Man. We love these Pacers.
More MLB moneyline action today, more Rockies, our weekday MLB futures, and our daily NBA and NHL playoff futures.
Detroit at Baltimore
Tarik Skubal is really, really good, and the Tigers are better on paper than we assumed they’d be at the start of the year. But the Orioles aren’t terrible on paper, they’re getting a little healthier, and Dean Kremer—the assumed bulk reliever today—has been pitching well. Even against Skubal, these odds are too long for a decent team playing at home.
Pick: Baltimore to win +175. 15.00 units to win 26.25. Skubal and Akin must start.
San Francisco at Colorado
The better odds are at the books which require locked-in starting pitchers. Are we worried one of these teams will use an opener? Sure. We’re more worried about the Rockies covering, though.
(The Rockies have announced their starting lineup, and they didn’t announce an opener. So that’s a good sign.)
Pick: San Francisco –1.5 (–138). 15.00 units to win 10.87. Birdsong and Senzatela must start.
NL Central
For our first baseball future, we’re rolling with the Brewers, who are flashing narrowly positive EV at 9-to-1 odds. This makes them a profitable outcome again for our portfolio in the NL Central market. We’d rather the Cubs be a profitable outcome for us, but we haven’t seen that opportunity.
Pick: Milwaukee to win +900. 2.00 units to win 18.00.
World Series
And for the second, we’ll put a little more on the Yankees to win the World Series. The other positive-value teams we see right now are the Blue Jays, Giants, and Mets. We have a solid amount on each of the Blue Jays and Giants. We have almost as much on the Mets as we have on the Yankees. If the Yankees are as good as they can be, a deficit on them is going to be harder to hedge out of than one on the Mets. The Yankees’ AL competition is much more flawed than the Mets’ in the National League.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +550. 2.00 units to win 11.00.
NBA Finals
The markets here don’t match. The moneyline price for Game 4 implies a 66.7% chance the Thunder win. If you accept that and assume a normal-sized home-court advantage, the futures prices for the series as a whole imply a 70.8% chance the Thunder win Game 5, a 52.0% chance they win Game 6, and a 70.8% chance they win Game 7. It’s hard to believe the Thunder will only be an implied 70.8% favorite back in Oklahoma City for Game 5.
How do we take advantage of this?
Arbitrage isn’t straightforward in traditional sports betting. There isn’t an easy way to bet this which covers all our bases. What we can do, though, is say that either our understanding of home-court advantage is badly wrong, the Pacers are undervalued in Game 4, or the Thunder are undervalued over the rest of the series. One of those three things has to be true. Which one is it? It’s possible it’s a little of all three, though we’re pretty skeptical that home-court advantage has dramatically changed this year.
If you have to pick one, and we think we do, we’ll go with the Thunder being undervalued over the series as a whole. Sportsbooks have to cover a whole season’s worth of futures bets with their Finals series odds. That’s a much less efficient market than a single game. This goes against some of what we’ve been doing, and it really goes against our gut, but we think betting the Thunder to win the series is the smarter play right now compared to betting the Pacers to win Game 4. Especially with our hockey portfolio struggling and our NBA portfolio so Pacers-heavy.
The new scenarios, with our current balance +64.17 units:
| Winner | Games | Total |
| Pacers | 6 | 131.88 |
| Pacers | 5 | 114.28 |
| Thunder | 6 | 86.55 |
| Pacers | 7 | 78.69 |
| Thunder | 7 | 33.36 |
Pick: Oklahoma City to win series –200. 15.00 units to win 7.50.
Stanley Cup Finals
Speaking of our NHL portfolio…more of the same on it today. Apologies for listing the wrong probabilities from our model these last few days in this next table. We forgot to update that column in that table after Game 3.
We’re 32.31 units in the hole so far, so any of the first three outcomes listed would be an improvement from where we currently stand. Go Oilers.
| Result | Probability | Total |
| Oilers in 6 | 11.6% | 34.41 |
| Panthers in 5 | 28.7% | -18.62 |
| Oilers in 7 | 18.4% | -20.33 |
| Panthers in 6 | 26.8% | -46.37 |
| Panthers in 7 | 14.6% | -119.11 |
Pick: Under 6.5 Games (–175). 6.00 units to win 3.43.
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I am only roughly 90% confident in these numbers. At some point we’ll get that Google Sheet up which tracks all our bets this year.
2025: –265.62 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025: –5% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 374 single-game markets plus one completed futures portfolio and two partly completed futures portfolios)
Pre-2025: 0% average ROI (worse when limited to only sports)
Units taken from best odds we can find at major sportsbooks available to most Americans.
These bets are not investment advice. If you’re worried you or someone you know might have a gambling addiction, call 1-800-GAMBLER for free, confidential help.
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