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...

_
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.
_

Six right picks out of seven the day after Turkey Day: Another "fluke" - or something to be thankful for that will happen again and again?

_
As thing stand, before the fourth week of the 7-dog trial comes to an end, we have seen five slumps followed by four complete recoveries.

Yesterday, Friday, November 27, underdogs had an overall NBA+NHL win rate of 50%, and all our money was "on ice."

Six of the seven dogs picked by the numbers were winners, adding 10.5 units to the bankroll and bringing us within 2.5 units of the best win to date.

If this was a Wall Street portfolio, Friday's surge would probably be described as a "correction" brought about by mathematical probability.

Underdogs have been under-performing for most of this month, and it was inevitable that at some point, favorites would suffer a similar slump and the effect would be a return to what long-term statistics have taught us to consider the norm.

Here's the current chart from the 7-dog test:


We're not out of the long grass yet!

The pre-Thanksgiving slide swallowed a large chunk of the month's profits, but now we have four out of seven lines or series fully recovered, with close to $3,600 in unresolved LTDs.

Three of today's seven bets are at the 5u max, so all we can do is hope that the surge in dog wins continues for at least a few more hours.

On the dog list today: the NBA's Bobcats (+150) and Trailblazers (+175) and five hockey picks, NY Islanders (+160), Montreal Canadiens (+165), Ottawa Senators (+115), Calgary Flames (+105) and NY Rangers (+140).

There are some long-shots in there, but all the bets are within the +100 to +180 range suggested as optimal by analysis of thousands of game finals in multiple sports.

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.
_

Is 5 right picks out of 7 a fluke? Who cares, as long as it keeps on happening (and from time to time, it will!)?

_
The 7-dog trial ended its third week with a flourish yesterday, delivering five winners out of seven picks in spite of the fact that overall, underdogs did not have a great day.

The win at the end of the day was not huge at +4.9u but it almost made up for Friday's losses, and how bad can that be?

Dognostics (those skeptics who watch from the wings and predict the certain demise of any attempt to make money betting on anything) are praying for a succession of "perfect storms" in which target betting has all seven lines or series betting the max and underdogs falling into a slump.

After Saturday's wins, four lines are back to a minimum bet, one is there already, and two are throwing 5u apiece into the fray.

That adds up to another $1,500 day, equal to half the 7-dog trial's current winnings.

Unrecovered LTDs total $2,425 right now, and when those dangling targets are finally hit, they will significantly boost our current profit of $2,975.

Obviously, I am confident that all three dog lines will eventually come home with their heads held high and other annoying cliches, or I would not be spending so much time on this sports book experiment.

But there is no point in me making any predictions.

It makes much more sense to just sit back and see what happens.

I don't expect a whole lot of "five-dog days" down the road, but so far, underdogs remain at a win rate of 42%, and the stats say that things are likely to get better for them by and by.

I will continue making selections based solely on the +100 to +180 range and the order in which they are delivered to me, but I look forward to the day when I am no longer betting in a goldfish bowl and can be a little more creative.

Yesterday I took a closer look at the Las Vegas odds report, which shows where the money is going alongside the official handicappers' assessment of each team's prospects.

There are anomalies that I do not yet understand, but mostly the message comes across loud and clear.

My NBA picks for today, Sunday, are the Toronto Raptors at +140 at home, and the Indiana Pacers at +120 playing the Charlotte Bobcats on their home court.

So what, you might ask, but while "the money" makes Orlando Magic the clear choice against the Raptors, the Pacers are favored to win on all three fronts: (S)ides, (M)oney and (T)otal.

Just for the fun of it, I have now started tracking SMT rankings for each day's options, so I can at some point get a feel for whether or not those behind-the-scenes numbers are helpful indicators.

I picked Tampa Bay (+115) and Chicago (+100) on ice for today, and the two dogs are both well liked according to those Vegas percentages: Lightning in the S and T categories, and the Blackhawks the top choice of money-line and total bettors.

