We’re going to publish our second election portfolio in here. It’s the standalone one, and it’s designed to get us back even all-time. It is a lot of units large. We will not recommend you follow it, and we are ashamed to be so far in the hole that we’re doing it, but we’re confident in it for our own purposes.
Before that, though, we’ve got college basketball’s opening day and Monday Night Football. Let’s begin.
Baylor at Gonzaga
We’re past the days when you could scrub for injuries and blindly bet college basketball games with the biggest kenpom/markets gap during nonconference play. We do, however, trust kenpom’s read on both these teams. Neither is so unconventionally built as to be hard to measure. If Pomeroy says this is a three-point game, we believe him, and since we’d guess there’s a lot of public money here, we have a convenient explanation for why the spread has moved the way it’s moved. (Langston Love’s return from last year’s injury is important and uncertain, but he shouldn’t be worth this many points.)
Pick: Baylor +6.5 (–112). Low confidence.
Tampa Bay @ Kansas City
Meanwhile, on the NFL side, we continue to blindly trust FPI. It’s been working, and we’re going to ride it until we get a strong indication that that’s stopping.
Pick: Tampa Bay +9 (–115). Low confidence.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Ok, what we’re doing here, and how we’re doing it:
We enter tonight with a 633.69-unit all-time deficit. We do have a 1,000-unit election portfolio already built which will likely generate somewhere between a 10% and 17% return, but we’re going to let those units be the gravy. The purpose of this portfolio is to make 633.69 units on markets where 1) Nate Silver’s model indicates there’s positive value and 2) there is almost no chance our bet loses. Everything we’re betting has, per Silver’s model, a 92% chance or better of winning. We’re betting some on each side, to keep ourselves at least a little safer from a gigantic polling error, but because of where markets stand, there’s more value available on Harris than Trump, so more of these are on Harris than are on Trump. Either way, we don’t expect to lose any of these. We’re only betting presidential markets because Silver only has a presidential model this year. We’re betting states because those were the simplest things to bet.
Do not bet more than you can afford to lose. We’re putting big unit numbers on these, and this is paper betting, and in our real lives we are not betting more than we can afford to lose (or anything close to that amount). We expect only about a 6.5% return on these. That’s a nice one-day return on a bet, but don’t bet more than you’d bet on a –1538 moneyline. That’s what this is, with 9,794 units down in total: 3,770 each on Virginia and Ohio, and 322 apiece on the other seven.
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Virginia –1200. Medium confidence. x1885
Pick: Republican Candidate to win Ohio –1600. Medium confidence. x1885
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District –1000. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Vermont –3300. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Republican Candidate to win Utah –3300. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Maine’s 1st Congressional District –3300. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win New Jersey –3300. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Illinois –4000. Medium confidence. x161
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Washington –4000. Medium confidence. x161
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
Single-game college basketball bets: These have been a rollercoaster for us historically, but on the aggregate, results have been negative. This year, we’re betting one or two games a day, at least to start. We may taper that off. We use kenpom heavily.
Single-game NFL bets: We got smoked on these all year last year, to the point where I think we might’ve even stopped placing them. This year, though, we’re 16–11 so far, up 3.69 units. We lean on FPI to make these picks.
Election futures: These have been our best market historically, with a 17% overall ROI and significant profits both times we’ve done them—in 2020 and 2022. We use Nate Silver’s election models, and we make money. Today’s are our second portfolio, a standalone portfolio we’re only doing because we got beat so bad by the World Series. Our first portfolio was 1,000 units large, published over the course of the summer and fall, and higher-upside than this one.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,489 published bets, a number that will increase to around 14,000 when the election markets are all settled. (That’s how big this gimmick is.) We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is very, very bad. –5.5%. Worse than coin flip betting. Most of this is because our MLB futures portfolio just got smoked, but even before that, we were around a 2% all-time deficit. This will change soon, because of the election bets, but our sports track record stinks, and it’s necessitated this election bet gimmick, a get-out-of-jail-free card from dumb betting markets which is very difficult to replicate in the real world with any reasonably sized unit.
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These are for entertainment purposes and are not at all investment advice. If you think you might have a gambling problem, please call 1–800–GAMBLER to learn more and/or seek help.
