Editor’s Note: Since November 2018, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been mixed, with an average return on investment, per pick, of –2% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,932 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +1% across 2,401 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you’re afraid you might have a gambling problem, seek help.
Odds for these come from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline. We used to use the Vegas Consensus, but it’s no longer consistently available in an accurate form online. We rely heavily on FanGraphs for all our MLB action. We rely heavily on Nate Silver’s presidential election model for our election futures. For college football bets, we primarily use our own model. For NFL bets, we lean on ESPN’s FPI.
Active markets today are MLB futures and single-game college football.
The context on each market:
MLB futures – In four of the five years we’ve done these, we’ve profited, twice by large margins. We began this season with 750 units in our portfolio. We placed two medium confidence bets most weekdays throughout the regular season, as usual, then pivoted to placing a more variable number throughout the playoffs, as usual. We’re currently big fans of the Tigers, Padres, and Mets, and we do not want the Dodgers to win it all.
Single-game college football bets – Our history here is mediocre, and we’re off to a really bad start this season, with a 14–21 record so far. We’re down 8.37 units heading into tonight.
ALCS
The basic state of our MLB futures portfolio is that we have huge ALCS upside on the Tigers, huge World Series upside on the Padres, huge World Series downside on the Dodgers, and some lesser isolated upside and downside. With the most value available on the Guardians, then, and with no value clearly available on the Dodgers, we’re going to roll with the Guardians. These ten units give us leverage in either ALCS scenario. Tomorrow, we’ll try to get an update in here with where our portfolio lands in each of what will be 16 remaining scenarios. For now: Go Padres.
Pick: Cleveland to win +475. Medium confidence. x5
Northwestern @ Maryland
We’re fading Movelor, as we wrote about yesterday. We don’t distrust it, but the betting spreads are more accurate (of course), and we think they might be meaningfully more accurate if we can pick enough of the right games. In other words: We might be able to pick a sample of games on which Movelor’s only on the right side of the spread 47% of the time. At least during this portion of the season.
In this case, Movelor has Maryland by 12.4, and we like that more than the other options where we’d be fading our system (Arizona State and Utah State). This is a low-total game, it’s happening on a short week, and both these teams are respectable defensively, held back by varying levels of offensive clunkiness. We’ll roll with David Braun as we try to get to 2–2 on the week.
Pick: Northwestern +11 (–110). Low confidence.
