With the NHL and NBA seasons winding down, short odds are getting harder to find. So, it's time to dig through the floor of the "dog kennel"!

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I have lost count of the number of bet the spread or bet totals or the moneyline will bleed you dry exhortations I have heard since the 7-dog trial began almost six (gasp) months ago.

I have ignored them steadfastly because, to a punter with a very limited comprehension of bigtime pro sports, who won and who lost has to be the most important question after any game.

But now, with odds bouncing up and down like a three-year-old on his first big boy's bed, I figure it's time to cross my fingers and toes and tentatively venture into the unknown.

The 890 bets placed so far in the 7-dog trial offer a wealth of potentially useful statistical info, and the numbers that pop out the most apply to totals and spreads.

The 7-dog sample says loud and clear that it's always best (unless you are absotively, posolutely certain for sure otherwise) to bet under the total or over the spread.

The numbers for this relatively small data set: 45% of all scores ended over the total, while 71% were over the spread.

Anecdotal! Irrelevant! I hear from the peanut gallery, aka the cheap seats where cheap shots abound.

OK then, but consider the following:

NFL 2009-10, 39% OT, 55% OS.
MLB 2009, 43% OT, 84% OS.
NBA TD, 45% OT, 65% OS.
NHL TD, 39% OT, 71% OS.

Again, if you want to bet the total, take Under every time, and if the spread's your thing always pick Over...unless of course you believe that guff about the past having nothing to teach us about the future.

Here's more detail about the 3,854 games in the sample:






Why publish this stuff for free if it really, truly offers the punting public an opportunity to get ahead of the bookies?

Why not? I say. What I have learned in the eight months or so since Pete first prodded me towards the sports book is that the venue is on the whole safer and more reliable than the table games I have been playing with a passion since I was a teenager.

And I have also concluded that a sports fund much like those promoted by InvestaPick is a viable way to go, as long as IP's rules are tossed out, and replaced with a variation of target betting.

I posted a recent target betting comparison for the three IP "funds" a while back and will keep on updating it from time to time.

None of this is meant to divert readers from the ongoing awful realities of the 7-dog trial, which has had a terrible time in the 5x column since January 18 (two months!) and a tough row to hoe in the 50x shadow rules set since February 10.

And as the headline at the top of today's entry admits, I am now having to abandon my refusal to bet negative odds in the face of diminishing opportunities and the prospect of having to give up the 7-bet daily target.

After all, these are the waning days of the basketball and hockey seasons, and short odds will not return until the Boys of Summer stop messing about and get down to business next month.

Here's the latest 7-dog info:





Tuesday, March 16 at 12:45pm

Yesterday's departure from the betting pattern that has been applied in the 7-dog trial to date gave the 50x column a nice little bump in the right direction, but cost the 5x rules set another five units.

The wider spread stands a good chance of recovery in this lifetime, but prospects are not looking so good for a 1 to 5 approach.

I am not happy about that, but also not really surprised.

Hopefully, what follows will not add to any confusion about trends observed with over/under bets on spreads and totals.


The rule I will be following from now on whenever the need arises is UTOS, an acronym for always betting Under the Total and Over the Spread.

I need to do more work on this, and Monday's results were far from conclusive with one win and one loss is each of the two categories.

Truth is, there are people out there who will argue that 5,169 games are not proof of anything, either!

I will post new data as and when.

Meanwhile, here are Monday's results and today's bets, which revert to the moneyline or "sides" because there were enough short odds to give me seven dog picks.



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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Saturday's games gave the 7-dog trial a much-needed boost with four right picks out of seven, but we still have a long way to go.

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Timing, timing, timing. Again.



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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We're in this thing for the long haul, remember. And boy, is this haul ever long, especially after an almost dog-free Friday! No dogs, no $s.

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Weeks like this one can be pretty demoralizing, for sure, but the good news is that even losing trends provide useful data for the road ahead!

It all comes down to the Big Question: Can the past predict the future?

Here's today's information:





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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After $weet Sunday came Terrible Tuesday, then Winning Wednesday - but now I'm stuck for a nasty adjective that begins with th for Thursday!

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Let's just say it was a lousy day for the 7-dog trial and leave it at that.

Here are the numbers:



The only bit of good news since Wednesday came from my latest lingering look at the three InvestaPick "funds" going back to the beginning of 2009.

They very strongly suggest that while target betting is a more effective approach than the simple Martingale that IP applies, the selection process may be very nearly as important as betting the right amount at the right time.

I started out last November 1 with a tendency to favor the high end of my +100 to +180 odds range, reasoning that higher paybacks on winners might offset the increased number of losers.

