishing just shy with 96. For comparison, the average number of completed courses for a kid was about 65.
With the girls being as busy as they are it means that Mr. Enzo will be running around a lot with Jessica and me from one activity to another. We’re trying to get him involved in something but haven’t had any luck so far. He loves playing football and basketball at school with his friends, plus we frequently shoot hoops at home in the backyard, but whenever we suggest getting onto a team he is totally against it. We’re not sure why he isn’t willing to put himself out there but it’s something we need to work on, otherwise he’s going to start missing out on too many things. He has already set a goal for himself to make it into the Middle School jazz band, which means he will follow Ava’s footsteps by joining the beginning band program during his first year, but that’s still a few years away so we need to focus on the nearer term for now.
Superbowl Activities
Since the Superbowl was in Las Vegas this month, we decided to take advantage as much as possible by attending some related activities. As mentioned in last month’s post, I wanted to keep up the tradition of taking Enzo to a sporting event for his birthday, so this year we attended the Superbowl’s Celebrity Flag Football game, which was held near our house at the Dollar Loan Center. Before the game, Enzo and I had dinner at Tacotarian, and he now insists that their plant-based fish tacos are one of his all-time favorite foods.
We arrived early and had fun checking out the items in the silent auction, then we ran into a couple of his buddies from school. We decided to get some candy at a concession stand and found ourselves standing next to Snooki from Jersey Shore, who was being followed by a camera crew. During the game, Enzo and his friends were standing along the railing next to the field. One of the referees kept coming over to talk to them and introduce them to various celebrities. One of the highlights of the night for Enzo was when he got to meet former NBA all-star Tracy McGrady, who was a captain of one of the teams playing that night. His other big moment that night came after the game when he got to take a picture with UFC star Justin Gaethje.
On the day before the Superbowl, I took the kids to the NFL Play Football event, which was being held at a local high school. Tickets were free if you knew how to get them, and luckily for us, Jessica was able to score four through the school district. It was a fun event filled with complimentary swag and food, plus we got to meet players, and cheerleaders from the Raiders, Chiefs, and 49ers. The cheerleaders performed and the kids got to run through some football obstacle courses. They enjoyed one of them so much that they each did it three or four times. We also got to try on some authentic NFL helmets! It was a really fun event that we were thankful to be able to attend.
Spring Break is coming fast
In addition to all these activities, we’re also getting ready for our trip to Colorado, which is only a couple of weeks away. The plan is to head out early on the morning of Friday, March 8, and drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s house up in the mountains. We will stay the night with them, then drive down to Denver on Saturday morning. We have a hotel reserved in Downtown Denver, just a couple blocks from the concert venue. We will spend the weekend in Denver, then head back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Monday morning. The kids love playing in the snow at their house so our plan is to stay with them on Monday and Tuesday, then drive back to Henderson on Wednesday. We’re really excited to see Moon Taxi play live, especially in such a small venue, so I look forward to writing about it in next month’s post.
A few weeks after that, Jessica will be heading back to Iowa to spend some time with her Grandma. It’s been a few years since she has seen her and she doesn’t want to take anything for granted. The kids and I always miss her when she’s gone but it looks like my Mom will be coming over to stay with us for the weekend to help out. It will be the weekend of our 14th anniversary that she’s gone so we’ll have to find another time to celebrate. It’s all good though; I’m glad she is able to get back there and spend some quality time with Sherry.
Vegas Showbiz and Cappers Update
I forgot to mention this in last month’s post, but early in January Vegas Showbiz finally reached 1,000 subscribers on YouTube! This was a goal I had been chasing for nearly two years so it felt great to finally achieve it. This meant that the channel made it to the next tier of the YouTube Partner Program, allowing it to profit from advertisements that run before and during videos. The channel is still small, and based on our average number of daily views, it only makes about $2 per day, but it’s something and it can only go up from here.
There are other perks that come with the channel though, for instance, Jessica and I recently had the pleasure of attending the Grand Reopening of the Jersey Boys show at The Orleans. Jersey Boys used to play in Vegas between 2008 and 2016, and it was a very popular show during that time, but it’s been gone since then. The Orleans has never done a show this big before and we loved it. Before the show we got to attend a cocktail party, then we were seated in the front row for the show! We were cracking up because they were clearly giving us the VIP YouTuber treatment even though our channel isn’t big at all. These are exactly the kinds of things I was hoping would happen when creating the channel two years ago, so it felt great to be able to have them come true. We very much enjoyed the show and gave it a nice review a couple of days later.
