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 -4.0% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,175 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). Our ETA for having the overall number back profitable is currently November 7th, the likeliest date of a World Series Game 7 and the eve of college basketball season.
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.
The definite final hedge of hockey season (since we’re emptying our bankroll), plus Gelo’s pick for tonight and a NASCAR play. For context: The NHL futures portfolio started at the beginning of the playoffs with 100 units, with another 100 in reserve in case we needed them for hedging (we did).
Stanley Cup
This isn’t fully emptying our bankroll, but it’s the closest we can get without resorting to partial-unit bets. We’re putting 113 units on the Avalanche to win the series. This makes our scenarios, on the NHL futures portfolio as a whole, to either lose 27% (Avalanche win the Cup) or lose 11% (Lightning win the Cup). We aren’t happy with these, of course, and if the Avalanche win we’ll have a new all-time low in futures efforts (a 27% loss out-loses our previous worst of 25% on the 2020 MLB futures portfolio), but it’s in our long-term interest to be able to say of our experimental futures portfolios, “We’ve never lost more than 27% on one of these.” Hopefully the Lightning win the series and we can keep that at 25%, not 27%.
Pick: Colorado to win -350. Low confidence. x113
Colorado @ Tampa Bay
We’ll have a Gelo post-mortem in an upcoming edition of my weekday notes, but it’s done…fine. Not well enough to have enthusiastic confidence in it for next year, but not poorly enough to cast it aside or dramatically reshape it.
It likes the over tonight, and we’ll continue following it. This is, after all, an experimental effort.
Pick: Over 5.5 (-128). Low confidence.
NASCAR Cup Series @ Nashville
This thing is getting rained out and run tomorrow, in all probability. In the event it’s run today, those who qualified well have an extra advantage, because this might be shortened by the weather.
With all that considered, Denny Hamlin’s our play. He’s on the pole, but he’s got longer odds than a handful of drivers. Toyotas overall seem to have a good grip on this track. Dover—said by some experts (Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi) to be the best comparison for Nashville—was a good track for Hamlin until the mishaps started.
Those mishaps have been a big part of Hamlin’s season, and it’s fair to be concerned about their potential again in this race. At the same time, though, what went wrong at Gateway was an incident with Ross Chastain that could have happened to any team, and while Hamlin’s missing his crew chief, the team had been strong before Gateway (and Sonoma’s an outlier). We think the 11’s more than ten percent likely to win, which gives value at these odds.
Pick: Denny Hamlin to win +900. Low confidence.