That's because losses cost 100% of the bet (of course) while wins return up to $1.80 on the dollar.

While the 7-dog trial was unfolding, I was adding to my MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL databases, and it became clear that the low end of the range is the safest place to be, more winners paying less edging out fewer winners paying more.

It wasn't a big surprise, so I was not too disappointed.

The IP selections are most frequently on bets rated at -110, meaning that a $100 winning bet returns about a dime less than $191.

The InvestaPick betting strategy is generally easy enough to figure out, except for the IPE fund, which on February 9 this year cut its losses after a $1,232 bet went south, and dropped back to $32.

I am grateful that the Sports Investment Analysts at IP have chosen to post all their results for their three funds going all the way back to January 1 2009 because they gave me some useful numbers to work with.

After yesterday's bets, the comparison between target betting's theoretical performance against the three IP funds vs. actual results posted online day by day looks like this:


One thing that continues to puzzle me is that after winning a redoubled bet (say, +$1,040 at -110 after losses of -$32.50, -$65, -$130, -$260 and -$520), the IP method makes no attempt to recover the chunk of change lost to the bookies' rake.

In the example above, the fund is $1,008 in the hole when makes its $1,040 bet, which wins at -110 and pays $945, leaving a deficit of $65, give or take.

The next bet according to the IP rules is $27.

That means that over time, a substantial number of wins are not really wins at all, because they do not put the bankroll ahead of where it was when the losing streak that just ended first became a threat.

In fairness, the IP strategy is a profitable one.

I am just surprised that it is not even more profitable, as it would be if the value of each bet during a recovery sequence were calibrated to compensate for paybacks known ahead of time to be at less than 100% of the wager.

Perhaps the answer is the old cliche, If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The IPE fund's failure to recoup its losses in the example I quoted is what caused the big dip in the blue line in the chart above.

Comparative individual results for the three IvestaPick funds are below:




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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Four right picks out of seven dog selections brought 50x a full recovery from Terrible Tuesday. But 5x needs more than one good day to get over it.

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One frustrating consequence of a too tight spread is that while disasters are smaller, they take longer to get over.

That means that a lot more luck is needed in the wake of prolonged downturns.

And when you are trying to beat the house (or the bookies) at a game played by their rules, luck is not something you should be forced to count on.

Look back a few days in the 50x column and you will see confirmation of what's obvious: as bets get bigger, wins and losses do too!

Stating the obvious is made necessary by the fact that most table game players and sports book bettors hope to make big money with minimal risk, something they can only do consistently in their dreams.

A narrow 1 to 5 spread can work for a while, especially when wins pay better than even money, as they do backing underdogs in the sports book.

But over time, a "house edge" that averages out at quite a bit more than 10% (for us, it stands at 13.6% after 883 bets since November 1) will take its toll from a tight spread.

After Wednesday's games, six of the seven series in the 7-dog trial were in profit in the 50x box (see the screen snap below), and all we are pursuing at this point is unrecovered LTDs to take us to a new best win to date.

Before today's games, the 50x column stands at 75% of the peak achieved on February 10.

The 5x chart tells a dramatically different tale: three of the seven series are ahead, and the other four report red numbers ranging from $720 to $6,500.

The cliche says it all...you gotta speculate to accumulate.

That does not mean you have to bet recklessly. But if you go into battle, then decide to conserve ammunition or turn tail when you are under heavy fire, then you will get killed. It's really that simple.

The first two screen shots below show the current state of each of the seven ongoing series at 5x and 50x spreads.

The rest of the summaries follow the usual format.







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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Tuesday, our dog picks turned out to be lambs, and all but one were led to slaughter. It's the bad days that make you appreciate the good ones!

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Yesterday was, in short, the worst day the 7-dog trial has had in quite a while.

Just when things were beginning to perk up a little, "Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer..."

But that's life.

Here are updates:





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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Sunday's games gave the 7-dog trial a much-needed boost, and to celebrate, I'm making Monday a day of rest!

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For a betting man, the time it is taking the 5x rules set in the 7-dog trial to turn around - next week it will be two months since it peaked at a profit of $6,000 - is unacceptable.

For an investor concerned only with long-term performance and unfazed by short-term ups and downs, it may (or may not) be less of a worry.

When Sunday's finals were all in, the 5x column was a little over 8 units ($812) in the red after four months of ups and downs, and facing a new round of bets totaling $3,000.

For the 50x rules set, which allows a maximum bet of $5,000 rather than $500, the story was far different: up $45,000 or +10% of total action, and well on the way to revisiting the best win of $60,000 achieved on February 10.