Today's NFL picks are the Cleveland Browns (+155), the Baltimore Ravens (+105) and the Chicago Bears (+145) and sad to say, no one likes any of them according to the Vegas report. Bummer!

Tomorrow I will discover the accuracy of numbers that single out the San Francisco 49ers (+220), the Washington Redskins (+425) and the New York Jets (+460) as likely underdog winners on the NFL schedule, while cursing the fact that they are outside my betting range!

Monday, November 23 at 10:10am:

Sunday was a dog disaster if ever there was one, with just two hits out of seven picks and $1,500 on the line.

The two winning underdogs cut the loss from a potential grand and a half down to $285, and that's really the game in a nutshell, isn't it?

Bet seven favorites and win just two of them and you are looking at a sad, sad sea of red ink!

Dogs, on the other hand, do not have to win more games than they lose to cover your losses and, more often than not, deliver a modest profit when all the playing's done.

That's a good thing, right?

As for those "Vegas" rankings, they were right four times out of six in NBA games, one wrong and one right on ice, and on the money six times out of 14 games in the NFL schedule.

In other words, one day in 365 tells us nothing at all, and I will keep monitoring those SMT numbers from now on.

Today, Tennessee looks like a solid Monday Night Football choice, and the four NBA contests are way out of range (+200 to +425 as I type this).

That leaves six NHL dog picks: the Blue Jackets (+115), NY Islanders (+115), the Panthers (+100), Washington Capitals (+110), Boston Bruins (+100) and Carolina Hurricanes (+165).

Once in a while, I run a next-day check to compare dog results, cash-wise, with what "woulda" happened if I had backed favorites all the way. I'll do that for Sunday's debacle and post an update tomorrow.

Today's another "heavy" day with $1,600 in play, but at least we're still betting from money won rather than from the opening bankroll.

Tuesday, November 24 at 3:59pm:

The big question dognostics will be asking today is whether or not it makes sense to risk almost 90% of money won to date in response to a succession of poor showings by underdogs.

I say you can't make money without risking money, and exposure is at least a little less painful when it puts profits back in play than when it's funded from your own back pocket!

Today has been a challenge (the updated 7-dog spreadsheet was posted barely 15 mins before the first game time) because I had to be out of the house bright and early, and the odds available at that ungodly hour were less than appetizing.

They had not improved that much when I got home mid-afternoon, but I found seven bets by venturing for the first time into college basketball.

I wasn't happy at having to do that, but felt that since I keep saying that the teams and players and even the name of the game are all secondary to the numbers, I had better put my money up and stop making excuses!

So today's picks are the Indiana Pacers (+180), the Philly 76ers (+135) and the Blue Jackets (+110), plus the college kids Florida State (+120), Pennsylvania (+160), Cincinnati (+120) and Gonzaga (+110).

I have long since stopped trying to guess how things will turn out, not just because I am so often wrong, but also because nothing is changed by my opinion.

This trial is all about good faith. That's really all I need to say.

Wednesday, November 25 at 12:00pm:

Just like you, I hate to lose.

But just lately, I have been making a habit of it.

Tuesday's only good news was that out of 41 college basketball games, only seven underdogs won, and I picked two of them.

The bad news is that I had zero NBA or NHL winners.

There have been worse "dog" slumps than this in the last 24 days, and it will end soon.

My friend Pete dropped more than ten grand in the dumpster by not listening to me and mostly backing favorites (and trusting "cappers"), so I am willing to venture that much on this 7-dog trial.

There's still money in the bank from past profits, but if today's selections crap out, I'll be in the red again come Thursday's betting.

Maximim risk to date: $1,420.

Today's seven bets total $1,400 and unresolved LTDs add up to $4,200.

When the two largest LTDs turn around, we'll hit a new high, although of course, skeptics insist that the money will run out before then!

Dog picks for today, Wednesday, November 25, '09, are: Toronto Raptors (+120), Milwaukee Bucks (+120), Dallas Mavericks (+150) and New York Knicks (+160) from the NBA schedule, and on ice, NY Islanders (+115), Toronto Maple Leafs (+125) and Buffalo Sabres (+110).

