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 –2% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,952 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2% across 2,411 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
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’re afraid you might have a gambling problem, seek help.
Odds for these come from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline. We used to use the Vegas Consensus, but it’s no longer consistently available in an accurate form online. We rely heavily on FanGraphs for all our MLB action. We rely heavily on Nate Silver’s presidential election model for our election futures. For college football bets, we primarily use our own model. For NFL bets, we lean on ESPN’s FPI.
Our active markets today are MLB futures and single-game college football. Here’s the context on each:
MLB futures – In four of the five years we’ve done these, we’ve profited, twice by large margins. We began this season with 750 units in our portfolio. We placed two medium confidence bets most weekdays throughout the regular season, as usual, then pivoted to placing a more variable number throughout the playoffs, as usual. We’re currently big fans of the Guardians and Mets, and we do not want the Dodgers to win it all.
Single-game college football bets – Our history here is mediocre, and we’ve had a bad first half of this season, with a 16–23 record so far. We’re down 8.59 units heading into this week.
World Series
It was big for us that the Mets won last night, and it will hopefully help that Luke Weaver had to pitch across multiple innings under so much stress. We still aren’t seeing value on the Dodgers or Yankees, though the Dodgers are close. We are still seeing value on Cleveland, and while the odds are definitely long, we’re still at a point in this process where we’re going to take the value. It’s only two units again, but it moves our portfolio to this situation:
| ALCS | NLCS | World Series | Final Net |
| CLE | NYM | CLE | 302.20 |
| CLE | LAD | CLE | 283.87 |
| CLE | NYM | NYM | 259.20 |
| NYY | NYM | NYM | 197.40 |
| NYY | NYM | NYY | -73.20 |
| NYY | LAD | NYY | -91.53 |
| CLE | LAD | LAD | -237.13 |
| NYY | LAD | LAD | -298.93 |
Pick: Cleveland to win +800. Medium confidence.
Troy @ South Alabama
In games we bet last week, Movelor was 2–5 against the spread. With very little else to go off of with tonight’s games, that leads us to only consider options which fade Movelor. There’s some sort of quarterback absence situation in Kennesaw/MTSU, and the gap between Movelor and the spread on Louisiana Tech/NMSU is too large for us to mess with. So, we’ll go with this one, where markets lean slightly more towards USA than Movelor does. Obviously, we do not recommend following us on college football bets against the spread right now, but if you really want to, go Jaguars.
Pick: South Alabama –10 (–110). Low confidence.
