Note: We’re changing up the format here a little and beginning by leading with the bets. The results come afterwards. For those who’ve read these bets since 2019, I’m sorry for what is potentially a jarring shift. We’re doing this because we’re getting our butt kicked on MLB futures, and while there’s hope (and we should get a nice payout from election futures), we want to hide how bad our current numbers are. So, from now on, our track record will be down below.
We’ve got the World Series and Monday Night Football today.
World Series
We’re in a tough spot with this portfolio. We had big upside on the Padres and Tigers, both led their Division Series 2–1, we didn’t hedge, and we lost. Now, we’re trying to use what units we have left in our futures portfolio to crawl back.
We’re betting 32 units today, because if we use 32 units per day from here and the series goes seven games, that’ll be our entire portfolio. We may slow down a little tomorrow, but for now, 32 units.
We’re betting those units on the Yankees. This isn’t quite 50/50, because the Dodgers have home-field advantage, but the Yankees probably have the better roster overall. The value is narrowly positive using FanGraphs Playoff Odds, and it’s more positive using ZiPS, which incorporates starting pitcher matchups.
In addition to our previous World Series picks, this leaves us in a position where we win back 9.22 units if the Yankees do win, but we lose 306 units if the Dodgers win. Given we’ve already lost 58.27 units on futures this season and postseason, we are obviously, as we’ve been saying, in a very poor position. But even with this placed, we do have 385.73 units left on hand to work with.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +116. Medium confidence. x16
Baltimore @ Tampa Bay
What we’ve done so far this year is follow ESPN’s FPI, specifically betting night games and, when we have to, choosing the matchup that seems simpler (healthier and more consistently present quarterbacks). Tonight, if you use two points for home-field advantage, that leads us to the Bucs. Is it foolproof? Not at all. But it’s been good to us so far.
Pick: Tampa Bay +4.5 (–110). Low confidence.
***
Alright, how we do this, and how we’re doing:
MLB Futures: We started the year with 750 units in this portfolio. This is something we’ve done each of the last five years. Twice, we profited by large amounts. Twice, we only narrowly profited. Once, we lost about 25% of the portfolio. We could make history this year. We heavily employ FanGraphs to make these picks.
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 12–9 so far, up 2.20 units. We tend to lean on FPI to make these picks.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,076 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is –2.6%, per unit. On 2,528 medium and high-confidence bets, it’s +0.9%. Obviously, this is bad, but we do expect to get back to even through the World Series and presidential election. In all honesty, we’re just going to pour enough units into inefficient election markets to wipe out our deficit.
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