were you the best student in your college math classes, or just very good? (what i'm trying to get at with this question is: why you? out of the millions of baseball fans who know how to use a calculator, why are you the one who became the king of mlb betting?)

you wrote you don't want anyone to reverse engineer your models. but you have given a lot if info away, and i'm sure someone energetic enough could create similar futures models and beat you to some of these bets. do you ever second guess your decision to be even remotely public about your success and methods?

jholz,

Tell me your thoughts on Vazquez v. Wang.

This thread has been a very fun and informative read. Crockpot, you are the illest!

You seem to bet a decent amount of futures. What are your general thoughts on the time value of money?


Just wondering because as a small time player (~12-15k br) there are usually quite a few profitable season long props and futures available but betting a bunch of them can quickly eat up upwards of 30-40% of my br.

I went through a phase when I just started betting sports where I bet a ton of these props and futures because those were the only bets I was sure I could beat. Now I have drastically reduced the amount of these bets I make in order to have more money to bet on games throughout the season, but I am still struggling to find an optimal balance I guess.

What other baseball bets(player props/derivatives) do you make besides futures/games?

What percentage of your bets are openers? Reactions to lineups coming out?

What other markets do you bet on besides MLB/NFL?

How much does baseball make up your entire profits/amount wagered? What do you do with your bankroll in the baseball off-season?

What is your favorite restaurant on the Strip?

When did everyone on 2p2 start making you out to be the baseball guru? What's the backstory?

How would you characterize your relationship with thremp?

What is single trait that has made you most successful as a sports bettor?

How long do you plan on living in vegas for? What would you consider to be the biggest pros/cons for living there during your 20s?

ty in advance.

i didn't get the highest grades in my math classes, but i was probably the brightest student. i placed in the top 10 nationally in two math competitions (ARML and AMC for you nerds out there) my senior year of high school.

sure, but i think an enterprising person could do this with or without my help. for all the flak i give the BP playoff odds, for example, they're very well-engineered, and i'm sure if clay davenport wanted to use more accurate inputs and beat the futures market, he could do better than me.

look at the playoff odds models out there. most of them have totally unrealistic biases towards a team or two. for example, FO with the ravens, or advanced nfl stats with the dolphins and falcons. there is just no possible way the dolphins win the east 61% of the time, unless you believe the weekly miami money lines are off by a dollar apiece.

it's certainly possible that i only instruct people because it makes me feel like slightly less of a loner degenerate. hey, whatever works.

it's not really worth my time to bet player props for games, but i do make a yearly ritual of picking off the worst season-long player props. most of these come from bodog; it's too bad they have a $100 limit, but i probably win 85% of them that i bet. the biggest risk is that the player fails to play enough games.

i bet 5 inning lines a lot, if those count.

i have no idea on the percentages. if i see a terrible opening line, i bet it. if i'm watching the cardinals game (or someone i know is watching) and albert pujols is carried off the field, i bet against st. louis tomorrow. these are probably standard approaches for smart people.

i usually don't get lineup info fast enough to bet before the market reacts, but i know people who can. it pays to have these connections.

for each sport, i'm willing to look at the divisional odds and season wins lines, and bet when i see an inconsistency. this worked well in the NFL, when i took the titans at 16-1 to win the south. it's not going so hot in the NBA, where all my teams except the hawks are basically toast already.

i'll bet a scalpable line in any sport, but since i don't look at odds screens for sports other than MLB/NFL, it doesn't come up often. when a big event like the olympics comes along, i'll usually look around and pick off some bad lines.

when i have a freeplay bonus, i'll toss it on a parlay of good lines for whatever sport is in season. that seems like a good approach.

it's the vast majority. i broke even last football season thanks to the pats SB collapse and west virginia losing to pitt.

back in the neteller era, each winter i would withdraw whatever i wasn't betting on football and collect interest on it. now this is so expensive and arduous that i'm just leaving a lot of it online, knowing i'll need it next year anyway.

i don't eat on the strip as often as i should. this is the problem with surrounding myself with poor friends to make me look richer by comparison.

so, i've never been to robuchon, alex, picasso, etc., although i definitely want to hit all of them. my favorite restaurants in the LV area are craftsteak, n9ne, rosemary's, and todd's unique dining.

they're overreacting to a hot run i had betting games in early 2007. that's my guess, anyway.

hard to say. if you asked him, he'd probably call me his lackey. i've only seen him twice in my life; putting 1000 miles between you and him is a good way to ensure that.

it certainly seems like he goes out of his way to be like his online persona, but that just makes him more entertaining.

probably that i have the right amount of confidence in my abilities. since i was raised by parents who didn't believe in me, i never went out into the world expecting everything to fall into my lap. however, i've been at this long enough to know a good bet from a bad one. i'd estimate few bettors out there can place the optimal number of bets. i'm not at the optimal level, but i'm close.

i moved here four months ago. it's an okay place, but it seems to be really difficult to meet new people, unless they're women who want to take your money or 2+2ers. still, i do like that it has the amenities of a big city without soul-crushing levels of traffic or road construction like chicago.

also, it seems like the term 'professional gambler' has a more derisive connotation here, since every sports bettor thinks he's a pro. just a heads-up.

they're pitchers of similar quality. if i had to sign one, it would probably depend on whether my infield or outfield defense was better, though i might take vazquez because of his cleaner health record. those who automatically pick vazquez because of his better K/BB ratio aren't seeing the full picture.

that said, i usually bet on vazquez and against wang.

paging thremp

this is highly player-dependent. what else are you going to use the money for? if it would be used to make +ev bets on games, that's entirely different from sitting in a bank account. (or, i suppose, making -ev bets on games.)

i usually won't make a preseason futures bet unless i expect a 25% ROI from it. that number may go down for 2009 since i have more money, but it's a good rule of thumb for beginners. in midseason, my threshold will vary based on my current risk profile, how much time remains, and how much i have left in the games bankroll.

doing the actual math on this would require accurate estimates of your edge on each type of bet, plus your unit sizes, etc. my guess is that putting 25% of your roll into the very best futures you can find is probably an okay balance. for 2008, maybe you could have put 1k on seattle under 86 wins, 1k on tampa over 74, and split another 1k on tampa division, AL, and WS bets. go hindsight bias!

