I hope this is the right forum -

I am in a Pick'Em league where we pick NFL winners using the spread with 27 other people. It pays out 5 people. I am currently in 1st place by 2 picks after two weeks (not including tonight's game) I offered my friend a bet saying I will finish in the money of this league and surprisingly he said I would have to give him odds for that because I'm in first place. I pointed out theirs like 250 games left to be played and that I'm in first by 2. He said maybe he would have done it preseason, which I think is fair, however I think he's way overestimating the advantage I have.

Facts about the league - None of the 28 are winning sports betters. This pool also involves wives and kids who have close to zero interest in football, so if we want to call them dead money, I understand that. Other than that I say I have zero advantage over the field. I am not a winning sports better and it's not even close. Last year I finished in the money (3rd) but I missed one week and only lost by 4 points. I never had a week where I got less than six, so to be fair I probably would have won last year. My buddy said my skill comes from a lot of people being complete guessers and I actually take time to think about these things. I'm not trying to hide any info here but I'll share any more info to questions posed in this thread.

In short, who should get what odds here? I'm hoping their is an equation someone much smarter than me can figure out telling me my chances to -

- Finish 5th or better based on my current lead of 2 points.

- What the odds would be if I say I'm going to win the thing.

- Finally, what would be good odds if I would have made the above bets prior to the start of the competition.

Thanks in advance.

Since none of you are long-term winners ATS, each game is roughly 50/50 for all of you. Since this is ATS, the people who barely follow football are barely at a disadvantage. In fact, they might be better off than some of the real fans because fans can be trapped by the sucker bets and might pick below .500 as a result.

One thing that could give someone a real edge is taking advantage of line movement after the pool's lines are already set. When are the pools printed, and when do you submit your picks?

I think to get a good answer to this, we need to know the complete standings, not just your distance from the 2nd place person. For instance, as an extreme example, if the 2nd place person is +10 ahead of 3rd place, clearly your odds are better than if all 27 villains are tied for 2nd.

Before any calcs or sims, I have a pretty strong hunch that you're correct, your +2 advantage is miniscule. If every person is 1/28 to win and 5/28 to place, then my guess is you're still very close to 5/28 and therefore you should be the one getting odds.

I'll try the calcs tonight or tomorrow, at least for the 3rd problem since the info is more complete for that.

Thank you for your answer, being personally not very good at math past a pretty basic level I found this very easy to read.

I will try to answer all your questions, though I think some of them may have just been hypocritical and you don't plan on answering them (which is of course fine).

When are the pools printed/when do I submit?

They pools are available either late Monday night or pretty early Tuesday. I personally wait until Thursday to generally pick because the first game of the week reminds me and not because I'm waiting for a line to settle, or anything to try to gain an advantage over the others.

Complete Standings -

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Thanks

Assuming bolded was supposed to say "hypothetical" or "rhetorical" but nah they were real questions because the info is needed for the calculation.

Ok that answers my question, plus come to think of it, most of the line movement happens after that anyway. Maybe occasionally you'll be undecided on a pick and take the side with the favorable half-point movement, but I'll assume you have no advantage.
Cool so I'll get to the problem when I can. Maybe between commercials tonight while my eagles are getting manhandled by the colts.

LOL, even when I wrote that word I made a mental note to go back and check it. Hypothetical was the word I was looking for, haha. So I'm not good at math or English. Cool.

And I took Philly tonight -3 in the pick'em and being that I'm in first place, then I think you're team will be good.

Kidding, of course.

Thanks for going out of your way to do this.

Hope you mean +3.

Colts-3 is my favorite bet of the week. My next 4 favorites were Arizona+1, Chiefs+13, Chargers+5, and a 3-team teaser {Packers-2, Ariz+7, Ari/nyg Under 50}, so if I were you I'd be nervous :P But GL. Hey could be a chop. If I lose at least my team wins.

Going out for a bit.

Of course I mean that. Since I can't talk today I'm going to go ahead and stop saying things for now.

Oy.

Good luck with your bet.

Yuck. I was freerolling, then the refs cause an INT and then call a nonexistent horse collar. Oh well can't win em all, and in the regular season I'd rather the Eagles be lucky than good!

This problem is multinomial, but the fact that there are 28 of you makes it too vast. For each individual game, there are 2^28 possible outcomes: half the time you win and therefore beat/tie each villain (2^27), half the time you lose and lose/tie with them, so 2(2^27) = 2^28. The identity of the villains matters because there's a difference between the 6th place person closing the distance on you as opposed to the last place player.

Furthermore, we can't just take your probability vs 1 villain and extrapolate to all other villains, because the probabilities are not independent. Maybe there's a nice way to compute the conditional probabilities, but I don't know it. If we could determine those, I think it would allow for a big shortcut to solving the problem.

Fortunately, I think it will be easy to write a monte carlo for this. I'll do that in R some time today.