Inbox Nuggets for the NHL, NFL, NCAAF and CFL

Back in March, towards the end of the 2023-24 NHL season, I received an email from 'Anonymous fan' with an interesting idea for a system which had a promising track record supported by a solid hypothesis.

Hey Cassini,

Thank you for your work and your blog. I really appreciate everything you do. I have been messing around with killer sports since you introduced me to it and I have a lot of fun thinking about things that may matter for the sports I enjoy.

I think I may have found an intriguing one for NHL.

Since 2007- ROI +10.5% in 948 games

Since 2021- ROI +5.5% in 208 games

Since this season- ROI +12.9% in 51 games

It seems to be steadily profitable year after year, present a solid number of plays, and the games that meet the criteria are typically quite enjoyable to watch. I am not very good at math or statistics though so maybe it is too small a sample? Either way I was curious to get your thoughts.

Best,
Anonymous fan

I've said before that it's pitting your wits against others and the intellectual challenge of beating these markets that is in many ways more exciting than winning money and having fun with ideas like this is what it's all about. When we can make some of the ideas profitable, so much the better.

I did respond with my thoughts, but back in March I was about to head over to Arkansas for the Total Eclipse and with the NHL season wrapping up, I put this idea to one side and, if I'm being honest, forgot about it. Retirement was apparently a distraction, or I'm simply getting old. 

I was reminded of the system when Anonymous (I shall call him Thomas moving forward) wrote with an observation about an NFL system, and there in the e-mail thread was buried the NHL system.

With 17 full seasons of data dating back to 2006, (for some reason the data we need for 2017 is missing), the numbers are now:

My only concern is that the ROI is down for the latest five seasons, a trend to keep an eye on, but overall the results are good.

Included in my numbers are playoff games where the edge appears to continue.

The fledgling 2024 season has had just one selection to date, a loser, but with two qualifiers tonight it's another system I'll be adding to the Sacred Manuscript and sharing with subscribers along with Thomas' simple, but highly impactful, NFL observation.

After running the numbers, Thomas has essentially managed to obtain the same returns but from fewer than 56% of the selections. 

Side by side, here are the basic returns pre and post Thomas' modifier:

Excellent work, and two probable selections this weekend. It also appears to be effective in College Football with a similar improvement:

And in the CFL too, although with only a dozen games remaining it's a moot point for this season. Thomas deserves a medal.  

It's been an unusual NFL season so far, with just six games having a spread of more than a touchdown and extra-point, i.e. seven points.

At this stage of the season the average number of such games since 1989 is 18, and four of the six hotties this season have lost straight up, with only one covering the spread. 

Finally, and the topic of my previous post regarding shutouts in MLB playoff games is relevant again as we had another one last night in New York as the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Mets 8-0. 

MLB Playoff Shutouts

One of the recurring themes in the Sacred Manuscript is how the markets react to a team after they've been on the receiving end of what John Cleese might call a 'damn good thrashing.'

While the sample size in playoffs is always going to be small with fewer games to begin with and shutouts fairly rare, nevertheless when a team is shoutout (fails to score) and loses by five or more runs in the MLB, the market typically discounts them in the next game.

I may have mentioned this in 2014 when the World Series provided a good example. The San Francisco Giants beat the Kansas City Royals 5-0 in Game 5. The Royals got revenge two days winning 10-0 before the newly vanquished team (this time the Giants) bounced back to win Game 7 and the World Series. 

With such a small sample size, it's not surprising that the p-value isn't significant but with a good premise behind it, this is an idea that may be worth watching and of course, it paid off on Monday night with the New York Mets bouncing back from a 0-9 loss in Game 1 with a 6-1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2. 

It's encouraging that the Run Line returns support the theory, but it appears that the 'damn good thrashing' theory only applies when teams are shutout. 

Scoring just the one run in a big loss, and there is no carryover to the next game, nor is the theory validated in regular season games. 

Someone at Betfair actually settled the market after three innings as a Dodgers win at a time when they were trailing 0-6, but they corrected the error and brought the market back in-play after I pointed this out to them on Twitter. Mistakes happen, but the response was immediate which was as impressive as settling the market incorrectly in the first place was unimpressive. 

Game three of this serious is later tonight

Roller-Coaster, Tight Pants, and Bromley Car Parks

It's hard to believe that next month I will have owned Tesla ($TSLA) for seven years. I've written about this investment several times since 2018 and although it had a terrible finish to the week yesterday, it's still up some 940% overall for me, but down about 12% so far this year.  

