BETTING PLAYER PROPS WITH ETR
With legal sports betting expanding across the USA and sportsbooks increasing their focus on player props, we have upgraded our prop betting coverage in recent seasons. The goal of this article is to explain our general process for approaching these markets while providing a peek behind the scenes to show how we examine a bet. There is a lot of noise in the fantasy and betting communities; our goal is to provide only the highest-quality products to our subscribers, and we hope you’ll take that away from reviewing our approach to betting player props.
Alongside Adam Levitan’s personal sourcing of props, Establish The Run has assembled a team of skilled fantasy players and projections-oriented news grinders to source as many good bets as we possibly can throughout the NFL and NBA seasons.
Overall, we’re confident in our combination of quantitative (our projection system) and qualitative (knowledge of betting markets, access to reliable news and information) analysis, particularly as we dedicate more resources to this effort. While we can not guarantee these results will continue, our performance thus far confirms the belief that our props betting process is built to win.
THE RESULTS
2021-22 NFL: 216-118, +$8,572 through Super Bowl LVI
2021-22 NBA: 751-495, +$20,348 through the NBA Finals
2022-23 NFL: 308-222, +$5,860 through Super Bowl LVII
2022-23 NBA: 700-455, +$18,770 through the NBA Finals
2023-24 NFL: 253-225, +$267 through Super Bowl LVIII
2023-24 NBA: 601-392, +$15,719 through April 15, 2024
2024-25 NFL: 228-158, +5,969 through Super Bowl LIX
2024-25 NBA: 377-264, +8,117 through February 10
*Both assume betting to win $100 on each favored prop and risking $100 on each underdog prop. All plays are released with push notifications to our Discord community (subscriber-only) at the time of release. Note: We expect these win rates to regress going forward.
THE PROJECTIONS
The marriage of our industry-leading projections with an experienced team of analysts is the secret sauce of Establish The Run’s props offering.
If you’re an ETR subscriber, you know how much time and effort our staff puts into our fantasy projections. Our analytics team is led by longtime DFS pros Mike Leone and Drew Dinkmeyer, who, in addition to creating and managing projection systems for years, successfully deploy our system’s outputs in the highest-stakes fantasy contests in the world.
Our efficiency and play-calling (run/pass ratios) models have been thoroughly refined. Adjustments to rates and efficiency are made by our projections team based on injuries, news, weather, etc. Altogether, we combine the qualitative expertise of Evan Silva and Adam Levitan with a rigorously tested quantitative approach to provide the best projections in fantasy sports.
However, projections are just a starting point. The props market is dynamic and requires more than just following a quantitative projection system to win. To address this, Adam Levitan, who previously sourced bets on his own, leads a small team of analysts to source prop bets we think have incorrect lines.
THE TEAM
Our experienced team of analysts allows us to pair our projections with a deep understanding of the sports betting landscape.
Reacting to injury information continues to play a big role in our success. In the NBA, for example, understanding how rotations will change if a questionable player is ruled in or out gives us a leg up on the sportsbooks. Our team is also able to make informed guesses on player statuses before they become official, which enhances our head start so we can pounce on bad lines whenever they’re released.
Additionally, we have analysts available around the clock to monitor props, injury news, and status updates to cross-reference with our projections. This allows us to react quickly to news and have multiple voices weighing in on the validity of a potential wager.
Lastly, our approach to betting props goes hand-in-hand with improving our projections across the board. Because we can get a feel for how sportsbooks are projecting an entire team, the large menu of props available to bet helps us hone in our projections down to the individual player level. If we’re too high or too low on a specific player, we can cross-reference the betting lines for his teammates to see if we’re off at the player level, the team level, or the overall game environment.
The result? An exhaustive process that combines both a quantitative and qualitative approach with the goal of consistently identifying winning bets.
THE MODELING
Creating a projection is just one part of our process. To win at props, we also have to be sure there is a big enough difference between our projection and the prop offered by sportsbooks to beat the “vig” (which is usually -110 on each side for a spread or total but can vary wildly for props).
As a result, the ETR data team has created modeling available for our own internal use to ensure our subscribers are getting props with a high expected value (and not just props that vary from our projection, regardless of price). The projections gap necessary to play a prop at -110 is a lot different than what’s necessary to play it at -150, and we also know that we are simply better at projecting some player stats compared to others. Our internal modeling is also regressed to the betting market somewhat so that we aren’t assuming we are always 100% right – the market is generally a wise entity and we don’t want to completely ignore that. With all of that in mind, the data team’s modeling ensures that we are only putting out the best props and not blindly playing anything where our projection is different from the line.
