Back into the arena we go, with Game 3 ahead tonight. Thankfully, we continue to win bets on NFL night games using one of the simplest approaches imaginable.
World Series
Again, we think markets are overvaluing the Yankees tonight, and again in Game 4 scenarios in which the Dodgers lead 3–0. There’s an assumption that the series will even out at least a little, but I don’t think Major League Baseball’s officials can or will put their thumbs on the scale like we might expect in the NBA, nor do I think we should expect any internal psychological bias towards a Yankees win on the part of the players. If anything, I’d be worried about purely objective systems under-valuing the Yankees.
So, we’re betting on a Dodgers sweep. It’s only eight units, keeping a lot of powder dry (we have 221.73 currently unspent units in our MLB futures bankroll). It does dig our hole deeper in the likeliest single scenario, which is the Dodgers winning this series in six games. But in the event the Dodgers do win tonight (and boy do we hope they don’t), we’ll have a narrower gap to navigate tomorrow morning.
The new scenarios:
| Winner | Final Portfolio Net |
| Yankees | 110.95 |
| Dodgers in 4 | -456.27 |
| Dodgers in 5 | -498.27 |
| Dodgers in 6 or 7 | -528.27 |
Pick: Dodgers to win series 4–0 (+425). Medium confidence. x4
NY Giants @ Pittsburgh
We’re sticking with what’s worked, which is blindly trusting FPI, with our own assessment of home-field advantage thrown in. In this case, home-field doesn’t affect the pick at all. FPI has the Steelers 6.8 points better than the Giants on a neutral field.
Pick: Pittsburgh –6 (–110). Low confidence.
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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 more than 50%. Twice, we only narrowly profited. Once, we lost 25% of the portfolio. We could make history this year with our losses. We heavily utilize 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 14–10 so far, up 2.91 units. We lean on FPI to make these picks.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,089 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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