Regular readers know well that I have always advocated a very wide betting spread to offset the long-term damage that is always certain to be inflicted by negative expectation.

A 1 to 50 spread is totally inadequate against even the most "player friendly" casino table games (blackjack at about -1.0% and baccarat at about -1.35%) but when I started out on this diversion into sports book betting, I was intrigued by the possibility that paybacks exceeding 50-50 (+100 in bookie lingo) might make a much tighter spread viable.

To the average punter, 1 to 5 is a wide spread, I know. A few minutes of observation at a blackjack or baccarat layout in any casino will confirm that.

But mathematically, 1 to 5 has little or no effect on what folks who think they know all about numbers like to call standard deviation.

When the 7-dog trial began on November 1 last year, I deliberately set the permitted spread at $100 to $500 so that readers of this blog could watch with me in "real time" how backing underdogs would fare at a relatively modest betting level.

I then set up the tracking spreadsheet to include a 50x "shadow" block of formulas that allowed a what if set of variables to be put to work at will.

Right now, the 50x approach has delivered a win that is 75% of the profit zenith achieved on February 10 ($45,000 vs. $60,000).

Does that mean that spreading 1 to 100 would do a better job?

No, it doesn't.

At 1 to 100, the win drops to $30,500 or 3.5% of overall action, vs. $45,000 and 6.3%.

(I should at this point confess to falling victim to the annoying tendency of spreadsheets to magnify minor errors into monumental mess-ups! Earlier in this post, I reported the current 50x win as 10% of action to date. Wrong. I had failed to extend the formulas that track day-to-day action beyond February 8, an irritating slip that was entirely my fault. Error checks are an essential part of my daily routine, and usually, I triple-check everything before I show my work to others, something that is not so easy to do in a goldfish bowl. All I can do now is to admit to the slip-up and apologize for it).

The numbers perk up very dramatically at 1 to 250, with the alternate rules set at an all-time high of $56,500 (+5.5%) with Sunday's bets collected. The Feb 10 win becomes $55,400 and the slump that follows it ends on March 5 with a new best of +$56,000.

Do all of these data actually mean anything, or have anything to tell us about what will happen if we keep on backing underdogs until the end of time?

The mythematicians who warn us away from gambling with the axiom that any amount bet against a negative expectation must eventually have a negative result obviously say NO! loud and clear.

They bolster their pessimism by insisting that gambling is unique in all the universe of human endeavors, in that yesterday has nothing whatever to teach us about how we should deal with today and tomorrow.

They are of course entitled to their opinion. And they are wrong.

Luckily for them, they are on the right side of a Catch 22 conundrum: Once the future arrives, it becomes the past in a moment briefer than an eye blink, and they can shelter behind their claim that the past doesn't prove anything.

It is therefore theoretically impossible to devise a strategy for any human activity that guarantees future success by analyzing the past.

This caveat applies equally to everything we do, and is never less than fatuous.

Sorry folks, but all knowledge is by definition the sum of the past.

All that we do in our daily lives boils down to dealing with the present by acting on the basis of what the past has taught us.

The good news is that the present only very rarely deviates dramatically from the past, earthquakes, tsunamis and all manner of natural and man-made disasters included.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Thank goodness.

Here's where the 7-dog trial stands right now:-





Tuesday, March 9 at 12:50pm:

Mythematicians (descended from the nattering nay-bobs of negativism of the Nixon era, no doubt!) like to argue that past profits from a given betting strategy are "anecdotal" and ergo irrelevant.

That of course rules out all but bets that have yet to be placed, games that are yet to be played and races that have yet to be run...and even they will be disqualified once the future becomes the present and, a nanosecond later, the past.

Since my pal Peter Punter first turned me on to them, I have been watching the three "sports funds" touted by InvestaPick pretty closely, and applying the target betting rules to their results each time they are updated online.

As of finals yesterday, IP was claiming a profit of $2,150 for its "C" or central time zone fund, or a 86% return on an investment of $2,500 on January 1, 2009.

Target betting against the same set of outcomes was ahead $5,180, using $32.50 as the base bet and a 1 to 100 spread.

IP's win for its "E" (eastern) fund was $832, or a return of 33%, and target betting showed a win of $6,665 against the same outcomes.

The IP "W" (western) fund was up $2,880 by Monday's close of play, or +115% over 14 and a bit months.

The target betting win was $4,595 against the same "W" outcomes.

Target betting required about twice IP's overall action and at one point was $1,145 in the hole vs. IP's $40. That translates to added exposure offset by a dramatically fatter bottom line overall.

What it comes down to as I type this is a $6,000 profit for InvestaPick's $2,500 x3 investor, earning him or her roughly 80% over 14 months. Beat that, Wall Street!

