More World Series, plus some Tuesday Night Football:
World Series
We bet the Yankees at +116 yesterday, and the market pushed the number even higher. So, 32 more units. Our 2024 MLB futures portfolio now has 353.73 units left in cash flow, a 58.27-unit deficit so far, 46.98 units in remaining Yankees upside, and 338 units in remaining Dodgers downside. Bad place to be! But we’re working on it.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +118. Medium confidence. x16
Sam Houston @ FIU
We’ve waffled on whether or not to trust Movelor when we don’t have a great read on a game. In this case, though, we think FIU’s a little overvalued. I know SP+ and FPI trust them, but they only trust them to the extent of making this bet a tossup. I do think Movelor’s saying something meaningful when it gives Sam Houston so much relative love. It’s changed its tune on the Panthers since the beginning of the year, but it’s changed its tune on Sam Houston by more.
Pick: Sam Houston –5 (–110). Low confidence.
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
MLB Futures: We started the year with 750 units in this portfolio. This is something we’ve done each of the last five years. Twice, we profited by large amounts. Twice, we only narrowly profited. Once, we lost about 25% of the portfolio. We could make history this year in a very bad way. (We heavily employ FanGraphs to make these picks.)
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 20–28 so far, down 9.72 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we aren’t entirely reliant on it.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,077 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is –2.6%, per unit. On 2,528 medium and high-confidence bets, it’s +0.9%. Obviously, this is bad, but we do expect to get back to even through the World Series and presidential election. In all honesty, we’re just going to pour enough units into inefficient election markets to wipe out our deficit.
One last note here: We’re probably just going to do a double batch of election bets on Thursday after missing last week. Apologies yet again for the continued inconsistency on this website.
If you think you have a gambling problem, please seek help. These are for entertainment purposes, and are not at all investment advice. If you think you might have a gambling problem, please call 1–800–GAMBLER to learn more and/or seek help.
