Ice Road Warriors

I mentioned in my previous post that the NBA Finals are about to begin, and the NHL's Stanley Cup Finals are also in progress having begun on Monday. The Vegas Golden Knights in their inaugural season are playing the Washington Capitals and lead the final series 1-0. 

For betting, the NHL is another sport where it's worth looking at the road teams when favoured.

 

The 2012 season was shortened due to a lockout, but for the five full seasons since, the records for road (away) favourites in the regular season is decent as shown above, although 2017 showed a loss for this basic strategy.

However, with many bettors subject to overreacting to the latest results, a.k.a. recency - and of course it is ultimately other bettors you are competing against and not the bookmaker - as with the NBA, it pays to look at road teams coming off a loss but who are nevertheless still favoured against a team which won its previous game:

The all important ROI more than doubles, and when including the playoffs, almost triples. It's probably not a coincidence that the NBA and NHL schedules are similar in their scheduling of road trips and back-to-back games, and thus we see similar weaknesses in the markets for these two sports.  

Baseball's T-Bone System also benefits from this extra qualifying parameter.

For the 2009 season to date, the basic T-Bone has an ROI of 4.2% from 1064 bets, while the enhanced system is at 5.2% from just 894 bets.