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 -3% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,029 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.3% across 762 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us).
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 have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. For futures bets and motorsports bets, odds are taken from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline as our best approximation of the Vegas consensus, which isn’t currently/accurately available online. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Back to hockey today, with a lot of help from Gelo. For context on the futures: We started with 200 units in our NHL futures portfolio bankroll, with 100 of those set aside should we need to hedge. We needed to hedge.
Tampa Bay @ Colorado
Gelo doesn’t see much value on this game overall, but if we’re going to place a single-game play of some sort, it recommends the over, expecting a 6.19-goal total.
Pick: Over 6 (-114). Low confidence.
Game 2: Tampa Bay @ Colorado (Futures Portfolio)
First, apologies for a mistake we made in Wednesday’s bets: We accidentally double-counted some units in scenarios in which the Lightning win the series when we were gaming out our hedges. As our bets stand, entering today, we have 137.16 units in our bankroll, with a 62.84-unit eventual loss should the Avalanche win the series and a 114.26-unit profit should the Lightning win the series.
Second: Our primary goal is to profit on our NHL futures in total, when all of this is said and done, but should we fail at that, we want to at least limit our losses to 25% of our initial investment, or 50 units. A 25% loss is our worst career performance on a futures portfolio (2020, MLB), and we’d like to keep that the case.
Now. The market has shifted towards the Lightning, at least relatively to Gelo. In tonight’s game, Gelo nearly views the Avalanche as a positive-value moneyline play, something that has never before been the case these playoffs. Still, we aren’t in a spot where we can corner the market. We could guarantee ourselves a worst-case 6% loss, but we would also be confining ourselves to a best-case 6% loss, and that’s 1) not very fun and 2) not helpful given our current situation (we’d like to get that -3% number above back to 0%, or a positive number).
So, we’re going to keep trying to chip away at our Avalanche liability. Today, that means a 31-unit play on the Avs moneyline. If they win, we’ll only have a 41.75-unit potential loss on our hands with a 135.35-unit potential win should the Lightning come back, and 158.25 units in the bankroll. If they lose, we’ll have a 93.84-unit potential loss on our hands with an 83.26-unit potential win and 106.16 units in the bankroll. This latter scenario is a bad one, but again, it’s not terrible. The series odds at that point should be fairly close to even, with the Lightning holding home-ice advantage over the remaining five-game set, meaning we could lop off a lot of the 93.84 units with a series bet, and our probability of actually hitting on the Lightning profit, which would be a windfall for us, would be close to 50%. So, while we’d like to be a little better off right now, we’re not unhappy with where things stand, and we like this play to help us get that eventual profit we’re seeking.
Pick: Colorado to win -147. Low confidence. x31
