No change to our World Series approach. With college football, we’ve got to figure something out.
World Series
The odds have moved towards the Yankees here, so we aren’t getting as good of a price as we were, but by both FanGraphs Playoff Odds (don’t consider starting pitching matchups) and ZiPS (do consider starting pitching matchups), this prices is still positive-value. With today’s 32 units, we finally have a scenario which leaves us profitable on MLB futures this season. If we were to place no more bets (we will place more bets, but this is where we stand), we’d make 24.87 units in the event the Yankees won it all. If the Dodgers won, we’d lose 428.27 units in total, which is 370 more units than we’ve lost already.
What we really want here is for the Yankees to win Game 1 and the market to then overreact, creating value on the Dodgers which we can use to at least lessen that potential deficit. What we really want after that is for the Yankees to win Game 2, Game 3, and Game 4, and allow us to breathe a gigantic sigh of relief.
In the meantime, we’re going to keep adding upside on the Yankees so long as the value is there.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +113. Medium confidence. x16
Liberty @ Kennesaw State
It’s possible Liberty is 30 points “better” than Kennesaw State. We don’t know just how bad Kennesaw State is, and it wouldn’t be shocking if Liberty was a little better than it’s played. Kennesaw State, though, has been pretty good at not getting entirely blown out this year. They may be 0–6, but their losses have with one exception come by 24 points or fewer. Only Jacksonville State took them past a 30-point margin.
Liberty, meanwhile, hasn’t blown teams out. Even Campbell played Liberty to a 17-point final margin. Add in the potential for rust for a team who’s played one game in the last month, and we don’t mind rolling with the Owls here. 27 is a lot of points.
Pick: Kennesaw State +27 (–105). 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. 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 20–29 so far, down 10.72 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 8,078 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.
We’re planning to do our football futures tomorrow, as well as that double batch of election futures. Big day.
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