Keep reading these posts from the experienced bettors. That's what did it for me.

I ran a pretty good sized book and we'd lose/break even on baseball. Make OK money on Football, but make a killing in NBA, then NHL, then NCAA Hoops.

Can you adopt me?

nice try, Thremp.

besides, i only have space for two other deadbeat gamblers in my house, and they're both occupied right now.

Haha.

FWIW "Lackeys" are only named by the masses. I do not force titles on my underlings.

On the Vazquez v Wang issue, we've covered this numerous times with me being suffocated under a deluge of information at which point I mumble some words, grunt, then point to a career ERA+ of 105 v 117 and vow to practice better game selection with arguments in the future.

That was as close to thremp admitting he was wrong as we're ever going to see.

Haha. Don't get confused that I think I'm wrong at all. I don't think that Vasquez is better than Wang at all. I think SABR is an epic failure on some issues, but they get the vast majority of it right. Its just too stat reliant and sometimes misses the core issue of scoring runs/stopping people from scoring runs. Using a bastardized ERA+ analysis (I'm lazy), someone who has been as effective as Tom Glavine is not in the same league as Javier Vazquez who been worse than Don Sutton/Tim Wakefield.

three comments:

i forgot to mention what may be my favorite restaurant in LV: thai grill bbq. great food, dirt cheap, and the one-man staff provides some of the best service you'll find in town. the place is constantly empty, so i implore you 2+2ers to keep them in business!

also, when i say i bet on vazquez and against wang, that's obviously a reflection of how the market perceives those two, but you knew that already.

and wtf don sutton as your example of a guy better than vazquez? the guy is (undeservingly) in the hall of fame. you can do a lot better than that.

It was a jopke. As was Tim Wakefield. I just googled the first two names I could think of with an ERA+ in that range (I have searched both before LDO). I'm sure there are better examples of elite K/BB pitchers who have sucked for thousands of innings. Or a compilations of the Miller's of the world who have all sucked for thousands of innings over dozens of short careers.

If you were going to start betting MLB having never placed a bet before, what types of bets would you focus on learning first? (futures, player props, single game lines, etc.) I guess the equivalent in other markets would be wong teasers in NFL or Naj's mechanical home fave system in NCAAB, so probably something easy to understand how it works and offer enough games to regularly bet on.

i would advise against betting single games if you don't want to put the effort into building a decent model. you can probably make a small profit by betting on pitchers who currently have an ERA way higher than it should be based on their peripherals, or fading pitchers whose ERA is way too low. of course, that system advised regularly betting on clay buchholz this year and against jon lester and dice-k...

bodog should have a ton of terrible player prop lines in march, but i don't know if i want to trust them with my money for six months the way they've been doing business lately. you can find slightly worse, but still profitable lines at the hilton if you're in town. sportsbook.com has them too, but they're also not the best place to keep your money online.

in short, your strategy for these props is to bet on regression. for example, i bet on four players to go under their hit total in 2008: bj upton, troy tulowitzki, curtis granderson, and chase utley. it was obvious (to me) that these guys got lucky in 2007, with good health and unrepeatable batting averages. utley came the closest to his line, falling short by 23.5 hits.

if you can find a team whose season wins o/u line is ten wins off from their PECOTA forecast, that's a good bet. usually there are one or two of these.

those over/under lines are the easiest to analyze; you can just compare the line with some trustworthy projections. betting futures lines is more complicated.

The bodog comments are off the mark. People are paid out in <6 hours routinely by them.

In analyzing this are we looking at something like these: Peripheral ERA or DIPS ?

Is it much of a concern that books would have this factor built into their lines already? Or might there only be some books that take this into account, and not others?

yes, and did their checks clear? i would rather wait a month than deal with that hassle.

how financially solvent can a company really be when they have to split a 9k cashout into three separate checks? and why are they adding a random number of cents to each check? that's not normal. also, their SBR rating has dropped.

that's all i've got, but it's four reasons i'd rather put my money elsewhere.

the books don't really determine the odds, the betting public does. if a book opens the red sox as a -130 favorite but the market thinks they should be -170, the line will move quickly.

there are several good peripheral ERA measurements. you want one that will take batted ball data into account, like DIPS 2.0 or tRA.

You're very out of touch. They don't receive checks. They instantly process Neteller withdrawals... well virtually instantly.

We know that SBR ratings are the be all and end all of financial solvency. It was also discussed that they have not addressed slow check processing issues (because they're larger than everyone?) and were duly nixed on their rating. Is it because of their financial solvency? Clearly not.

The second part of this is you talking out of your ass and not knowing anything about the situation. Do you think Bodog processes any checks? Let me help. No, they don't. They hire a third party to do this. Adding random cents is a good idea that I have not seen on any of the checks I've received, but would be a brilliant idea to help escape going to jail and having your business shut down.

Its legitimate to not play there because they don't pay you quickly. But WSEX is just as much of a slow pay threat and an equal financial solvency risk. They also have far fewer customers than bodog, but have the same troubles as Bodog. Though you don't spend time railing on pulling money out of WSEX.

Your statements are both slightly false and irresponsible.

i've been playing around with physical fatigue in betting different sports, including baseball

do you think it's a big factor if a team is on an extended road trip and has to travel greatly from one city to the next to play a team that is on an extended home stand?