MLB
The Underdogs got on the board yesterday with the Toronto Blue Jays easy (10:1) winners over the Texas Rangers, who some of you may remember were the subject of a discussion at the end of August.
I suggested on August 30th to:
expect them [Texas Rangers] to be a bet in September.Fizzer then pointed out that a much higher number of the Rangers' wins were in one run games, and I later wrote:
Fizzer has looked far more deeply into the reason why the Texas Rangers have the second best record to date, yet haven't been market darlings until the past few days. [I'm a CEO, so I only have an hour a day for these things].In the end, the September record for the Rangers was 15-11 and backing them would have made 0.35 points. Opposing them would have lost 1.67 points.
His findings are, as always, perfectly logical, and with the Rangers ability (luck?) at beating the odds in close games almost 80% of the time certain to regress to the mean at some point, Fizzer's thinking is that the value (if any) is more likely to be on the lay side in September.
Fizzer will no doubt point out that I'm being a little disingenuous by excluding the first two days of October, which marked the final games of the regular season.
Unfortunately for me, the Rangers lost both games, so the final numbers for September and October combined were -2.18 and +0.76 points respectively.
Although the official price may change, the Blue Jays were at 2.04 last night, but I was matched on the exchanges at 2.3. I'm tracking the prices I get against the official prices, as usually the recorded returns can be beaten. It'll be interesting to see by how much.
In the second UMPO game yesterday, the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox 5:4 at 2.25 (2.34 on the exchanges) to bring UMPO '16 into profit.
NFL
The highly questionable Vanilla Thursday System bet (Under 42.5) lost as the Division game between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals was won by the away team 33:21, and Martin's Divisional Road System comes up with another winner, this one at 2.06 on Betfair.
Martin replied via Twitter ( @martinortizz) to my findings:
Now as some of you know, I'm a CEO running a global multi-billion dollar betting empire from my secret lair on a private island somewhere near Tahiti, but I'm too cheap to fork out for a research assistant, and indeed I cut my own grass, as many of us global CEOs like to do apparently:
If the aforementioned person really is a CEO then I can only assume his trophy wife is on the phone to a divorce lawyer or worse, a hitman. The CEO in question makes himself look even more of a buffoon when he refers to his career as a "job" and that he has just "returned home to cut the grass" rather than ordering someone to cut the south lawn of his mansion.In the tropical paradise where I live, the women all wear grass skirts, so being handy with the mower is a useful skill to have.
College Football
The first challenge with Martin's request is determining what line best represents a probability of 0.667 since the straight up prices aren't available to me. Looking at the last ten full seasons, teams giving 4.5 have won 66.1% of games, so that's a good starting point.
So Martin's theory is that soft favourites (giving up to, and including 4.5 points) may be vulnerable.
The numbers show that any edge is slight. 50.4% of underdogs have covered the spread over the last ten seasons, and just 50.2% over the last five seasons. I don't see anything here that will make us rich unless Martin has some additional filter, perhaps certain Conference games? I'm wary about asking since I can see my weekend disappearing, but there's no real football so I'll take the risk.
2 comments:
Interesting pick for UMPO followers tonight. Washington Nats (SP: Max Scherzer) 2.33 (was 2.46 earlier).
I know Washington are up against my favourite pitcher Clayton Kershaw and their catcher Wilson Ramos is out, but 2.33!!
In his two years at Washington, Scherzer has only started as a Home Dog once (and that was at a price of 1.99). In his career he has only been the home dog 4 times, twice at the Tigers starting at 2.05 and 2.15 and you have to go back to his early days at Arizona in 2009 for the other one, starting at 2.30 (which Arizona won).
Whatever the result, I'd much rather be on Scherzer and the Nats at home at 2.33 or higher than on the Dodgers away at 1.69. Got to feel the market is over reacting to the Nats injury news and that the Dodgers are healthy and perceived to have finished the season well (In reality both teams went 6-4 in their last 10 games. Perception can be a dangerous thing).
As for Texas, I would have been disappointed if you hadn't picked out the September only win profit! All I would say on that is that they had to continue their unbelievable 1-run match result record - going 6-3 in September to make it 36-11 for the year, to achieve their 0.35 units profit. Actual Odds on Texas were much shorter, a 1.72 average versus 1.995 up to the end of August, the market believing they were good in the clutch or never gave in etc. made them no value.
As a reminder, fivethirtyeight.com commented at the end of August "The lesson here is that a team’s record in one-run games tends to regress to the mean. The Rangers are more than 90 percent likely to make the playoffs, but they won’t be able to count on this kind of luck in tight contests when they get there."
"In the tropical paradise where I live, the women all wear grass skirts, so being handy with the mower is a useful skill to have."
I always thought you were a bit of a bushman, waving your massive weapon in front of the ladies.
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