No Hitter

Winning Green

One of my two baseball selections last night was the New York Mets to beat the St Louis Cardinals. Slight underdogs at 2.04 in the Match Odds markets, and 3.15 giving 1.5, they did something that they had never previously managed in their 51 year history. After 8,020 games, they finally had a no-hitter, winning by 8-0. Mrs. Cassini's Dad will be happy - he was a minor league player with the Mets franchise in his youth, and coincidentally is from, and now lives in, the city of the only MLB team yet to throw a no-hitter. Three times they have come within one out of success, nut they won't be one of my selections any time soon because they are currently the worst team in baseball. Answers on a postcard please.

The second selection was the Anaheim Angels v Texas Rangers (2.2 MO and 3.15 -1.5) and they come from behind to win 4-2. As I wrote in August 2009, and Peter Nordsted recently highlighted recently:

In sports such as baseball, historical data shows that picking underdogs is the best way to "keep the wind" at your sports investing back. This may result in winning only 40%-45% of your selections, but the long odds means you'll have a positive return.

In basketball, the two Conference Finals are getting a little closer after the home teams won their home matches for 2-0 leads in both series, followed by the home team success in games three. I predicted a long series in the West between the Spurs and Thunder, and if the Thunder can win tomorrow, that will be a winner. Six games was 3.0 and seven was 2.88.

Speaking of basketball, BigAl drew the attention of many via this blog, to an interesting read about NBA gambler Haralabos Voulgaris, who, the article claimed, made his money, at least in part, from his 'predictive models'. To my simple mind, NBA games are not suited to this - the line-ups, and thus the match-ups, change constantly, and there are too many variables. You can model pre-game to a certain extent I agree - but in-play, I had my doubts. Too many unpredictable variables. Players have off nights for one, players get into early foul trouble, injuries happen - none of these can be predicted pre-game, and there was some confirmation of this during the Boston Celtics v Miami Heat game three last night when Haralabos tweeted:

No model, just gut intuition 

and later

all my in game stuff is based on my gut subjective stuff

I felt quite relieved. The key to trading games like basketball, unlike football, which isn't 'real' trading since most price movements are predictable based on the pre-game prices, is the ability to read the game, and for me, it's the ability to rid your mind of what has BEEN happening, and be able to think about what is going TO happen. I've written before about the importance of time-outs in basketball. Coaches call them to stop momentum, and to make adjustments to line-up or strategy. The tendency is to think that the hot team will continue where they left off, but this often isn't the case. Another advantage of time-outs as your entry and exit points, is that the prices are stable.