Time to make like a monk and keep chanting the phrases long term and just numbers as a reminder that it's the math that rules each day.

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It was probably a mistake to pick any selections at all Monday, but that would be Tuesday morning quarterbacking if we weren't talking basketball!

I am doing my level best to stop whooping and hollering, chanting a mantra that puts the onus squarely on the numbers and ignores team identities and, to some extent, applicable odds.

Yesterday, there were 10 CBB clashes and underdogs came out on top in just two of them.

I made three picks and caught one victorious dog - the "wrong" one because it did not coincide with the only maximum bet on the 50x list.

It stands to sense that we are not going to do well on days when dogs under-perform as a group, unless we "get lucky," and it is foolish to rely on luck at all.

We are back to seven picks for Tuesday, none of them especially attractive from a subjective standpoint, but so what?

Here are today's updates:






Wednesday, February 17 at 10:00am:





There isn't an optimistic angle from which to view what's been happening to the 7-dog trial recently.

The 50x rules set came within a single large bet of achieving complete recovery and setting an all-time high for this 100-day (now 105-day) demonstration, and now it's headed south at a rapid clip.

The 5x rules set bets less and so loses less, but as long as underdogs fail to come close to a 40%-plus DWR, gravity is having its evil way there, too.

Dognostics will be doing a happy dance right now, repeating the ancient axiom that in the world of random numbers, if you create a rule for the future based upon what has been observed in the past, three words apply: It. Won't. Work.

As it happens, the current 50x slump is almost an exact duplicate of one that occurred very early in the trial, when target betting climbed slowly and elegantly to a profit of $5,425 by Day 9, then leaped off a cliff (by degrees!) until it hit -$15,023 three weeks later.

Then, dogs recouped their departure from expectation, and the numbers bounced back to where we needed them to be.

What we are seeing now is a far more rapid downturn made worse by the fact that only one series is betting the max, so even 4 right picks out of 7 don't help much if the day's single big bet is not among the winners.

Tuesday was a decidedly dismal day for dogs with a 14% DWR - six "upsets" in 33 contests, and we managed to nail three of them.

Let's hope today is kinder to us!

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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