Blindly betting home favorites in interleague games that is +74
units dating back to the beginning of 8 full seasons ago.. And it has
started out strong in 2008 as well [22-12, +6.5 units]. When you
consider home teams have been doing quite well this season, the
interleague home team should as well. In fact, AL interleague home teams
fare even better than the NL versions... In large part due to the fact
that the DH getting to bat for an AL team is far superior than the
"best" designated hitter any NL team can put out there. The AL lives
and dies by the DH.
The betting systems
on my website have gone a combined +53 units this season... just follow
them for free everyday and you get to learn a lot. I've been working on
this website for 4 years.
Far too much emphasis is placed on how a team performs at home or on
the road as compared to how pitchers perform in these situations. Some
pitchers simply cannot win on the road and are thus strong fade bets.
But others are so overvalued at home that they are a fade bet at home.
On my website EasyBaseballBetting.com, I have been tracking this very dynamic on a page called "Pitching Disparity Home and Road"...
I list those pitchers that have a net disparity of more than 6 units
between how they do at home and how they do on the road. I also make
sure that the magnitudes of their home and road performances are
opposite. i.e. one is positive and the other is negative. Doing the
magnitude checks keeps me from claiming that a pitcher that is +7 units
at home and +0.5 units deserves to be faded at all.
Our goal is to find cases to bet against a pitcher that the average betting public may not have caught onto yet.
Keep in mind that when we talk about records here, we are not
talking about pitcher decisions but rather how many wins and losses a
team has with this specific pitcher on the mound.
The pitcher with the largest disparity is Jurrjens.. he is 7-0 +7.14 units at home but is -6.04 units on the road with a 1-6 record :-O. After that is Dempster of the Cubs...
He is [9-0, +9 units] at home but -1.29 units on the road. But not all
pitchers are so much better at home than they are on the road. For
example, Zito is 0-6 at home but is 3-4 on the road.
We love to see how teams fare after being shutout because it is a
phenomenon in baseball that always produces drastic results within a
given season. This is what I mean:
- 2007: +15 units
- 2006: -15 units
- 2005: +27 units
- 2004: -6 units
- 2003: +10 units
- 2002: -18 units
- 2001: +26 units
- 2000: +16 units
- 1999: -23 units
Thus far in 2008, it is 5-8, -4 units.
As you can see, there appears to be a definite trend in that if it
is good in a season, it is really good. And if it is bad in a season,
it is really bad. Of course this could all be within a statistical
margin of error in some way but what seems clear to me is that the
system most handicappers loved last year of betting on teams off being
shutout does not always work and one such team today that we feel is
totally being overvalued is the Seattle Mariners.
And to test that hypothesis, we looked at how those teams fared
against road divisional rival dogs (like the Angels), well we found
that teams in the Angels position were undervalued by about 14 points
on the spread.
What accounts for this 14 points shift you may ask?
- Bettors incorrectly gauging that being shut out in their last game is an advantage.
- Bettors incorrectly pouring money on the home team per default.
- Bettors betting heavier on the favorite with no real underlying reason.
We were asked recently how it is that we estimate a team's true
odds. There are a couple of strategies to do this and we try to employ
them all...
The first strategy is to use the oddsmakers' odds as a baseline and
move it according to the angles and systems currently at play in a
game. Now this is a very strong and effective way to estimate the odds
IF you trust the sportsbooks. For the most part, the sportsbooks tend
to be dead on balls accurate with about 20 of the teams in any given
season... Meaning that we look at the moneyline records standings
and exclude the top 5 teams and bottom 5 teams because we feel the
sportsbooks are doing a horrible job at predicting those teams' odds
anyways.
So with the negation of that set, we are left with about 20 teams of
whom we can somewhat trust the odds... Then it allows us to narrow down
the research to momentum, etc as those issues are more relevant to
where a team should be placed.
But no matter what, that is still a limitation... It puts too much emphasis on the betting systems
themselves.. All the sportsbook has to do is screw the odds against you
when your systems come up and you are left out to dry because the
premise of your methodology was to believe they were honest in the
first place. That is why far too many handicappers lose when they bet
on football and basketball.
We employ that methodology but with caveats and we are weary of
fishy odds when they seem to not coincide with how we usually bet.
The second methodology is to use an average margin of victory to
odds conversion. A team's odds are defined as their probability of
winning... And there is a correlation to how likely a team is to win
with what average their average margin of victory is... We proved this
a couple of years ago in an article where we looked at teams wtih
varying odds and conditioned on them to win and to lose, and found that
no matter their odds, winners won at the same average margin of
victory, etc... So this suggests that if you took the average -240 and
+175 teams and looked at only the winners, they'd have the same avg
MOV.
The reason we believe the -240 teams are much better and know they
have an overall higher MOV is because they win at a higher percentage.
So all we've got to do is estimate the MOV and convert that to the odds.
