Is this the last night of baseball season? Is this the last night of these published bets? Is this the week we finally become profitable on the college football year?
We’ll start with the big one. We have a note at the bottom (under our overall results) about what happens if we lose it.
World Series Game 4
We’re in trouble!
A quick recap on how that came to be:
- During the regular season, when we were placing ten MLB futures bets weekly, we placed none on the Dodgers to win the NLCS or the World Series. The value was never there. We left that hole, watching our upside elsewhere and recognizing that in most scenarios, we’d have enough leverage to hedge and cover the liability if the need arose. We weren’t technically wrong about this last part. But we didn’t form an adequate plan.
- When the Padres took their 2–1 lead over the Dodgers in the NLDS, we did bet on the Dodgers a little, not even needing to hedge to do it. We didn’t place very many units on them, though, wanting to keep our powder dry with a lot of postseason left. This, ultimately, was where the plan went wrong. We should have bet more heavily on the Dodgers to win the NLCS when we got them at +550. At the time, we were projecting a mean return of 48%, with massive upside on the Padres and the Tigers, both of whom led their series 2–1. We played it too safely (not enough units on the Dodgers, saving too much powder) and too aggressively (letting the Padres and Tigers ride when they still would have had tough matchups to survive). Whoops.
- We still had lots of upside on the Mets and Guardians, and the Yankees were a break-even option for us, but with the Padres and Tigers eliminated, the balance of power shifted. We no longer had the leverage to hedge if we wanted to, unless we wanted to resign ourselves to a loss on the season. Ultimately, we went into the World Series with our Dodgers downside far larger than our Yankees upside, but with enough flexibility remaining that we thought we could cull some of the liability as long as the Yankees won one of the two games in Los Angeles, something we viewed as 75% likely. Again: Whoops.
Now, here we are. We have 221.73 units available to bet, with all other units from our original 750 MLB futures units tied up in pending bets. Our best case—the Yankees winning the series—nets us 110.95 units of profit on the season. Our worst case—the Dodgers winning the series in six or seven games—nets us a 528.27-unit loss. If the Dodgers win tonight, we stand to lose 456.27 units. None of this includes what we’re placing today.
Our options for tonight are many, but our situation is this: If the Dodgers win, we’re sunk. Even if we were to bet every available unit on our highest Dodger-upside option, the Dodgers to win Game 4, it wouldn’t be enough to get us back to even, and in the event the Dodgers lost Game 4, we’d have no units available and no profitable scenarios remaining.
Since we’re sunk if the Dodgers win tonight, then, sunk no matter what we bet, we’re going to do something rash and foolish, something you only do if you’re betting recreationally and betting within your means: We’re going to put every remaining unit we can, within our established rules, on the Yankees to win Game 4 and extend the series. That’s 110 medium-confidence bets, or 220 units. We don’t really like the value. We still aren’t in a good place even if the Yankees win. But if a Dodgers sweep would be disastrous either way, we might as well give ourselves upside.
Here’s where it leaves our scenarios, with one important note to follow:
| Winner | Final Portfolio Net |
| Yankees | 280.18 |
| Dodgers in 5 | -329.04 |
| Dodgers in 6 or 7 | -359.04 |
| Dodgers in 4 | -676.27 |
The important note? If the Yankees do win Game 4, we’ll have 390.96 units in our bankroll to use on additional bets, including pro-Dodgers hedges.
There’s a long way to go, and our chances of winning tonight are only a little better than 50/50. But we’re throwing up the Hail Mary here. Hopefully whatever ghosts reside in the greater Yankee Stadium area show up and help us come down with it.
Pick: New York (AL) to win Game 4 (–130). Medium confidence. x110. No starting pitcher requirements.
Louisiana @ Texas State
From 220 units to one unit.
Betting markets have been enamored with Texas State this year, and maybe they’re right. Maybe Texas State has broken through. Movelor, though, has Texas State as the fifth-best team in the Sun Belt, and while it makes sense that Movelor would be late to a breakthrough, Movelor also has Texas State as the second-most stable Sun Belt team.
What do I mean by that? Texas State’s current Movelor rating is only 1.0 points off of its preseason rating. Within the Sun Belt, only South Alabama is closer to their August mark. If Texas State’s breaking through this year, it hasn’t happened yet.
So, we ride with Louisiana, the likelier one in this matchup to have engineered a breakthrough. The Ragin’ Cajuns are only 4.4 points better than their preseason mark, but that’s enough to have them past the Bobcats in the Sun Belt lineup.
We know there’ll be a good atmosphere in San Marcos. But our model’s pretty charitable to mid-major schools on that front. Give us ULL to stay unbeaten in Sun Belt play, or at least come very close.
Pick: Louisiana +4.5 (–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 (2019 and 2021), we profited by more than 50%. Twice (2022 and 2023), we profited by less than 5%. Once (2020), we lost 25% of the portfolio. If we lose tonight, we’ll have lost 90% of our portfolio.
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 25–32–1 so far, down 9.23 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 8,090 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. Our plan had been and pretty much remains to see where the World Series leaves us, then place enough election bets to get ourselves back to even all-time. That’s a bit of a farcical way to do things, but it’s not the worst betting strategy: Only bet as much as you can afford to lose, but try to cover your losses every two years on dumb offshore political markets. Anyway, we’ll continue to be as transparent as we can be. If we’re “break-even” all-time but we’re not profitable in sports, we’ll readily admit that.
If we do lose that bet tonight: We’ll probably stop publishing these daily. We’ll finish out our ongoing football futures portfolios, but if our second-best market historically, MLB futures, isn’t getting it done for us? That might be the indication we need to push these more into the back seat and prioritize our other content in their place. We might do that even if we win tonight, but if we lose tonight, that’s the plan right now.
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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.