Thursday, November 26 at 10:20pm:

The profit number ticked up by a miserly 1u (to $1,700) yesterday, but I am grateful for that!

Again, two "dog" wins out of seven picks, with the overall DWR for the day at 35%.

Tuesday's DWR was a truly dismal 19%!

The long-term viability of this whole strategy pivots on the fact that two wins can often cover the cost of five losses, a "balancing act" that favorites can never match.

We need three to four wins a day to move forward, but when that doesn't happen, not sliding backwards is a welcome consolation prize.

No doubt someone out there will look at today's updated file and claim that I "got lucky" because one of the wins was a $500 bet with a +155 payback.

Nonsense!

Over time, we can expect that each of the seven lines will require maximum bets about as often as the others and that the total amount bet from day one will pretty much match up across the board.

After 25 days, Line 6 has required $3,250 in total bets, and Line 7 has demanded $5,700 overall.

The other five independent series have required between 63% and 84% of the Line 7 total.

As the days go by, those discrepancies will even out.

And as is always the case when math rules, luck has nothing to do with anything!

Here are today's dog picks, copied directly from the open file:

501 Orlando Mag +145, $200
509 Alabama +105, $100
517 Minnesota +110, $300
519 Portland +160, $100
523 Georgia St +180, $100
1 Blue Jackets +125, $100
3 LA Kings +160, $500

The first number on the left is the bet number, the "+" indicates the odds (+145 pays $1.45 to $1) and the dollar sign indicates the bet value.

I first planned to celebrate Thanksgiving by keeping my money in my wallet, then decided that my critics might interpret a betting holiday as some sort of trick!

It's amazing how determined some people are that the bookies must be seen to be winners in the end.

Perhaps they will be.

But probably not.

Friday, November 27 at 08:30am:

Everything is on the line today - and everything's on ice!

Thanksgiving Day's picks were a mixed bag that included more college games, and when the dust settled, we were just $91 ahead.

There was an error in there, too, just to demonstrate that I'm not perfect! I picked Minnesota over Butler based on early online odds that had them as +110 dogs, but they won as -127 favorites. Oops.

Winning is a good idea, but not with a payback of less than even money. I don't know who goofed, me or the online odds report, but in the end, we all have to accept that we will slip up from time to time, and that sometimes, mistakes can be expensive.

Today's all-NHL picks start at 9:05am with New Jersey over Boston at +110, then Buffalo (+115), NY Islanders (+115 at home), Colorado Avalanche (+105), Anaheim Ducks at home (+120), Calgary Flames (+110) and Toronto Maple Leafs (+105).

I'm not wildly excited about an all-hockey selection, but it's the numbers that matter.

Today's numbers tell us that we're ahead $1,790 with $1,900 in play.

Watch this space!

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.
_

"Your betting strategy works more than 99% of the time in a casino, but always crashes and burns. The same thing will happen with sports betting."

_
Sometimes, I can't help but wonder if every effective method of beating the odds is not automatically targeted by casino snipers seeking to blow away any breakthrough with well-aimed disinformation.

Then I remember that I couldn't care less.

It's been said that casinos don't need to bad-mouth betting methods because the odds and player psychology are in their favor and they are sure to win in the end.

But even that is an industry-serving load of twaddle. The casinos will cheat if they have to in order to beat winners, and the gambling-dependent gaming control boards will always be right there beside them in the front line.

The "independent" gambling "watchdogs" know which side their bread is buttered, and just like the casinos they pretend to "control," they are very fond of a little extra jam to go with it.

I'm frequently reminded that table limits will always doom any betting strategy to an inglorious end.

No amount of data demonstrating the falsity of that argument can ever have an effect, any more than it can alter the attitude of people who say they would rather have loads of fun betting their way and losing than being miserable betting my way and winning.

Whenever I find myself thinking that losing can't possibly be fun, I spend an hour or two in a casino for a quick refresher course on how exciting and entertaining a sound thrashing can be.

