nice location, you highfivinmotherfer

Pack up the Cats is a goot album

I've been subscribed to your baseball/gambling blog since the beginning of 2007, and generally regard you as one of the sharpest single sport bettors actively posting on the Internet.

1) Did you backtest (cross-validate or whatever) your model against historic data?

2) How much time do you spend being a fan of baseball (game watching, news reading, etc.)?

3) Looking long term, do you feel like you're actually contributing anything positive to society? I could see the response to this question being very flippant, but hopefully you'll come up with a thoughtful answer.

Thanks for taking the time to do this.

it's no As Good As Dead.

no. i probably should have, but it would have been really difficult.

it varies. at the start of the season, i devour everything. by september, i'm usually ready to pack it up. six months of 15 games a day really wears on you.

not especially. does the world want me to contribute positively? if so, they probably shouldn't have rejected me at every job interview i went to. (i hope that doesn't sound flippant, but i did make an effort to work for the man, and it wasn't very well-received.)

i do hope that my writings can at least entertain people, and back in early '07 when i had more confidence in my baseball acumen, i felt good about helping my readers make some extra spending money.

i think about this subject from time to time, but i also try to stay positive about my life and it doesn't help to dwell on how nebulous my accomplishments are in the grand scheme of things.

ahhhh.... Crockpot knows music as well
As Good As Dead is much, much better than Pack Up the Cats

As Good As Dead is one of the best albums every made. Frankly, I have loved Local H for quite some time but never believed it was one of the great bands precisely because every album except As Good As Dead only had 2 or so good songs. However, this year, 12 years into the band, they released their second great album, Twelve Angry Months. If you have not listened to it and like Local H, I highly recommend downloading it or whatever. You will not be disappointed. I now put Local H among my favorite artists of all-time.

Then again, this year has been a reliving of my favorite mid/late 90s bands. I've seen Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, and Local H twice this year. Local H played a crummy sports bar in a strip mall just down the street from me about 11 days ago. It was sweet.

check out The One with "Kid" on Local H's myspace

your last response makes me wonder,
do you enjoy the game of baseball more or less now that you bet so much on it Crockpot?

I like As Good As Dead also, but Pack Up the Cats is the better album, imho.......it is much more balanced and as an entire album listens much better, I think As Good As Dead has some great songs, but it also has some clunkers too.........I used to go and see the H a lot here in Chicago back in the day, the Vic, Double Door, etc...........always a fun live band. Glad to see some other people love Local H too.......

Oh, I do have a question, what advice would you give a complete novice, someone who reads the forums, but doesn't bet sports (I dabble in the poker and fantasy sports, in which I use PECOTA to win many beisbol leegs)..........I am a low limit winning player in both, but I am looking to add more +EV activities.............mind you, I have a good job, so I just do this sort of stuff as a hobby to make a little money.

overall, less. sweating games can be a real headache, and i haven't yet evolved to the point where i can watch a game i didn't bet on in preference to one i did. i've found the best strategy is to go out for the night and check scores later.

also, somebody should have warned me about the concept of in-game win probability. this was a fun angle back when books still had decent limits on soft live lines. now i can't watch a game without re-computing the team's chances of winning after every play. this definitely magnifies the size of bad beats in my head.

at the beginning of the season, though, i do enjoy it more because i've put so much prep work into handicapping, so i look forward to finally seeing some results. or maybe i'm just biased because i've done really well the first week of the season for the past few years?

i don't think you're going to win enough money betting sports to compensate for the time it will cost you unless:

- you enjoy it enough to gain non-monetary utility from it
- you want to invest a lot of time to become a solid winner

that said, i'd say the easiest way to compare PECOTA's projections to betting lines is just to bet a few season wins over/unders if the PECOTA projection is off by ten games or so. if you can afford to tie your money up for six months, this is almost never -EV.

if you can identify a really underrated team like this year's rays, you could also bet on them each game until the market corrects on them. however, this is trickier, because it's hard to compare lines across games, so you won't really know when other bettors have cottoned on. if kazmir is -150 at home against baltimore, does that really mean anything compared to sonnanstine +135 at the yankees?

u increased lots of ppls bankrolls by 10-20% during mlb playoffs alone.

J HOLZ CORP. "Invest with confidence." (music playing in the backround with some whack sports analogy by monotone announcer)

Sorry for being an ignoramus, but where can I find a link to your blog?

Also, what are some good places to start if I'm interested in baseball from a quant perspective?

something tells me this ad campaign would have been a lot more effective six months ago.

www.resultsdisoriented.com

www.baseballplayoffodds.com

are you interested specifically in gambling or just in analyzing the game from a stathead perspective? if a), michael murray's Betting Baseball is just okay, but it's probably the first book i'd buy on the subject. if b), try Baseball Between The Numbers if you don't like heavy math, The Book (by Tango and Lichtman) if you do.

RD is the only blog that I regularly read. Keep the amusing analysis coming, Jamie!

Also appreciated the frequent updates on the playoff odds page even though it convinced me that betting on the NYMs was a good idea again and again.

i'm sure NFL followers weren't too pleased with the week 16 results either; basically every game except miami/kc went the wrong way. oh well.

Meh, if none of us ever lost a good bet we'd never be seen posting at 2p2, but instead be chillin' at our beachfront villas, dining on sushi and steak and lobster, and spending our nights doing a model*.




* Not that kind of model, the other kind.

bump

Well done kind sir

Great reading through this, especially getting a kick out of the above. How the times have changed.

have you changed your stance on this at all? or do you just like fallopian tubes anyway?

If that's still your dream, then your success on Jeopardy may very well land you one of those jobs, and I hope it does

wait...that guy crushing jeopardy is crockpot??

welcome to April!

Crockpot, you got out of poker at the near perfect time. I continued to stick around for another decade and it has gotten more and more difficult. While I still profit, it gets tougher and tougher. I wish I had those mathematical skills you have to apply to sports betting. Though, just keep up this Jeopardy run for another few months and you will be set for life and never need to place a bet again, LOL!!

James Holzhauer Was Told to Smile to Get on ‘Jeopardy!’ He’s Smiling Now