Mowers And Mansions

MLB

The Underdogs got on the board yesterday with the Toronto Blue Jays easy (10:1) winners over the Texas Rangers, who some of you may remember were the subject of a discussion at the end of August. 

I suggested on August 30th to:

expect them [Texas Rangers] to be a bet in September.

Fizzer then pointed out that a much higher number of the Rangers' wins were in one run games, and I later wrote:

Fizzer has looked far more deeply into the reason why the Texas Rangers have the second best record to date, yet haven't been market darlings until the past few days. [I'm a CEO, so I only have an hour a day for these things].

His findings are, as always, perfectly logical, and with the Rangers ability (luck?) at beating the odds in close games almost 80% of the time certain to regress to the mean at some point, Fizzer's thinking is that the value (if any) is more likely to be on the lay side in September.

In the end, the September record for the Rangers was 15-11 and backing them would have made 0.35 points. Opposing them would have lost 1.67 points.

Fizzer will no doubt point out that I'm being a little disingenuous by excluding the first two days of October, which marked the final games of the regular season.

Unfortunately for me, the Rangers lost both games, so the final numbers for September and October combined were -2.18 and +0.76 points respectively.

Although the official price may change, the Blue Jays were at 2.04 last night, but I was matched on the exchanges at 2.3. I'm tracking the prices I get against the official prices, as usually the recorded returns can be beaten. It'll be interesting to see by how much.

  

In the second UMPO game yesterday, the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox 5:4 at 2.25 (2.34 on the exchanges) to bring UMPO '16 into profit.

NFL

The highly questionable Vanilla Thursday System bet (Under 42.5) lost as the Division game between the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals was won by the away team 33:21, and Martin's Divisional Road System comes up with another winner, this one at 2.06 on Betfair. 

Thanks again to Martin Ortiz who found, and shared, an edge on the away teams in Divisional games.

Martin replied via Twitter ( @martinortizz) to my findings:

Now as some of you know, I'm a CEO running a global multi-billion dollar betting empire from my secret lair on a private island somewhere near Tahiti, but I'm too cheap to fork out for a research assistant, and indeed I cut my own grass, as many of us global CEOs like to do apparently:

If the aforementioned person really is a CEO then I can only assume his trophy wife is on the phone to a divorce lawyer or worse, a hitman. The CEO in question makes himself look even more of a buffoon when he refers to his career as a "job" and that he has just "returned home to cut the grass" rather than ordering someone to cut the south lawn of his mansion.

In the tropical paradise where I live, the women all wear grass skirts, so being handy with the mower is a useful skill to have.

College Football

The first challenge with Martin's request is determining what line best represents a probability of 0.667 since the straight up prices aren't available to me. Looking at the last ten full seasons, teams giving 4.5 have won 66.1% of games, so that's a good starting point.

So Martin's theory is that soft favourites (giving up to, and including 4.5 points) may be vulnerable.

The numbers show that any edge is slight. 50.4% of underdogs have covered the spread over the last ten seasons, and just 50.2% over the last five seasons.  I don't see anything here that will make us rich unless Martin has some additional filter, perhaps certain Conference games? I'm wary about asking since I can see my weekend disappearing, but there's no real football so I'll take the risk.