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 -5% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,393 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 to get the overall number back profitable is currently November 5th, the date of a potential World Series Game 7.
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. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer picks.
Just MLB futures today. For context on the unit size: We started the season with 520 units ready to bet on MLB futures and another 520 in reserve.
World Series
We’re taking a break from the Seattle/Tampa Bay ALCS combo, though that remains valuable and we may return to it tomorrow. Here, we like what we can do because one of these two teams is going to receive a first round bye in the National League and the other is going to have something like 60% or better chance of getting into the opposite Division Series. For hedging routes to be available, we need to have value that’s guaranteed to be there late in the playoffs, and these sorts of plays—available because of what we believe is a market overestimation of the Cardinals, Dodgers, and even teams like the Yankees across the bracket—help raise the value of our biggest guaranteed chip in the postseason’s second week.
For those curious, we did a little analysis this morning, and our current reads are that our median expectation for the MLB futures is a 65.26-unit profit on what’s already been bet, with the 1st quartile expectation a 196.66-unit profit on what’s already been bet. We expect both of those to rise over these next two months of placing more futures. We’re currently 220.38 units away from being back profitable overall. So, work to do, but we have a good base.
Pick: New York (NL) to win +600. Medium confidence.
Pick: Atlanta to win +1100. Medium confidence.