Target betting's bet by bet stalking of the IP "investment portfolio" is purely theoretical but precisely calculated. To date, it woulda brought in about $16,000 profits from an investment of 3x $5,000, or 107% since January 1, 2009.

There are some anomalies in IP's betting pattern that I can't explain without advance notice of daily picks, but on the whole the InvestaPick strategy seems sound and credibly transparent.

Target betting is just more effective, is all...

We have skin in the game(s) again today after taking Monday off. Beats me how odds can suddenly shoot off the charts like a seismograph in Chile one day and drop back the next, but that's how it is sometimes.

Here's new data:





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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The Theobeau time machine wobbled off its rails for a moment, but we're back on track today to report a bumpy ride on Saturday.

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I guess it's inevitable that updating these records day after day week after week will induce a minor case of time warp now and then.

Somehow I got a day behind myself yesterday, and stayed that way until it was time to post Saturday's results, which are appended below without further comment!

The necessary corrections to Saturday's post have been made. Sorry for any confusion...



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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Three right picks out of seven on Friday meant barely a blip for 5x rules, but 50x moved ahead a little bit.

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The 50x rules set now stands at 75% of the best win to date zenith achieved on February 10, and the way the numbers have been playing out lately, a recovery lasting more than three weeks is nothing to be alarmed about.

It is hard for some people (especially stock-holders who pretend they disdain gambling) to draw a parallel between sports book betting and investing on Wall Street, I know, but that does not make the comparison invalid!

Stocks frequently head south for no discernible reason, then surge to new heights, maybe because someone somewhere has pushed a green button just for the fun of it.

So it is with underdogs: giant-killers one minute, tails between their legs the next.

Friday brought a win of less than 1 unit for the original 5x rules set.

And because dog wins have been in short supply for the last couple of weeks or so, a max win in the 50x column was whittled down by ever-larger losses for series that are below the max but struggling to recover.

Current data follows.





Late update (not shown in the summaries above): the overall DWR for Friday was 24%.

Not good enough!

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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Underdogs deliver another great day Wednesday...much appreciated but not unexpected!

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The last couple of days suggest that maybe the 7-dog trial should have taken a break when the NHL hung up its skates for the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

But coulda, woulda, shoulda never did anyone any good, and I am just happy to see the math proving out again at last.

Slumps never last forever, but neither do surges, and no one ever knows for certain what a new day will bring.

If I am allowed one complaint (and I'm in charge here, so I am!) it's that yesterday's five right picks out of seven were not as helpful as they might have been on the 50x side of the equation.

One of the wins matched up with the one and only maximum bet, but three of the others coincided with piddling wagers determined by recent turnarounds.

But hey, that's how it goes. In betting, as in life, timing is almost everything.

Here's the latest data, along with today's bets as usual:-



Friday, March 5 at 12:30pm:

As I was saying, you never know what a new day will bring.

And as it happens, Thursday sucked!

Dogs turned tail and fled yesterday, and the only good news is that in the 50x column, a max bet win undid most of the damage done by five losses out of seven picks.

The odds wizards put almost all games on both the NBA and NHL schedules out of reach for us today, so with my usual misgivings, I have concentrated on college hoops.

Here's the current picture for the 7-dog trial, which at this point looks as if it might go on forever.



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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Just when you think you're the shark's lunch, those deadly jaws lose their grip, and you're swimming for the beach. For a while, anyway!

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One good day does not a long-term winning strategy prove, as an old Greek geezer sort of said 2,000 years ago.

But after weeks of slip-sliding ever deeper into the red, it's exciting to see the interrupted pro hockey season resume with eight dog wins out of 12 matches.

We nailed five of them, losing only two bets out of seven on Tuesday, and things turned out the way they are supposed to.

Glancing quickly over the 5,000-plus sports events contained in my databases, I am tempted to think that odds have much more to do with whim than wisdom.

I can picture some bookie in a dark back room scribbling positive and negative numbers on scraps of paper, and dropping them into separate hats labeled for each team in each sport.

Added together, the numbers come out more or less even, but whenever the anonymous wizard of odds dips his hand into a hat, the value he pulls out is a random selection.

When a negative number comes up, the team is favored to win, and its opponent's odds are set according to the 20% gouge rule.

If a positive value is selected, the vice is naturally versa.

It doesn't really work that way, I know, but the fantasy makes about as much sense as the real-life methodology sometimes seems to do.

Now all we need is four more days like yesterday, and I can wind up this 7-dog trial with all-time best wins in both the 5x and 50x columns.

Dreams are good for us, after all...





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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