THE PROCESS IN ACTION
To illustrate how our props team utilizes both our player projections and our qualitative insights to make nuanced betting decisions, we’ve outlined our process for betting Patrick Mahomes UNDER 5.5 rushing attempts at +116 on FanDuel in Super Bowl LIX.
Super Bowl bet: Patrick Mahomes (KC) UNDER 5.5 Rushing Attempts +116 FanDuel (also available at +125 on Prop Builder and +120 on Caesars at time of release)
This was an interesting bet because Mahomes intuitively runs more in the playoffs, and that is borne out by the data. For his career, Mahomes has scrambled on 6.0% of his dropbacks in the regular season compared to 8.2% in the playoffs. That difference was even more pronounced in the 2024 playoffs leading into the Super Bowl – Mahomes had 10 scrambles on 67 dropbacks for a 14.9% scramble rate. Because of that, we had long internal discussions about where to put Mahomes’ scramble rate. Clearly, it needs to be well above his regular-season rate, but the 14.9% rate he had in the Chiefs’ first two playoff games is likely far too high as well.
KC doesn’t design many runs for Mahomes – he had zero designed runs all year before they did design run plays for him in the AFC Championship Game. We did give him a little bit of designed rush attempt share since it was the biggest game of the year and KC had just designed plays for him two weeks prior. However, the overwhelming majority of Mahomes’ rush attempts are scrambles, so nailing the scramble rate was key to getting his projection right. On one hand, we were kind of guessing on where to put it given the difference between his regular-season rate, his career playoff rate, and his rate in two 2025 playoff games.
However, our internal modeling showed major +EV on this prop at our initial projection. After internal discussion, we raised Mahomes’ scramble rate somewhat, but we would have had to have Mahomes’ scramble rate extremely high for this to not show as a bet (we would have had to project Mahomes to scramble at a significantly higher rate than we project for Lamar Jackson, which seems incredibly optimistic even with how much Mahomes has scrambled in the playoffs historically). We did bump Mahomes’ scramble rate after talking amongst ourselves but simply couldn’t get it to a point where this prop didn’t grade out very well. As a result, we sent it out to our subscribers, and thankfully, it won. We tracked this play at +116 rather than the best available line because FanDuel was the most widely available book with reasonable limits, so it felt most fair to track this play at the line we thought most of our subscribers would play this at.
Result: Patrick Mahomes, 4 rushing attempts (UNDER 5.5 rushing attempts) ✅
BET PROPS WITH ETR
Now that you’ve seen how much thought and effort we put into our prop betting process, join the ETR community and allow us to do the hard work for you. After signing up, the process is simple:
Our props team sources as many prop bets as we can find and relays them to you via push notifications to your mobile device, courtesy of Establish The Run’s Props Discord channel. For each prop we release, we first send a warning in the mobile app Telegram (instructions on how to join available on the props sign-up pages), which will direct you to our Discord. From there, we will post the official play in Discord 1-2 minutes after the Telegram warning after subscribers have had time to load up Discord and their sportsbook apps.
Note that while we want to offer as many +EV plays as possible to our consumers, we also have to make sure our consumer base is actually able to get the plays we send out. As a result, we don’t bet pure openers like many other props services and instead wait for our props to be available at multiple books and with limits that make working hard to get the plays worth the cost of subscription.
You will also receive access to the ETR subscriber-only Discord community, which is a great place to discuss props with other enthusiasts. Our goal is to get props and betting enthusiasts together and form a community where we can enjoy fantasy and betting together.
To get started betting props with ETR, subscribe to our NFL and NBA packages below:
To gain access to our NBA props offering, subscribe to our NBA Props Package.
Please note: Accessing our Discord server AND Telegram channel will be essential to maximizing your experience with our props package. If you do not want to use the Discord app on your phone to receive push notifications, we recommend keeping expectations low about available lines. Lines will move quickly and you will need to be ready to act in order to get the same or similar lines. Please read this FAQ before purchasing a props package.
If you have any additional questions about our props offering or in-season packages, please reach out to [email protected].
– The ETR Team
