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 -1.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 4,370 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.9% across 1,602 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 (in both sports and politics) 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. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer futures picks. ESPN’s FPI is heavily used in making NFL futures picks.
Formula 1, a World Cup future, and our daily college basketball plays:
Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
We’re just continuing our general idea from the last few months here, which is that Max Verstappen is close enough to a sure thing to bet even at these odds.
Pick: Max Verstappen to win -190. Low confidence.
2022 World Cup
First, the unit structure with these: We’re putting 50 units into our World Cup futures portfolio, intending to place one future a day until scenarios are direct enough to start hedging.
Second, the broad approach: We’re using SPI, we’re looking for good value, but the sequence of the World Cup makes it such that at a certain level of nearness with specific futures, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to look too far ahead. For instance: The only match today is a Group A match. The only teams affected in the quarterfinal-reaching market are in Group A and B. The only teams affected in the semifinal-reaching market are in Groups A, B, C, and D. So unless we’re betting on something directly involving the final, we’re limiting ourselves to looking at those four or eight or sixteen teams.
There does appear to be value on Ecuador, either through the match-fixing speculation (there’s an allegation that Qatar paid Ecuadorian players to throw today’s match) or despite it. The allegation is admittedly spooky, but if we trust our fundamentals, Ecuador and Senegal are in a dead heat for the second spot out of Group A, and the Group A runner up has nearly a 50/50 shot of playing a manageable USA, Wales, or Iran in the first round of the knockout stage. So, we’re taking them. And hoping they win today for a few reasons.
One last note on these: For the first week of the World Cup, we’re going to be publishing a “Tonight’s Best Bet” or bets in addition to the daily ones. This is where the World Cup future will mostly be found, and we’re doing it this way to save ourselves having to get all our picks up for the day before games kick at 5:00 AM Pacific/8:00 AM Eastern (or 2:00 AM Pacific/5:00 AM Eastern). Once the schedule retreats later in the day in that week after Thanksgiving, we’ll switch back to one publication a day.
Pick: Ecuador to reach quarterfinals +550. Low confidence.
Virginia vs. Illinois
KenPom’s been high on Virginia relative to the market so far this year, but Friday night really backed that up. Baylor’s a better team than UCLA.
That isn’t to say this pick should be based entirely on Friday night’s result, but it supported the overall idea, which is that Virginia is a better team than Illinois right now. We’ll take them.
Pick: Virginia to win (-106). Low confidence.
Fairleigh Dickinson vs. VMI
VMI had a very bad ten minutes yesterday, and has had a very bad eighty minutes overall in Farmville during this little MTE. They’re also clearly better than Fairleigh Dickinson on paper, and Fairleigh Dickinson hasn’t exactly been tearing it up. The indicative power of recency is overblown here.
Pick: VMI +5.5 (-118). Low confidence.