And to estimate the MOV, we look at various factors affecting a team
like.. whether they had to travel, whether they are facing a lefty or a
righty, whether they are coming off a double digit victory or a shutout
loss, whether they are at home/road, whether they are facing a
dvisional rival or not, etc.. We look at the betting systems involved, as well as a slew of angles each team falls under. (example look at our Yankees page).
Now we understand there's a lot of unknowns that go into all of this
predicting but that is exactly what betting is.. It is all just a
matter of estimation and doing your best guess.. You have to start off
with a whole lot of initials that may or may not be correct but we
tweak that process and improve it as the season progresses. Last
season, our system plays were at +0 units at around the all star break
but ended up to about +30 units by the end of the year. Ideally, we'd
like to tweak our initial values such that we get better at estimating
a team's probability of winning.
By looking at margin of victory, it allows us to take a game and
convert it into one unknown variable with a probability density
function centered about the value we pick. That is why we tend to avoid
over/unders because we have to treat each team's scores as an unknown
variable and have two independent unknown variables.. And it is much
tougher to look at 2 unknown vars as it is to look at 1.
I have a Masters degree from UCLA with a concentration in estimation theory so I am very familiar with all of this.
We think highly of the handicapping service we offer but do not
think everybody should sign up. In fact, we offer a lot of free goodies
on our website that you can do all of this yourself. Most handicappers
spend half their time with marketing, gimmicks, and high pressure sales
tactics to get customers and make money. That is because their service
is fluff.. The service we offer is $100 a month and you can sign up by following any of the Subscribe links on our website.
These are the betting trends with respect to the Atlanta Braves thus far in the baseball season. It is June 11, 2008 that I am posting this. This is continually going to be updated on the Atlanta Braves handicapping page.
| Angle |
W |
L |
Units |
E[x] |
| 1st Half of Season | 32 | 33 | -7.51 | -11.6 |
| National League | 30 | 32 | -8.11 | -13.1 |
| American League | 2 | 1 | 0.60 | 20.0 |
| Divsional Rival | 16 | 16 | -3.69 | -11.5 |
| Non-Divsional Rival | 14 | 16 | -4.42 | -14.7 |
| Interleague Game | 2 | 1 | 0.60 | 20.0 |
| As a dog | 7 | 9 | -0.61 | -3.8 |
| As a favorite | 25 | 24 | -6.90 | -14.1 |
| Off a win | 17 | 15 | -1.04 | -3.2 |
| Off a loss | 15 | 17 | -4.87 | -15.2 |
| Off being shut out | 3 | 2 | 0.13 | 2.6 |
| Off scoring DD | 4 | 2 | 1.92 | 32.0 |
| Series Game 1 | 10 | 12 | -3.91 | -17.8 |
| Series Game 2 | 11 | 10 | -0.91 | -4.3 |
| Series Game 3 | 7 | 10 | -5.34 | -31.4 |
| Series Game 4 | 4 | 0 | 4.25 | 106.3 |
| At Home | 25 | 11 | 10.25 | 28.5 |
| On the Road | 7 | 22 | -17.76 | -61.2 |
| Off LL | 8 | 9 | -3.14 | -18.5 |
| Off WW | 10 | 7 | 1.18 | 6.9 |
| 5+ WL10 | 16 | 20 | -7.65 | -21.3 |
| 7+ WL10 | 3 | 8 | -6.90 | -62.7 |
| <=3 WL10 | 5 | 6 | -1.57 | -14.3 |
| <=5 WL10 | 21 | 17 | 0.54 | 1.4 |
| Against team off SO | 2 | 1 | 0.69 | 23.0 |
| Vs. team off DD runs | 4 | 0 | 4.11 | 102.8 |
| Vs. team off W (G1) | 3 | 5 | -2.61 | -32.6 |
| Vs. team off L (G1) | 7 | 6 | 0.14 | 1.1 |
| Off W (G1) | 5 | 7 | -2.90 | -24.2 |
| Off L (G1) | 5 | 5 | -1.01 | -10.1 |
| 1st Home Series | 12 | 4 | 6.47 | 40.4 |
| 2nd Home Series | 10 | 4 | 4.53 | 32.4 |
| 3rd Home Series | 3 | 3 | -0.75 | -12.5 |
| 1st Road Series | 3 | 11 | -8.93 | -63.8 |
| 2nd Road Series | 3 | 8 | -5.67 | -51.5 |
| 3rd Road Series | 1 | 2 | -1.56 | -52.0 |
| L-->L | 5 | 6 | -4.28 | -38.9 |
| R-->R | 13 | 12 | 0.16 | 0.6 |
| L-->R | 7 | 7 | -1.22 | -8.7 |
| R-->L | 7 | 7 | -0.57 | -4.1 |
| Diff. Orientation | 14 | 14 | -1.79 | -6.4 |
| opTeam Diff. Orientation | 20 | 18 | -0.43 | -1.1 |