Odds and Ends: Week 15

A good sports betting column should be backed by a profitable gambler with a proven track record. It should offer picks generated by a sophisticated and conceptually sound model. Most importantly, it should treat the subject with the seriousness it warrants.

This is not that column.

Instead, this will be an off-beat look at the sports betting industry-- why Vegas keeps winning, why gambling advice is almost certainly not worth the money, and the structural reasons why even if a bettor were profitable, anything they wrote would be unlikely to make their readers net profitable, too.

While we're at it, we'll discuss ways to minimize Vegas' edge and make recreational betting more fun, explain how to gain an advantage in your office pick pools, preview games through an offbeat lens (with picks guaranteed to be no worse than chance), and tackle various other Odds and Ends along the way.

Tracking the Unders

In 2022 and 2023, mass-betting the unders was incredibly profitable over the first 6 weeks and essentially just broke even after that. I hypothesized this year that maybe all we needed to do to make a killing was to start our "mass-bet the unders" strategy earlier in the season.

In Week 14, unders finished in the black for the first time in four weeks. Technically. Based on the lines I posted last Thursday, they went 7-6, which (if you got all action at -110) would result in a 2.8% profit. At $10 per game, that's a gain of $3.64.

Despite that windfall, anyone who bet $10 on every under since we started would be down $200 even. Anyone who started with $160 and snowballed all wins and losses would instead by down $143.96.

Closing Out Your Picks Pool

There are only four weeks left in the season, which means (unless your pool goes through the playoffs) there's less than a month to go before scores are final and winners are settled in your office pick pools. I've discussed a couple of times throughout the year what rules you should be following to maximize the points you're scoring-- set your picks early, leverage any movement after the lines lock, and make as many office-contrarian picks as possible.

We've now reached the part of the season where you can forget about all of that.

Why? Because the point of the game isn't "getting correct picks". You might think so, but you'd be wrong. The point of the game is getting more correct picks than your competition. And sometimes, the best way to maximize your chances of doing that is to make suboptimal picks.

Let's say you've picked 50% of games correctly so far, while the leader in your pool has picked 54%. There have been 208 games played to this point, so that would translate to 104 wins for you and 112 for your top opponent, a +8 advantage.

There are only 64 games left to pick, so if your opponent gets 50% right the rest of the way, in order to make up that +8 advantage, you'd need to get a whopping 62.5% of your picks right. In order to pass them entirely, you'd need to hit 64.1%. That's... well, it's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. And this is if they merely hit 50% down the stretch.

So what can you do? If first place is out of reach and your pool gives cash prizes for second or third, you can focus on trying to finish there instead. If you're within easy striking range-- say within a win or three-- then it's probably best to keep making fundamentally sound picks, such as focusing on selecting teams receiving favorable line movement late in the week.

But if that's not an option, rather than trying to pick 65% of your games right, it's probably best to recognize that if your opponent picks 50% correctly going forward, you simply can't catch up. Recognizing that, you must operate under the assumption that your opponent will pick worse than 50% and set yourself up to capitalize. (Because if they don't, it doesn't matter anyway.)

If your opponent picks 42% over the final three weeks and you manage to pick the opposite team in every single game (meaning, by definition, you finish at 58%), that translates to a +10 edge for you and a win. And since everyone trends toward 50% in the long run, "opponent picks 42%" is a much more realistic possibility than "you pick 64%". (It's an 8% deviation from expected, rather than a 14% deviation.)

This should illustrate the clearest path to victory. If you're down by a lot, all of your efforts should be devoted to figuring out who the leader is picking and going with the opposite in all cases, no matter how you personally feel.

On the other side, if you're up by a lot, this whole logic gets flipped on its head. The only way anyone can catch up to you is if they differentiate their picks from yours, so the easiest path to victory is to ensure that you're making the same picks and just let your early lead coast across the finish line.

Lines I'm Seeing