But I do my research as a spectator only, because I'm one of those oddballs who hates to lose.

The only way target betting can come to grief is if it is inadequately funded.

Table and house limits are not a problem, because the statistics that predict a certain turnaround are unaffected by suspending play until the required next bet can be placed without interference.

Running out of money definitely IS a problem.

Betting underdogs has a lot of appeal not just because it delivers steady profits but because it is a stealth method that flies smoothly under the gambling industry's anti-winner radar.

Its greatest asset is that when an underdog pulls off a "surprise" (a surprise to 85% of punters but rarely to bookies) it always pays better than even money.

So losing more bets than you win is less of a challenge than at a table game in which the best you can hope for is a buck back for a buck bet.

I have laid out all the numbers in earlier posts, but am happy to provide the latest update from my ongoing "7-dog Trial."

Thursday was a rare dog day, with favorites bested 58% of the time, and it added another $500 in profits to take the 19-day total past $3,000.

Overall, "dogs" have won barely two out of every five bets. But target betting has ensured that even that statistically poor showing has not hurt the bottom line.

There have been some nerve-wracking down days, especially at the beginning of this open demonstration, and there will be again.

But just as statistics (aka "The Math") predicted, dogs will always recover and make sure that those inevitable setbacks are temporary.

To date, the deepest "hole" has been just over $1,400, making a win of more than $3,000 a very comfortable return on exposure.

Other numbers that matter are total action of a little less than $21,000, making the win almost 15% of all bets won and lost, and an average return on "dogs" of +138 overall, indicating a payback of $1.38 on the dollar.

Remember that a 40% underdog win rate (DWR) requires an average payback of +125 to enable a flat bettor to break even, 45% needs just +112 and 50% makes money above +100.

More importantly, target betting is a whole lot more effective than betting the same old same amount every time.

Worth considering, though, are these charts from my just-completed database for the 2008-09 NBA baskeball season.

Even readers with teeny-tiny screens on wristwatch net-books should be able to discern the less than subtle difference between the result of betting flat on underdogs (the green line!) and backing favorites all the way (that would be the red line).

Favorites wreak havoc with the bankroll because although wins outnumber losses, they return a tiny premium on the money risked.

And, of course, every wrong bet costs 100% of the wager.

As I keep saying, it's the arithmetic...


Click on the image to enlarge it

Saturday, November 21:

Five of Friday's seven "dogs" ended the day with their tails between their legs, costing us $580 and wiping out Thursday's winnings.

It was the eighth losing day in 20, and no doubt the red total that ended a five-day winning run will prompt the usual chorus of aha!s and told you sos!

Today's picks are a motley bunch (Knicks and Bucks, Canadiens, Thrashers, Panthers, Maple Leafs and Hurricanes) but as always, I am ignorant of their prospects and have relied on the experts to make my choices for me.

That's what betting by the numbers is all about: No experience or wisdom is required, just enough dough to cover the bet values demanded by the target betting strategy.

The method is of course anathema to diehards who have to believe that their intuition and inside knowledge (courtesy of the slew of sports stats available on the 'Net every day) trumps a simple odds-based selection process.

I sympathize, I truly do.

And as I have said before, perhaps at some point down the road there will be an opportunity to blend the two methods, accepting or rejecting qualified picks with the help of educated guesses.

Meanwhile, it's just about money...and confidence.

The Saturday set puts $1,500 in play, covered by almost $2,500 in winnings since the open experiment was kicked off, tipped off, pucked up or whatever on November 1.

Hopefully, today will prove a better day than yesterday, but as in any long-term investment scenario, gains are always preceded by (hopefully smaller!) losses, and there is rarely any such thing as a sure thing.

I know a guy who claims a 70% success rate at picking stocks and trades millions of dollars back and forth every year.

He is far more of a gambler than I would ever want to be, but his method, like mine, is primarily numbers-based: he's not interested in annual reports, market trends, or tipsters' inside info.

