God’s Tid-Bets, Vol. 10
Joe Duffy (www.godspicks.com)
Here is the latest in a Godgepodge of articles about sports handicapping information, most based on your questions and feedback.
Redux: Picking the Team that Wins Outright
In Tid-Bets Vol. 3, we rightfully deflated the illogical figment of just picking the team that wins outright and you will more times than not have the spread winner. We considered writing an entire article debunking the endless flaws in this unsystematic witlessness.
However we were confident most gamblers could see through this air castle and only touched on the hallucination. Showing there is a sucker placing a bet every minute this flapdoodle is actually gaining steam and perhaps qualifies as one of the great incongruities in sports gambling. On high volume posting boards, I see cyber back-slapping every time some lunkhead “tracks” this belief. It’s happening more often, not less. Stop the insanity!
Consult Vol. 3 for the main reasons this is inductive and not deductive, but if there were any veracity to this, why would quixotic ones waste their time betting the games ATS? Since the prevailing premise behind this urban myth is “it’s so much easier to pick the SU winner than the spread winner” why don’t these fancied geniuses just pick dog winner after dog winner on the moneyline?
There are plenty of underdogs that win outright, many huge dogs in fact. If one wants to postulate how much easier it is to pick the SU winner, why waste such foreknowledge on collecting $100 for every $110 risked? Just keep picking those 250 dogs and get your money’s worth.
I don’t want to ruin this fool’s gold with such a logical question, but like I keep saying, I guess those pipe dreamers are needed to keep the books in business for the rest of us.
No oddsmaker will go broke underestimating the intelligence of the betting public.
Radio Active
We’ve mentioned before how satellite and internet radio can be a valuable tool. Perhaps we are a bit biased but the best gambling radio show portal is GamblersZoo.com for over–the-air and/or internet sports gambling broadcasts.
Quality Not Quantity
One FAQ I get that frustrates me goes something like this, “Last Saturday I got your plays and you had 14 releases. This Saturday, I buy them and you have only four, even though there are about the same number of games.” Sometimes they will refer to it as inconsistent even though we won.
Any smart player always allows the quality of the card to dictate how many plays they release. We’ve had complete Saturday college basketball cards in which we’ve released just two plays and we had a Thursday night football card with two games and we had plays on both sides and both totals including three Wise Guy plays.
Betting a certain number of games for the sake of doing so or forcing bets on any game is simply playing the lottery. A sharp player must pick his spots. One should be leery of a sports service that guarantees a predetermined and invariable number of plays. It may be smart from a marketing standpoint because clients get a comfort zone with routines, but it’s horrible from an investment standpoint.
Do you think Wall Street wizards got there by habitually buying and selling set amounts? Sports brokers certainly won’t either.
Duffy’s plays are part of the Dream Team at Godspicks.com. He is perhaps the most published and respected author on sports gambling theory and has been featured as a regular guest as the handicapping expert on the Rick Ballou Show on Sporting News Radio, Gamblers Zoo national radio show, the Meat and Potatoes gambling show, Pro Fantasy Sports Internet radio and Grogan’s Fantasy Football show.
His Wise Guy Plays available exclusively at www.godspicks.com where daily sports handicapping information is available to crush the sportsbooks. Godspicks.com is the top source for NFL picks, college football winners and more.

Don’t Have a Tendency to Overvalue Coaches Preseason Tendencies

Just say no.  Too often the wannabee sharp player will tell you how much they love a preseason game because one coach is 7-3 ATS in the preseason and the other is just 10-20. The non-reasoning is that the first coach wants to win more.

First of all, ATS trends have little or no value in preseason NFL betting, but even if they did just about any that apply to a coach’s preseason record would be statistically insignificant. But more importantly one must ascertain if there is a rhyme to the reason.

For example Jimmy Johnson had a horrible ATS record in the exhibition games at Dallas because the variables basically stayed the same.  They were a marquee team that had high bettor’s appeal but they barely gave their “Triplets” of Smith, Aikman and Irvin a cop of coffee in a game. However the same spread fate continued with Barry Switzer because the same set of circumstances applied until the day Michael Irvin’s career ended on the dreaded Veterans Memorial Stadium turf.

And the Pokes being a great fade had absolutely nothing with their lack of motivation to win, it was simply a lack of justification to play their front line players. I would not bet my worst enemy’s money on for example any Steve Mariucci preseason historical record because a complete change of circumstances makes all numbers irrelevant.

Fluid circumstances are the primary reasons for the coaches’ historical record in preseason. Bluntly I’d rate coaches inclinations barely above random chance as a rationalization for the records and thus as a handicapping tool.  True Bill Parcells is a rare example of a coach who does seem to consistently put emphasis on the final score but an overwhelming majority of perceived annual dispositions of any specific coach are more imagined than real.

Offshore Drilling  Requires a Refinery

Yes we drill the offshore books the same way we did the Vegas sports odds and outlaw books before that.  We keep refining theories, systems and angles. I keep a database of what I half-jokingly refer to as “almost plays”.  These are plays I like but the base principles are established more on theory than proven track record and hence cannot rise to the level of premium play.  I then group each play under the theorem in its own memory based program. Once this premise has been proven to withstand the test of time it is upgraded to our empirical process.

Some recent revelations have resulted in our releasing and winning many more favorites in baseball. We were in some respects victims of our own success. “Bad” days consisted of going 2-3 and thanks to big dogs we still turned a small profit. We had slumps that resulted in hitting 44 percent yet still with a positive ROI.  Potential chalk winners resulted in us passing on the games because we got so biased against laying the lumber.

We deprived ourselves of the profitable fact that even with the much higher winning percentage required, baseball favorites under the right set of circumstances can have the same probability/risk ratio as our tried and true dogs and small favorites.  Thanks to tracking theories we have rectified that.

Another demonstration is how we rate our system plays. In the past we yielded to what statisticians use to measure the reliability of data: z score.  Who are we to argue with PhDs? However upon tracking the deviation from the mean as it applies to handicapping we discovered that the simple return on investment (ROI) is an even more accurate way.  The ROI is based simply on one-unit per play and includes the juice.

So instead of insisting a system have a z score of 4.0 or above to be statistically reliable, we now use 80 units or higher as standard.  Essentially it puts more emphasis on sample size and less on winning percentage.

We Love the Information Age

It looks like one of our favorite sites for college sports information Collegesports.com has added even more colleges to the network.  This will both increase and streamline our ability to not miss a beat both on the gridiron and hardwood.  Along those lines now that ESPN U, CSTV and Fox give us three channels dedicated to college sports, they and the other major sites such as CBS Sportsline are greatly increasing the amount and quality of coverage in their respective premium and “insider” packages.

The offshore sportsbooks are somewhat handcuffed because intense competition has forced them to come out with lines earlier and earlier.  Yet the pinpoint accuracy of information available late in the week from the ever increasing sources continues to widen the gap between handicapping’s upper, middle and lower classes. Luckily there is no shortage of rank and file gamblers to keep to books solvent.

Now many sports bloggers are a worthwhile source.  Not so much gambling specific but there is no shortage of sports fanatics out there and a few do have some good insight.  We will keep an open mind and two open eyes.

Grand Master Handicapper Joe Duffy is widely accepted as the top sports handicapper ever. He was General Manager of the Freescoreboard scorephone network and CEO of OffshoreInsiders.com, the premier hub of world-class handicappers.