Friday, 22 November 2013

Reliable Numbers

NBA Tips claim that "a lot of effort goes into making our numbers reliable", which is a bold claim after having made mistakes with the number of games a team plays in the regular season, with the prices at which wins are recorded, and of course the intentional mistake of attempting to modify the bet several hours after posting it.

They posted their version of their results for this season yesterday, but unfortunately rather than confirm that the errors already mentioned were the exception rather than the rule, there are a number of other errors revealed. Some are minor, for example the 4.November bet on a player to score over 195.5 points, something even Wilt Chamberlain would have struggled to do on his best night, or the handicap moving from 13.5 to 13, but more serious are these:

The 2 unit stake on the 31.October bet is recorded as one unit in the spreadsheet.
And then we have this:
Bwin apparently give a bonus similar to Ladbrokes, as the recorded price has gone up to 1.85 in the spreadsheet.
It's not all bad news for the thousands of NBA Tips followers though, as on a couple of bets, they have actually managed to err against their own interests, so the errors do seem to just be down to carelessness or poor mathematical skills. Unfortunately, with at least 11 of the 91 bets in the spreadsheet having some kind of an error, the claim that "a lot of effort goes into making our numbers reliable" just isn't supported by the evidence. I would be happy to point out the other mistakes, but NBA Tips don't seem to appreciate my well-intentioned advice for some reason.

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