Today’s guest post is the second from my good friend and fellow court jester smugdog, who wrote a very-well received guest post last week. Thanks for the post man!

If you hang around this community long enough, you’ll realize that you’re part of a group that looks at the world in an odd lens. For some of us, every interaction, purchase, and minor life inconvenience is run through a mental calculator to determine one thing: What is the Expected Value (+EV)?

In the traditional churning sense, +EV is just the math behind your activities. It’s knowing that paying a small percentage fee to float a cash load is highly profitable when you’re extracting massive rewards multipliers in return elsewhere. But +EV isn’t just about spreadsheet math and calculating the exact cent per point value of a redemption. Sometimes it’s vibes.

For example, a fellow Capital Heavyweight & Ultra Degen recently pointed out that paying for a Discord Nitro sub (gross) is inherently +EV. I had to ask him why because paying $10/mo or whatever it is to make your PFP spin or wink didn’t seem worth well, ANYTHING. Actually, its because the extended character limit lets you shitpost better, write longer guides and provide more helpful information. The +EV is that it builds online rapport with the community, ie whales who might eventually drop a unicorn play in your DMs. Maybe. If they like you. They probably won’t. (But maybe!)

So, beyond the obvious stuff like SUBs and loops we’re all doing, what are the activities that actually generate positive expected value off the usual path?

We’re above board currently: We look at top level +EV plays; the classics. There’s the play of adding a small army of friends to help your business, ideally your Roman friends, to trigger massive point boosts. That’s pretty straightforward. Knowing lots of Romans with similar names is +EV.

We sink a little: You got roped into a cruise, or unwittingly decided to go on one. You realize there’s portions of the trip that are in international waters which means casino shenanigans.

You load up your stateroom credit at a discount beforehand, play through a portion of it through the slot machines or video poker to keep the pit boss happy, and cash the rest out. You potentially get a free cruise, free casino drinks, and walk off the ship carrying bags of cash like a pirate, a very +EV emotional feeling.

Lets go deeper, into the weird and polarizing stuff. The plays that cause ethical division even in our own groups who are already very morally grey.

Someone in a group I’m in extracted +EV from bodily harm. After overextending and injuring themselves at a kids’ ninja gym, they ended up in an ankle boot. The +EV play was using the injury to get a handicapped placard for six months of free metered parking. +EV prime parking at the beach. 

Years ago, a major retailer offered daily store credit if you synced up a smartwatch to track your runs. The +EV move was spoofing the GPS data to imply you’re a pro runner, defeating actual runners legitimately trying, and stacking up piles of credits. You then buy video games with the credit, which is the exact opposite of exercise, and then resell them, or keep them. -EV to health, +EV to finishing the battlepass. Net EV+ transaction. 

Fibbery is +EV. I have a friend I occasionally sell points to who is terrible at paying me back quickly. If I ask nicely I get ghosted, but turns out if I tell him I need it for the weekend to blow it on liquor and drugs he’s immediately excited to pay me back. Jokes on you brother, all that money is going straight into my dakimakura collection. +EV fabrication.

Ultimately, living +EV isn’t just a strategy; it’s a mild sickness. Opportunities are everywhere if you know how to look for them, whether that means scaling up your point generation to the millions by wandering through the financial system, or just leveraging a sports injury for free parking. You just have to keep poking the system until cash falls out.

Someone swore to me that writing on this blog was +EV. I haven’t seen a single cent of return yet, but who knows? Maybe this post will be the unicorn play that makes it all worth it.

-smugdog