One day, you're up, and the next, you're down. Darn it, this is almost like gambling. The good news is that we're still ahead...

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Friday's six winners out of seven prompted a short-lived celebration!

Saturday, the best I could manage was two right picks, and neither of them applied to a maximum bet.

Result, a loss of $1,440, blowing away Friday's profits and then some.

Investment strategies are by their nature long-term (hit-and-run day trading does not usually qualify!), but it would have been nice to see a second winning day in succession before the tide turned.

Never mind: There's still $1,400 left in the kitty before we start digging into the start-up bankroll again.

I don't usually exercise control on picks outside of the +100 to +180 range qualification and the demands of chronology, but today I chose to ignore games starting before noon in Nevada.

There's just too much happening on Sundays to bet across the board, and for now I'm sticking with the seven-pick limit while continuing to record what woulda happened if I had backed every qualifying candidate.

I can't pretend I don't get nervous in a downturn, and I need to get over that.

Modeling the underdog strategy against thousands of archived outcomes indicates frequent slumps, some of them serious and all of them turned around in time.

The reverse is true for betting favorites all the way. Those lousy returns take ever-bigger bites out of the profit line as time goes by, causing red ink to run deeper the more faith you place in "sure things."

I have no doubt that Saturday's bad news will be forgotten soon enough as underdogs deliver the returns predicted for them.

Monday, November 30, 11:25am:

"Soon enough" did not come yesterday!

Sunday was another dismal day for dogs, dragging the win to date all the way down to $393, with unrecovered LTDs hitting an all-time high of $5,465.

I am hoping the chorus of I-told-you-so's from died in the wool dognostics will stay muted for a few more days, but things probably won't turn out that way.

Underdogs won just one game out of 12 NFL collisions, three in 10 NBA hooplas, and two out of two hockey games, and a 25% DWR can only mean bad news for an all-dogs strategy.

As in a casino, the best betting method known to humankind won't make money if you lose three hands out of four!

The question now is how deep do we have to dig before the inevitable turnaround occurs?

There's never a whole lot to choose from on a Monday, but at least this week I was able to collect seven dog picks without straying into college basketball again.

So today, we are looking at the NFL's New England Pats at +105, four NHL teams, St. Louis (+110), Carolina (+170), the Florida Panthers (+165) and the Toronto Maple Leafs (+105), and two NBA games, Chicago Bulls (+125) and the Indiana Pacers (+115).

As always, bet distribution is detailed in the Google Docs file (e-mail me for the URL).

One interesting factoid from the databases is that with the current NFL season winding down and last season on file, pro-football is far from the dog-friendly sport that my Harrahs mentor suggested.

Last year, underdogs won less than 40% of all NFL games, and so far this season, the DWR is about the same.

Disappointing, but true.

The DWR for the 7-dog trial stands at 42% right now, so the shrinking win to date comes as no surprise.

The numbers will prevail and enable us to recover those dangling LTDs and show a substantial profit.

I just don't know when!

Before today's bets fly out of my wallet, we are at +1.1% of action to date.

Better news this time tomorrow, I hope.

Meanwhile, here's a screenshot of how things would look today if it had been possible to place bets from November 1 through 29 consecutively:


This summary is not as irrelevant as you might at first think!

Multi-line betting is an inevitable reality which greatly delays recovery of the LTD for each series.

But what the above charts show us is that even in an optimum betting situation, slumps or setbacks are unavoidable.

What matters is that even with a DWR well under 45%, recoveries are just as inevitable as downturns.

That's good news at a time when we really need it.

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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