Editor’s Note: Since November 2018, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been mixed, with an average return on investment, per pick, of -1.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 4,375 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.9% across 1,602 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us).
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. For futures bets (in both sports and politics) and motorsports bets, odds are taken from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline as our best approximation of the Vegas consensus, which isn’t currently/accurately available online. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer futures picks. ESPN’s FPI is heavily used in making NFL futures picks.
Our World Cup future of the night, before tomorrow’s matches:
2022 World Cup
A note on these: We put 50 units into our portfolio on Sunday before this started, and for now we’re just posting one future a day, one affected by the upcoming day’s action or made advantageous by the preceding day’s action.
As for the pick itself, well, it’s a reach. We know it’s a reach. We’re targeting the three-digit underdog range on these, meaning we don’t want to dip below ten percent probability (because of the relatively small sample size our bets will compose) but we recognize that the value is available on underdogs, not favorites. This was the theme with our previous two picks—Ecuador to the quarterfinals, Iran to the knockout stage—as well. We only need to hit one out of each handful of these, and they can provide strong hedging leverage (even if Ecuador does play England in the Round of 16, they’re unlikely to be a 5-to-1 underdog). So, we press on.
Pick: Saudi Arabia to advance to knockout stage +600. Low confidence.
