Thursday, January 14, 2010

If you take anything too much for granted, try doing without it for a while! Five right picks help me celebrate my return to high speed Wi-Fi!

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The timing for yesterday's burst of dog wins could hardly have been better.

Charter eventually made it, four hours late, and it was pitch black outside when the 'Net finally exploded into life on my new laptop.

Seven underdog wins in 15 games might not sound like a lot, but having five of them on my picks list made it a welcome day indeed.

I'm happy that the 7-dog trial is starting to look healthy again, because the sports funds I have been checking out all show green lines climbing steadily skyward with barely a blip along the way.

On my to-do list is applying the very simple strategy from the sports fund to archived samples of outcomes from my "dog" project.

The funds mostly bet favorites, then spreads and totals rather than moneyline wagers, and my research does not endorse that approach.

But it's unwise to argue with success, and I have always conceded that from time to time, I'm wrong.

Payback for those bets is rarely higher than 90 cents on the dollar and often falls far short of even that skimpy percentage. On the other hand, losing streaks do not usually last long, making the funds' reliance on a Martingale a lot less dangerous than it might appear.

All three of the funds I have analyzed claim returns that double an original investment of $2,500 in just over a year.

Gamblers expect far more, but people who are not suicidal morons see real value in a rate of return that is at least 20 times better than anything banks are offering.

There is risk, for sure (the FDIC does not stand behind sports funds), but according to the numbers I have crunched, it is acceptable.

So...back to the 7-dog trial.

Here are current numbers, with today's picks shown at the bottom of the screen snap below:-


As promised, I am sticking with the tight 1-5 spread applied when the 7-dog test began on November 1, but continuing to run a concurrent summary that permits a max that is 50x the min.

The sports funds on my radar start with a $32.50 bet (an interesting number!) and after a loss, keep redoubling until a win, averaging out at a max that is around 64x the minimum.


The sports funds each claim a win rate equal to about 8.0% of total action, which is not half bad.

Target betting against dog picks can do better - but first we need to recover from the slump that began right after the holidays!

Friday, January 15 at 12:20pm:

The evolution of the master spreadsheet file for the ongoing 7-dog test is mainly aimed at catching my mistakes.

I would like to avoid errors altogether, but since that's not likely to be possible, I keep trying to find new ways to catch them before any harm is done.

Today I found out that the screen shots posted yesterday immortalized a mistyping of the Houston Rockets game on January 12. The error has been corrected in the screen snaps below.

No harm was done, because the game was correctly tagged as a loss for us - I just want everyone to be reassured that I am trying my best to stay on top of any mistakes I may make, hopefully catching them before I post them, in future!

Thursday was a standstill for the trial: three wins, four losses, no money lost and none won either.

Friday's picks are at the bottom of the charts attached below...



Today's picks include some relative long shots, but the more I do this, the more instances I see in which an underdog manages to beat the holy bleep out of a team that everyone ranked as a sure thing.

That's what the bookies need us to do, of course - to keep on making "safe" bets and losing our money to teams that didn't rate a snowball's chance in hell before they suddenly became winners.

Per the first of the two charts above, the current day's picks are shown as losers, with a sad red "L" on the far right, until the results are known. That way, each win comes as a nice surprise at the end of a long, hard day!

One last screenshot, this time from the growing "dogbase" (collecting data about teams that nobody else cares about!).

It shows what a passing good day looks like...



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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