The Dodgers might be inevitable, and we’re starting our NHL futures early this year.
NLCS
The Dodgers are the only team where there’s clearly value available right now. They’re also the favorites. They’re also our portfolio’s biggest vulnerability. We’ll keep chipping away.
Pick: Los Angeles to win –160. 4.00 units to win 2.50.
NHL
We haven’t started posting probabilities yet from Gelo, our NHL model, but we’ll probably do that tomorrow. We do have them, and they’re about what we’d expect. Gelo’s big strength when we use it during the playoffs is how quickly it reacts. Those same tendencies lead it to look at the regular season, though, and do a big shrug. Gelo gives the Sharks a 0.7% chance of winning the Stanley Cup. It gives the Oilers a 5.6% chance. Everyone else falls in between those two bounds.
What we see then, is absurdity. A 506% expected return on a bet on the Penguins to win the Stanley Cup. Plenty more numbers similar to that.
We do think markets probably underrate the uncertainty in hockey. But we aren’t going to start the portfolio by betting on purely terrible teams. Instead, we’ll limit ourselves to bets that meet the following criteria:
- Positive EV, per Gelo
- 50-to-1 odds or shorter
- Season-opening Gelo is better than Gelo at end of last postseason. (Since most of our offseason adjustments come from Vegas point totals, this makes sure we’re only betting on teams expected to get better. We’ll probably ax this one after a few weeks, but it’s a good gut check in the early going.)
This is possibly too restrictive, but we’d rather err on that side. There are a lot of likely playoff teams we can get to win their conference or win the Stanley Cup at those numbers. Since we’ll only be placing two units worth of futures a week throughout the regular season (that’s the plan right now, anyway), building a base from which to operate in the spring (we have proven results on doing NHL portfolios in the playoffs, but we’ve never started the process this early), our hope is that we get through the first few weeks with a bunch of eventual playoff teams at sky-high prices, and that ultimately this gives us leverage in those early playoff rounds.
Today, that leads us to Utah and Montreal, each their conference’s ninth-likeliest champion, per the markets. Since this is largely a bet on markets underrating uncertainty, that’s the exact kind of playoff bubble action we want.
(One more note: We forgot to include division champions in our model’s output on the first pass. We’ll get those in before next week.)
Pick: Utah to win Western Conference +2500. 1.00 unit to win 25.00.
Pick: Montreal to win Eastern Conference +2500. 1.00 unit to win 25.00.
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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.
2025–26: –431.15 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025–26: –6% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 823 single-game markets plus three completed futures portfolios and one partly completed futures portfolio)
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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