Regarding Cappers, things have definitely picked up over the past two months. One major contributor to that has been the addition of our daily sports betting analysis video, which we post on YouTube Shorts and TikTok. It’s one minute or less and we simply highlight a play that looks attractive on the site. It’s normally a screen recording of the site with either Devin or myself talking about why we selected this particular play. We only get about 40 views per day on YouTube, but we average anywhere from 200 to 700 views per day on TikTok! This has been driving a lot more traffic to our site, resulting in more free trials and more paid subscriptions.
Recently we even got our first annual subscriber, which came from a guy in Ireland, of all places. It’s great to see that we are reaching an international audience, and it comes as no surprise that when we review our viewer analytics on TikTok, we can see that about 96% of our viewers are male, and the majority of them are between the ages of 18 and 25. Sports betting is extremely popular with young men these days, especially since new states are constantly legalizing it. While there are plenty of services out there for sports bettors, most of them are known as Touts, and they simply tell you who to bet on. These services are much more expensive than our site, so it makes sense that a younger generation of sports bettors is attracted to our platform, which focuses more on presenting relevant information for them to make their own decisions with. I am constantly working on adding new features to the site which add value for our users and I firmly believe that it’s only a matter of time before this thing really takes off.
One feature I’m really proud of is the Expected Value dashboard, which compares odds on every game from a lot of different sports books and identifies games where you can get good value by betting on a specific game at a specific sports book. One thing that makes the sports financial market much different from the stock market is the fact that the odds for games are often different from one book to another. The same kind of thing doesn’t exist in the stock market, meaning the price of a stock is the same regardless of which brokerage firm you use. When I find value in a game at a particular book, I run it through variants of the Kelly Criterion formula to determine the optimal bet size, as a percentage of your total bankroll. In many cases, no bet is recommended, but when enough value is there we display the optimal bet size and it’s doing very well. I’m always tracking the performance of our dashboards and systems, and I’m confident that our users are turning a profit if they follow along.
Another feature I recently built that I’m very proud of is related to NBA player prop bets. If you’re not familiar with prop bets, it’s like betting that a certain player will score more or less than a certain amount of points in a game. It goes well beyond points though. In the case of basketball, you can use Cappers to research how many rebounds, assists, and three-pointers they will have. Each day our site analyzes every prop bet available for every player, then examines their stats from every game of the season to determine how likely they are to go over or under the given line. We graph all of this out for the user, then compare their recent performance to how well the opposing team does at stopping players in these categories. For example, if a player has been rebounding well recently and they’re playing against a team that is at the bottom of the league in rebounding, we highlight that to the users.
We frequently recommend these types of plays in our daily videos and have been very successful in doing so. I find these types of plays much easier to beat consistently than betting on the outcome of an entire game. They’re known in the gambling world as “soft markets” while betting on games are considered “hard markets.” Not only do these types of plays appeal to sports bettors, but they also appeal to fantasy sports players, which opens up a much larger audience to us. I’m already working on adding the same type of feature for the upcoming baseball season, then will do the same thing for the next football season as well.
In order to continue building our knowledge, Devin and I are always reading books and watching videos about sports betting. Whenever we learn valuable new things, we work on adding them to Cappers. This was how Cappers originated, with me reading books about NBA betting and transferring those learnings into a website, so that trend continues to this day. Sorry for being so long-winded about Cappers but you can probably tell that it goes beyond work for me. It has become a passion that I have invested myself heavily into. I can’t wait for the day that this is my only job, but in the meantime, I’m willing to continue grinding along with two jobs as long as necessary. Again, it’s only a matter of time.
I guess that’s about it for now. It’s great to be busy again, and although it’s been a mild winter for us, it’s nice to have it already warming up. We’re going to be outside a lot this Spring, and I’m excited for everything the kids have going on. Elise and Ava have school performances coming up soon, I’m excited to be out at the baseball field regularly, and can’t wait to get to Colorado. Other than holidays, I haven’t had a day off since starting my new day job last April, so this getaway is going to be nice. Here are a few more recent family photos.
