Am I in a dog daze? The numbers from three different sports all say loud and clear that I'm barking up the right tree! Roll on NBA 2009-10...

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Somewhere in a sneaky sub-clause in the Law of Large Numbers is a rule that says that the effects of an apparent but illusory trend will, if it has no merit, always diminish as the size of a data set expands.

Within a couple of days of accepting my friend Pete's challenge to adapt target betting to sports book wagering, I suggested to him that following tipsters' picks and therefore putting money mostly on favorites might not be the best way to go.

And I also urged him to stop placing bets in blocks, instead relying on multiple lines or linkages that would enable him to set win and recovery targets based on prior outcomes.

Pete chose to ignore my advice, and since he was betting his money, not mine, it was his right to shrug off my dire three-word warning: You. Will. Lose.

Since then, I have analyzed almost 1,500 actual games, mostly from the MLB season just ended but with season-to-date numbers from hockey and pro football making an important contribution.

And my advice to Pete and anyone else who might be more receptive than he is remains the same.

Forget favorites, at least until your bankroll has some serious heft behind it.

And depend on target betting, the most effective method of money management known to betting men, to keep you out of the red.

I have already posted MLB data that shows target betting profiting day after day in spite of the fact that, as we would all expect, underdogs are more likely to lose than favorites.

The method prevails if we bet ALL "dogs" on a given day. But who would want to do that?

Instead, I used a middle-ground selection process to cherry-pick betting options solely from the odds offered at sports books in my Nevada neighborhood.

Final results for games played out before I started all this with Pete at the end of July were available to me, of course, but I did not start keying them into the "databaseball" until I had made all my selections by the numbers.

By season's end on October 4, I had 355 "cherry dogs" (a mixed metaphor that I'll improve on one of these days!) consisting of 172 winners and 183 losers.

The overall win for target betting woulda been $9,120 or 13% of total action of just over $72,000.

Nice, but not such a huge surprise, given that "dogs" almost always return better than even money on a win.

For the record, flat-betting $100 on each of my cherry-picked underdogs would have brought in a profit of $2,770 on bets totaling $35,000, an overall outcome of +7.9%.

I ended up cherry-picking just 153 favorites, and found even that many a chore simply because I could not see the sense in risking a hundred bucks to win less than $100 in return.

I was wrong.

Flat-betting my choices at odds consistently shorter than even money, risking $100 each time, woulda LOST $325 overall in spite of the fact that favorites trounced underdogs more often than the other way around (81 wins vs. 72 losses).

Target betting told a happier tale: +$1,597 from action of $34,732 (+5%). Better than losing, I'd say.

It's early days in the NFL and NHL seasons and the NBA schedule is still a few weeks away, but here's what I have so far.

NFL "cherry dogs" (35 winners out of 61 games) +$2,430/$7,630 = +32%.

NFL "cherry faves" (14 winners out of 18 picks to date) +$720/$2,080 = +35%.

NHL cherry dogs are not doing so well after 40 season-to-date games and are $65 in the hole (-1%) with an outstanding LTD of $910. That sad state will not last for long, I can guarantee...

NHL cherry favorites are doing even worse, with 12 picks down a total of $885 (-49%!). Again, the season is young, and the picture will change to black numbers soon enough.

I owe quite a debt to a punter known to me simply as "Dave," a regular at the sports book at Harrahs Stateline (a pale shadow of its former self since the parent company's feeding frenzy swallowed up neighboring Harveys along with almost every other casino in Nevada!).

Dave pulled out a pen and scribbled a few numbers on the corner of my day's NFL schedule: "Dogs 51.5%, faves 48.5%." I had no idea then what "dogs" were, but Dave quickly put me straight and added, "Favorites will break your heart."

From then on (and this was maybe two days into Pete's sports book project) I weighed the advantages of larger but less frequent wins against a greater number of smaller pay-outs, and have been looking for Dave ever since.

There's a guy who really knows what he's talking about!

I mentioned Dave's doodle to a sports book manager in Carson City, and his response was terse: "That's crap!"

From what I have seen so far, I don't think so.

From a bookies' standpoint, of course, business is best when most punters back the short shots, in spite of the standard industry claim all wagers are welcome.

The other day, a couple of NHL contests were so heavily weighted that it took a $1,200 bet to win $100.

Neither favorite lost, of course (the scores were 44-7 and 33-14).

But they gave the bookies a lot of action for very little risk, and every so often in games like that, Christmas comes in the form of an upset, and Brinks has to send an extra truck to haul the money to the bank!

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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