Thursday 26 March 2020

Opening Day - Postponed

Today should have been Opening Day for Major League Baseball. I should have been watching my wife's home town team play the Colorado Rockies, but of course the season has been postponed indefinitely. 

All those trends for opening day will be saved for another day.

Whether or not it is possible to play a shortened season perhaps extending into November and a neutral World Series in an indoor stadium remains to be seen, but it seems likely that there may well be more than a few doubleheaders, a feature of the game I wrote about last September, if the season ever gets started. 

The NBA is still hopeful of completing its season in some form with one suggestion being that: 
The NBA could decide to cancel the remainder of its regular season and create a play-in tournament for lower-seeded teams to enter the postseason. The league could then set up a best-of-five series for the first round, before moving to a one-and-done tournament to determine the two teams that will play in the NBA Finals, which would also be a best-of-five, people familiar with the planning said.
The tournament and NBA Finals would be held in Las Vegas at the Thomas & Mack Center and Cox Pavilion, where the league hosts its annual Summer League events.
The NHL is hopeful of resuming in July and completing its season in September but we shall see. 

As I mentioned previously, it's difficult to get motivated for something as trivial as betting while the ongoing pandemic plays out. 

Some light reading here for you in an article by Dave Hill titled The Perilous Future of Gambling in the Time of the Coronavirus.

Neither Dave or his friend are that great at maths: 
I texted a friend who is better than me at math and asked him what the odds were. He told me it was (½)^7, or about 99-1.
I made it 127-1, but let's not allow the truth to get in the way of a good story at a time like this. The more people gambling without solid math skills, the better. 

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