I'm a little top-heavy on this stock as it currently represents more than 25% of my "play" account, but it's nothing like the position that Canadian Christopher DeVocht managed to achieve before things took a turn for the worse.

Christopher DeVocht, a carpenter by day, successfully traded Tesla stock and options during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a record amount of stimulus helped stocks soar and drove a retail-trading boom.

At the end of 2019, DeVocht had C$88,000, or about $65,000, with the Royal Bank of Canada's brokerage division. At its peak in November 2021, according to the lawsuit, DeVocht's account grew to C$415 million, or about $306 million.

But DeVocht and his professional advisors didn't cash out and instead lost everything as a brutal bear market took hold in 2022, leading to staggering losses for his heavily concentrated portfolio.

$65k to $306m to zero is quite an emotional roller-coaster. One commenter stated that:

Yeah I would never have made $300M. As soon as I hit $10M, I would have cashed out, set up an annuity or plopped it all into index funds and went fishing and mountain biking the rest of my life.

Easier said than done. While I'm a big fan of index funds and cycling, fishing - not so much, I suspect many people would struggle to call it quits on reaching $10M especially if that number is reached rapidly. It would be a nice problem to have, but very easy for that market driver of greed to take over.

With Kiké Hernández hitting a Home Run for the Los Angeles Dodgers as they eliminated the San Diego Padres last night, presumably while wearing his extra tight pants, and Elon Musk talking about car parks at the Tesla Robotaxi unveiling yesterday, I'd be missing a great opportunity if I didn't mention this post from a couple of years ago which addresses both car parks (Bromley Sainsbury's specifically) and baseball pant tightness. 

MLB Totals, Playoffs, and Ice Cream

It seems a long time ago now, but the issue I mentioned in the last post regarding the line for the Green Bay Packers @ Tennessee Titans has now been corrected, and the winning bet will now show up in the 'official' results.

Peter confirmed my thoughts, and my betting, writing:

That Green Bay spread line from Killer Sports is wrong. I placed my bet at +3 only a few minutes before the start and was watching the lines across the board until the kick offs and it didn't move into favouritism. And covers.com reports on the result: "Green Bay covered the spread of +3."

Mistakes happen, but Killer Sports corrected this one fairly quickly, so no harm done.

The MLB regular season has ended and for the totals system which doesn't carryover into the playoffs, the all-time and 2024 season results are updated as below:

These calculations use the Pinnacle Dime line of -105 (1.952), but the system is historically profitable with the line as short as -123 (1.813):

Some of you may recall the UMPO system and while these low volume systems can be volatile in any one season and ROIs meaningless, historically the record is good, especially for qualifiers playing at Home and we have the first one for this season playing tonight. 

For some reason, Killer Sports no longer has the data for the first three seasons, but since 2007 the 'official' ROIs are 6.7% (all) and 14.2% (Home) - excluding the COVID season of 2020.

Due to the rule changes post-COVID, this system wasn't included in the Sacred Manuscript, but I feel confident now that it should be. 

On a personal note, our trip to the mountains was mostly very relaxing, but my wife was a little concerned when the campground was under an evacuation warning last Monday but personally, being surrounded on three sides by water (we were staying by a lake), I felt quite safe. In the end, no evacuation was necessary, and it was a very relaxing trip with no TV, and no computers (though I did have my phone with me). This meant plenty of time for reading and exercising, although the scales didn't have good news for me when I got back. The usual aphorism refers to doughnuts but adapted for me, it is true that 'you can't outrun an ice-cream'.

With now four years of personal health data, the clear trend is that I lose weight (hopefully fat) in the first quarter of a year (thanks to Dry January and New Year Resolutions) then gain weight every other month with the exception of October (thanks to Sober October, although there will be no fully sober October this year due to the trip extending beyond September by a few days).

It's often said that losing weight is 80% diet, 20% exercise but for me, calories ingested alone has a 91.1% correlation to weight loss, with exercise actually decreasing the correlation to 85.6%.

On a quarterly basis, if my average daily intake of calories is fewer than 2,230 I lose weight, as I do if I have fewer than 8 days a month with alcohol. It's that easy, but not very exciting. 

Moving Lines

There are still a couple of matches to play before Week 3 of the NFL season is complete, but so far it's been a winning one. 

