You Win Some, You Lose More (especially if you take Browny's advice)
How one man's efforts to get gambling ads off TV are making a real difference.
IMAGE: TrackMyBrown (X)
Adam Keily is taking a unique approach to end the constant stream of gambling-related ads shown on television during live sport.
It's called TrackMyBrown, where Keily tracks what would happen if you put $20 on every bet promoted by former Western Bulldogs and Richmond player Nathan Brown on Sportsbet ads that appear before AFL games.
I had the opportunity to chat with Keily about TrackMyBrown earlier this year when he appeared as a guest on the Useless AFL Stats podcast.
The passion project started in the second half of 2023, when Keily got curious about how many of the promoted and suggested bets in TV ads actually hit.
“After relentlessly seeing the ads, and Browny coming on and plugging these multis every week, I just started wondering how they went. I’m like, ‘these can’t be good bets, right?’. They were four or five leg multis every game, every week,” Keily recalled.
In tracking the televised bets from round 15 through to the grand final, Keily calculated that anyone who put $20 on each bet would have ended the year losing over $700.
When he repeated the process this season, it was a similarly bleak story - Brown finished with an $873 loss.
The addition of the AFL's Opening Round, which received mixed reviews from clubs and fans by making an already uneven fixture even more uneven, was a welcome start to the season for Keily.
“I started tracking at round 0, and he went none from four. So technically after zero rounds of football, he was already $80 in the hole, which was just the perfect start to my footy year,” he said on the UAS podcast.
Keily's efforts have attracted the attention of the mainstream football media, with people quick to jump on Brown's case.
There's no denying there has been a change in the type of bets put forward by Brown and his Sportsbet associates, including former AFLW player Kate McCarthy, over the course of the season – Keily has the evidence to prove it.
There was a gradual shift away from four or five leg multis to single leg "best bets", and then multiple weeks where there were no promoted bets at all.
IMAGE: TrackMyBrown
Keily was generous enough to share the data he collected this year through TrackMyBrown, allowing anyone to find some interesting insights into Browny’s bets.
As someone who followed TrackMyBrown's progress over the course of the season, I was keen to jump into the data and do some exploring of my own.
I was particularly interested in seeing if and how far Browny had wound back the multis, in terms of the number of legs, the individual leg odds, and the total odds. The table below shows this data on a round-by-round basis.
It turns out that Browny did promote fewer same game multis as the season progressed. In the first seven rounds of the season there was a multi for every, or almost every, game of the round – but this dropped off from round 7 onwards. There was only one promoted same game multi in the final round of the home and away season and the first week of the finals, and no same game multis in the remaining three weeks of the finals series.
The average number of legs included in each multi peaked at 4.5 in round 5 before slowly decreasing as the season progressed. It was rare to see a multi with more than two legs after round 12.
But the average odds on each leg showed the opposite pattern. In the early stages of the season the average leg sat in the $1.30 to $1.50 range, but this blew out to $2.50 per leg in round 21. It’s possible that the average odds increased because there were fewer legs, but it’s also possible that Browny (or Sportsbet) got more reckless with what was being included in the bets each week.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Occasional One (a nickname Keily has for Brown, based on his success rate occasional at best) only hit one of the four legs spread across the two multis that round.
He whiffed on both legs in the West Coast v Gold Coast game (Liam Duggan 25+ disposals and Sam Flanders 35+ disposals, total odds $4.20) and missed one from the North Melbourne v Richmond game (Harry Sheezel to get the most disposals in group 1) but saved a little bit of face by correctly picking Nick Larkey to kick the most goals in group 1 (total odds for that multi: $8.75).
The average total for each multi followed a somewhat similar pattern to the number of multis promoted and the average number of legs included in each multi. It started high, had a slight dip in the middle of the season, and then had a few significant peaks towards the end of the season.
One of these peaks was in round 21, when Browny averaged $6.47 across the two multis that were promoted. But there was one other week where the average odds of the multis were higher – round 19.
The tip to back Adam Treloar to collect the most disposals and for Jeremy Cameron to kick the most goals among a certain group of players did most of the heavy lifting here – it would have paid $9.75 when Geelong played the Western Bulldogs. But it didn’t, as one leg missed.
One leg also missed in the round 19 game between Port Adelaide and Richmond, when the combination of Dan Houston collecting 25 or more disposals and Connor Rozee having 30 or more disposals also fell short.
While there are many people who have jumped on board and supported Keily's efforts, the project hasn't been without its detractors.
“I’ve had people criticise me a bit, going, ‘you’re giving him a lot of air time. You’re promoting his bets, particularly when they win’… But I feel it’s important to be completely transparent about the whole thing and say, ‘this is what happens. This is how it works out, [the] good, bad, and ugly – and it’s probably more ugly than good’,” Keily explained.
However, Keily isn't letting the negative comments distract him.
“Hopefully we can kick [gambling adds] off the air altogether, just like we did with smoking ads. We’re not talking about ending gambling, it’s gambling reform.
“I’ve got two girls, they’re eight and ten. Now [when] Browny comes on the TV, they boo the television, which is a win for my house.”
Keily has also developed a Google Chrome browser plugin that removes gambling odds from the ladder and fixture pages on the AFL website.
“You can register with an account with the AFL through afl.com.au and go into your profile settings and turn those off, but I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if there was [an easier way to do that]?’,” Keily said.
TrackMyBrown can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (X). If you’re interested in exploring Keily’s TrackMy Brown data for yourself, the Google sheet can be accessed here.
Click here for a list of services available to people affected by gambling.
The timeframe of this stat is limited based on what data are freely/easily available and/or accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you spot any errors in what I have presented.
Great read Lincoln. Super informative.