It was a heartbreaker for our MLB futures portfolio last night, but it might work out in our favor. More on that below, but first…college football.
Notre Dame vs. Navy
Notre Dame’s performance against Northern Illinois is part of their season and, as it should be, is baked into all assessments of Notre Dame. It’s being too heavily weighted, though. Even if Notre Dame isn’t a top-five team, like Movelor suggests, it’s a top-ten team. Marcus Freeman’s staff knows Navy well. They should be able to match this number.
Pick: Notre Dame –13.5 (–112). Low confidence.
BYU @ UCF
UCF might have the talent edge here, but BYU just keeps winning, and I think that means something. We didn’t take last weekend’s escape from Oklahoma State as some seismic victory—it took a bad BYU performance to put them in that corner—but we also don’t think Oklahoma State’s atrocious. With UCF, it seems people are waiting on Gus Malzahn to do his thing, but that might take a while. This team is a little disorganized. BYU’s firing on all cylinders. Give us the undefeated road underdogs.
Pick: BYU +3 (–120). Low confidence.
Wake Forest @ Stanford
We don’t think all that highly of Stanford, but we’re bullish on this offense figuring it out. Troy Taylor’s done too much in his career for his offense to not become serviceable soon. Wake Forest is a good candidate to be the victim of that tick upwards.
Pick: Stanford +3 (–109). Low confidence.
Texas @ Vanderbilt
Maybe Vanderbilt’s entirely for real and the Georgia State loss was, like Notre Dame’s loss to NIU, simply bizarre. Again, though, that’s part of Vanderbilt’s story, and in this case, we think it’s being undervalued. Maybe Texas is beat up and tired after dealing with Georgia, as opposed to being fired up and ready to take their anger out on somebody. Even if they are, though, they’d have to be really beat up and tired to make this line make sense. Texas is a lot better than Vanderbilt.
Pick: Texas –17 (–105). Low confidence.
Kansas @ Kansas State
In a parallel theme, Kansas State is a lot better than Kansas. Yes, the Jayhawks have lost a lot of close games. But this isn’t about the Jayhawks. K-State is good! Really good! K-State is the best team in the Big 12, and while they’re no strangers to a good meltdown, those haven’t tended to come in this game under Chris Klieman.
Pick: Kansas State –9.5 (–120). Low confidence.
SMU @ Duke
We don’t think Duke’s going to spring the upset here or anything. We think SMU’s legitimate. But Duke should be able to keep it close. That’s what these technically sound, defensively-focused programs do. They make themselves tough to blow out.
Pick: Duke +11 (–110). Low confidence.
World Series
With our portfolio heavily out on the Dodgers and therefore heavily in on the Yankees, Game 1 went about as poorly as it could go. Not only did the Yankees lose, but they leaned on their best bullpen arms in the process.
The upside here is that with the value still on the Yanks, we’re getting good value at a longer price. What that means is that if they do get out of Los Angeles with the series tied, we’ll be closer to a strong position. Yesterday, our portfolio was effectively a –494 bet on New York. With these 16 units added to the mix, it’s now effectively a –388 play. 130.95 units of Yankee upside. 508.27 units of Dodger downside. 241.73 units left to spend, if we want to.
We’ve been doing 32 units per day, since that would put us on pace to use the whole portfolio if the series goes seven games. Why are we only doing 16 today? We use two sources to look for MLB futures value during the postseason. The one of those which doesn’t include starting pitching matchups says there isn’t value on the Yankees. The one which does include starting pitching matchups says there is value, and actually pretty good value.
We trust that second one more at this stage, but there’s some advantage to keeping a little more powder dry,
Pick: New York (AL) to win +195. Medium confidence. x8
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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 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 college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 22–30 so far, down 9.86 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we aren’t entirely reliant on it.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,082 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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