Out Of The Stretch

What a thin line it can be between winning and losing. After an awful Copa America that I should have followed my own advice about and ignored, whether July finished in the red or the green came down to the last day and among key events was a basketball game where my bet won with a shot with less than two seconds remaining. A few inches off, and the month is likley a losing one. Today's Free Under Over Soccer Picks had Kalmar v Mjallby, an investment that had I checked the progress of after 82 minutes, with a score of 0-0, would have looked safely in the bag. Luck this time went against me, with three late goals, but it's all part of the game and here's no point getting upset about it. One of the keys for successful trading is to take the emotion out of it. My own trading favourite of basketball often comes down to a last second (literally - a second in basketball is a long time!) play. Sometimes I need the basket to be scored for my best outcome, other times I need the basket to be missed, but I have no control over the play. All I can do is play the odds, and make the best decision given the situation. Whether it goes for you or against you in these circumstances, a ho-hum attitude seems to work best. In one way, it's perhaps somewhat disturbing how winning or losing a four figure sum seems so irrelevant, but in other ways it is really rather a good thing.

My last post showed the results from following two Free Picks systems, the afore-mentioned Free Under Over Soccer Picks and the MLB Daily Picks - systems that I blindly follow with a view to not losing too much, but generating commission and helping somewhat with the Premium Charge. No thought or rating by myself on these, but I do have other methods for both football and baseball, a sport where backing the underdog has offered much better value over the years than following the favourite, something I wrote about at the start of the 2010 season.

The results show that not surprisingly, betting on baseball underdogs is the way to go. Underdogs over the past seven seasons have gone 6917-9644 for a loss of 153 points. Favorites during that span are 9619-6891 for a loss of 641 points. Thus even though favorites win at a 58% hit rate, betting on them costs you more than four times your money. Of course, no one in their right mind blindly bets on either the favourite or the underdog, but the numbers show that there is better value to be found on the underdog.

While the picks I display here are those of Mr. Stretch, P commented - You're missing the boat with the MLB picks Cassini! Simply laying the home favourite appears to be much more of an edge: http://www.mlbdailypicks.com/2011-ratings-results/ Hard to argue with - laying the home team shows a profit to date of 40.74 points, while Mr Stretch's official results show 'only' a profit of 6.46 points.