Something very strange happened leading up to the start of the Tennessee Titans v Green Bay Packers game. 

Less than 30 minutes before kick-off, the Packers were a selection at 1.96.

But according to Killer Sports, the Packers went off as favourites, giving two points, which is quite a large move in a few minutes.  I'm pretty sure my 50p didn't move the line that much... 

Anyway, the bet was a winner, but it won't show up in the 'official' results. As I've written before, sometimes these 'ghost' bets go for you, and sometimes they go against you.

The College Football Week 4 went 10-10 and is 39-29 overall for the season and there were no Canadian Football Selections this week. 

We did have a winner at 3.66 with the Manchester City v Arsenal game finishing all-square, perhaps a little fortuitous but again, sometimes the breaks go for you and sometimes they go against you.

The new baseball system I mentioned a couple of days ago started off with a winner for subscribers on Friday, and then produced two more on Saturday. The p-value is even more significant now! 

I'm going to be away from my computer for a couple of weeks starting tomorrow. One of my retirement goals is to try out RV life. It's been about 30 years since my last trip which was to Florida when I was living in Arkansas, but with the father-in-law now recuperating slowly at home, my wife and I will be heading into the San Bernardino Mountains for about ten days. 

I'll be back in early October, by which time the regular baseball season will be over, with my wife's San Diego Padres now looking almost certain to be featuring in the playoffs.

Winners and September Baseball

It was almost a perfect night for the Sacred Manuscript yesterday with the Thursday Night NFL game (New York Jets v New England Patriots) a comfortable winner, and all three MLB selections were winners too.

The final WNBA selection of the regular season was a loser though, and while the systems in this sport do apply in the playoffs, there's typically not too many selections. 

One of the baseball systems is under review. Not because it's not been successful - this season it has an 'official' ROI of 27.6% and is up 14.84 units - but because it has generated no selections since the All-Star break.

Too late for this season, but there definitely seems to be a case for either making this a system a first half of the season system only or adjusting the parameters. 

The last month of the regular season is one in which the motivation for all teams is not the same. There are teams looking to win their division, teams looking to make the playoffs via the Wild Card, and teams looking forward to the season being over.

In the latter category, historically the market under-values Home teams, in particular Home teams on a winning streak who are playing a Divisional opponent. I suspect the focus for most bettors at this time of year is understandably on the more important games with post-season ramifications.

We have data since 2007 thanks to Killer Sports and the p-value is significant:

Stateside

As some of you know, it's been an interesting few weeks, with my father-in-law being rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, blood transfusions and all that good stuff, but he's on the mend now. 

The challenge is that my wife is an only child and California is a long way away and it's probably not the last time we'll get a call like this as neither of her parents are getting any younger. 

Her dad will be 79 in December, her Mum (or Mom) is 75, and as were my own parents, they are somewhat stubborn when lifestyle changes are suggested that would help them. 

They live in a tri-level house that they built themselves, so while that is not an ideal environment, they have this deep emotional attachment to it and simply refuse to even consider moving or down-sizing. 

Neither are particularly mobile, (her Dad was a professional baseball player for several years and has paid the price in recent years with knee and hip replacements) and the consequences of a fall can be severe, but there's only so much one can do. 

At least now that I am retired, it's a lot easier to hop on a plane and fly over there, but it's certainly not an ideal situation. 

Vent over, and the NFL is back, and it's been an unusual start in more ways than one. I mentioned the Friday Night game in Brazil in this previous post, but it's been unusual in terms of results with the biggest favourite losing straight up in both Weeks 1 and 2, the first time this has happened since 1980 according to Sports Odds History.

Week 1 was not pleasant for followers of the systems in the Sacred Manuscript - "brutal" as one subscriber called it - but while it's always nice to get off to a strong start, it's important to remember that it's a marathon not a sprint, and Week 2 was profitable bringing the overall record for this season to 9-13.

The College Football systems are purring along nicely though, with a 41-23 record but the CFL Totals are hurting us north of the border with an overall 16-18 record there. 

The WNBA regular season ends today, and we have one final selection before the playoffs start on Sunday. The three systems are a combined 31-16-2 (12-7-1, 10-6-1 and 9-3-0) so far. It's not the highest number of selections each season, but since records began it has a good record:

Baseball has another ten days of its regular season to go, with the playoffs starting on October 1st. 

The NBA starts on October 22nd.