Established in 2008, this blog is an independent, common sense, look at challenges and opportunities in sports and financial investing, with occasional diversions as my mood takes me. I am not a tipster, nor is this a Profit and Loss report either. They are boring.
I was literally on the plane when I saw A Lucky A Day's comment last weekend, and while I wasn't planning on spending my time this weekend on sports betting, one does what one can to keep one's readers happy. It's my last weekend before three weeks away, although plans are in a state of flux right now with one of my dogs getting sick while I was away for work last week, and currently hospitalised. If you've never owned a pet, it won't make sense that there is a possibility of cancelling a three week trip because of a sick dog, but some of you might understand. Anyway, the premise from Plus EV Analytics is that markets are inefficient early in the NFL season, and that backing big underdogs is a profitable exercise. As the positor concedes, one season doesn't prove anything but in 2018 the results were:
A +300 NFL 'dog is approximate to a team getting 7.5 points, but the selections above are teams getting 8.5 points or more, and backing these seven teams against the spread (ATS) would have produced a 5-2 winning record. How about in previous seasons? Looking at the past five seasons (2014-2018), the ATS record is 18-12, while over the past ten seasons (2009-2018) the ATS record is 40-38, which is a slender 0.1% ROI using Pinnacles -105 as our base. In Divisional games, the five and ten year records respectively are 8-2 and 18-11 which is a little more promising, and for Divisional games played on an artificial surface, the numbers are 3-1 and 10-4.
To reset for a moment, since the current 32 team format was introduced in 2002, teams receiving more than 8 points have a losing (48.8%) record in the regular season. Week One is, as might be expected, the most inefficient with a 17-9 ATS record for the big dogs. In Divisional games only, the record is 8-2 and in Divisional games on an artificial surface, the record is 100% from just the five games. Here is a breakdown by week:
It's interesting that the middle weeks of 8, 9 and 10 show an undervaluation of the underdog, especially on a grass surface, and the only rational explanation I can think of is that the bad weather is starting to impact the playing surface which drags the favourite down to the underdog's level!
I have had a life-long interest in sports and after studying Pure Mathematics with Statistics at secondary school, have been fascinated by odds and probability.
The first system I came up with was a simple one - back the favourite and double up after a loss until a winner. Simple enough in theory, and I told my Dad about it. Not being a betting man himself, he ran it by some of his colleagues, and came home to tell me that it wouldn’t work because a long losing run would mean that the bank would be empty. Then there was always the possibility that the winner would be returned at odds-on, meaning that the total returns would not match the outlay. Not what a ten year old wants to hear! Only slightly daunted, I then went on a search for the Holy Grail, the secret to riches that I knew was out there somewhere. Finally in 2004 I stumbled across an article about Betting Exchanges and four years later I was able to make a steady profit.
No comments:
Post a Comment