The Yankees came through for us last night, keeping these bets on the internet at least a little longer. We’re back for more in our World Series wrestling match with the markets, and we’ve got some Wednesday night Conference USA football to go with it.
World Series Game 5
We’re doing the same strategy as last night, which is to bet on the Yankees to extend the series in the hopes of giving ourselves better leverage down the line. We are not, however, putting anywhere near as many units on this as we did last night. Last night was about avoiding total disaster. Tonight is about trying to at least get our floor up to its normal historical bounds.
Our worst futures portfolio ever was a 40% loss. It was a college basketball portfolio. That’s benchmark is our target tonight. If the Yankees win this game, we’ll be lined up to either make a 45% profit or take on a 40% loss on our original 750 units, pending future bets. If the Yankees lose this game, well, it’s a 52% loss. Very, very bad, but thankfully not as bad as the 90% loss we were going to suffer if they lost Game 4.
To be clear: This isn’t a bet we think is valuable in and of itself. We don’t see value on either side in this game. ZiPS points towards the Dodgers a little bit at current prices, but I’m suspicious of the notion that Shohei Ohtani is 100%. He didn’t look comfortable last night, and he wasn’t running. With that value looking so narrow, I think this is a fairly efficient market. In some sense, then, this is a hedge. It’s purely portfolio mechanization, and not a bet intended to generate value.
Our new scenarios, given what we’ve bet, won, and lost so far:
| Series Winner | Final Portfolio Net | ROI |
| Yankees | 339.34 | 45% |
| Dodgers in 6 or 7 | -299.88 | -40% |
| Dodgers in 5 | -388.18 | -52% |
84 units on this game. Just trying to raise our floor here.
Pick: New York (AL) to win –142. Medium confidence. x42
Jacksonville State @ Liberty
In much smaller stakes:
We like Movelor’s read on this one. Movelor has the Gamecocks favored by 0.4. FPI has them favored by 1.9 if you assign three points for home-field advantage. SP+ has them an 8.6-point underdog. With FPI and SP+ comparably accurate, the line here is reasonable at a glance, but SP+ is the outlier on Liberty, and outliers deserve some scrutiny. What’s driving this?
Again, it’s Liberty more than Jacksonville State. Bill Connelly pointed out this week that using a weighted average of each team’s last five games, JSU’s been outperforming SP+’s projections more than any other team in the country, but it only has the Gamecocks 13 spots lower in the FBS than Movelor does, with FPI in the middle. SP+ has Liberty 28 spots higher than FPI does, and 16 spots higher than Movelor. Maybe SP+ is slow to catch up to Jacksonville State, but we don’t think it is. We think Connelly has that thing calibrated properly and Jacksonville State just really improved its play these last few games.
Why does SP+ like Liberty?
It’s impossible to know for sure. Connelly does great work, but ESPN—his employer—isn’t very transparent these days with how its rating systems work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and we definitely trust SP+. It’s more accurate than Movelor. But we haven’t gotten an update on how SP+ works in a long, long time. Our impression is that its respect for the Flames has to do with Liberty’s very high success rate, since success rate is where the S comes from in SP+, and since Liberty does have a good success rate on both sides of the ball. The issue is that when a team has played a small number of games against possibly the weakest schedule in the country, it’s easy to see how adjustments for opponent strength could wind up underdone.
Liberty has played only six games, and Liberty’s played only two games in the last five weeks. Liberty’s toughest opponent probably remains East Carolina, who’s on track to finish .500 overall without playing any power conference teams. Jacksonville State’s only played three games in the last five weeks, so it’s not like systems should have a great read on JSU, but we at least have Louisville and CCU as September Jax State benchmarks, and three games is a 50% larger sample than two games. All three of SP+, FPI, and Movelor should have an easier time grading JSU than they do grading Liberty. Given SP+ is the outlier on Liberty, and given Liberty’s dropped a good amount in Movelor since the start of the year (JSU’s right around where it started, though it’s taken a weird path to get there), we’re ok tossing SP+ out on this one.
Why don’t we think the market is catching this, if the market is more accurate than all three of these systems? Our theory—and there are only two games tonight, so this is not necessarily all that strong a theory—is that there’s an undercurrent of trust in Liberty in the betting markets, a thought that Jamey Chadwell’s a good coach and these are good players and Liberty will bounce back in front of their loyal home fans. We think that’s overstated. Jacksonville State’s been rolling Conference USA competition. Liberty’s the best Conference USA team they’ve played, but Liberty hasn’t impressed against the same sort of opposition Rich Rodriguez has routed.
Pick: Jacksonville State +2.5 (–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 lose 52% of this year’s portfolio.
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 26–32–1 so far, down 8.32 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we don’t always follow its lead.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,205 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is –1%, per unit. On 2,642 medium and high-confidence bets, it’s +4%. Obviously, this is bad, and it’s worse when you consider that this already incorporates a lot of gains from this year’s MLB futures. Our remaining picture there is worse than our overall picture. As we’ve been saying, our plan is to load up on election bets to get back to even all-time when all election markets have been settled. It isn’t pretty, but we value transparency. We would not follow our own bets right now on anything but elections, and we don’t recommend anybody follow our bets at all, because this is for entertainment and is not investment advice.
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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.