What he does is look for stocks that are declining in value because Big Money is dumping them, but are being snapped up in small chunks by buyers who see real long-term value in their reduced price.

The result on those twin Bloomberg screens that people like my friend squint at all day long is a red value line headed south east, and a white buy line slowly inching up in the opposite direction.

Those stocks are underdogs - shares in companies that the herd will bet against because a superficial glance at them suggests that there's no quick and easy money to be made from them.

The screenshot below should help put the dogs-only sports betting challenge in a rational, unbiased perspective!



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.
_

"How can you claim to be objective if you're not betting ALL underdogs that match your half-baked requirements on any given day?"

_
As I write this, a few hours ahead of game times on the 14th day of my 7-dog test, I am a breath-taking $118 ahead, with two lines in the black and resuming with minimum bets, one ahead overall but with a loss to recover, and four waiting to recoup a total of $3,000 in LTDs between them.

A whole set of "Catch 22" rules are applied by skeptics to any attempt to make steady money at gambling, chief among them that all losses are to be expected, but wins are sheer fluke and may never be repeated.

So when for a few days underdogs fall short of the 45% win rate that I estimate to be the magic number for profitability, I hear a chorus of told-you-so's and hoots of derision.

But when turnaround is achieved as predicted, I'm accused of cooking the books.

I'm not complaining, just observing.

Anyone out there who believes that, like casino table games, the sports book can't be beaten in the long run is entitled to his opinion. And his losses.

I am happy to forge ahead with my strategy, confident that the math is on my side.

For those of you on the fence about all this, just consider the simple truth that the bookies need underdogs to win a high percentage of games in order to make the extra profit that their expensive tastes demand.

It's not enough that they squeeze the odds each way by 30-40% on top of the rake that they are guaranteed by the arithmetic. Like Oliver Twist, they always want more, more, more.

(I, on the other hand, have modest expectations and am unsullied by greed!).

I must admit that the other day, I looked at the latest set of finals and wondered why on earth I had skipped a block of potential picks that turned out to be underdog winners.

Then I remembered that I usually make my selections several hours ahead of game times so that I can post them online and avoid the predictable claims that data is added to the file after the fact.

So from time to time, there are gaps in the line-up, usually because the odds-makers in Las Vegas (or maybe the Land of Oz) are on an early AM coffee break or simply can't make up their minds.

The "Why 7?" question that keeps coming up is fair, but I want to say again that the picks I post are in the order that they became available to me, and I take the first seven whether I like them or not.

There are all kinds of ways in which the strategy's performance in this test might be improved, but cheating is not one of them.

I am just relying on the math to confirm that as time goes by, the dog win rate (DWR) will reach at least 45% and probably much more no matter what selection criteria are used.

So, for example, I might decide that I only want to back underdog teams named after animals, and in time, the DWR would prove out. Or teams with more than seven letters in their names...

As a concession to the skeptical comment above, I will from now on run a separate file tracking all qualifying "dogs" every day, the range being odds of +100 to +180, and the candidates being games on the NBA, NFL and NHL schedules.

I believe I have the right to ignore all college games, partly because the odds are all over the place, but also because there are too darn many of them and I just don't need the extra paperwork!

Monday, November 16, 2009:

One of those turnarounds (well, almost turnarounds) that makes skeptics sniff in search of the smell of books a-cooking, happened Sunday after three wins on Saturday left me pretty much even.

The entire premise of this strategy is that one or more lines that have dragged on in red ink for a while is likely to recover on any given day, simply because winning underdogs are as important to the bookies' bottom line as winning favorites, if not more so.

The math is simple enough. Even if the dog win rate (DWR) falls as low as 40% overall in the short term (trust me, it won't ever happen in the long term!) no harm will be done as long as dog paybacks average +125.

At a 45% DWR, the break-even average PB is +112, and at 50%, it's +100.

Given that in the thousands of game results I have analyzed, covering four major sports, the average dog payback is +132, an eventual recovery for any prolonged LTD is as sure as the sunrise, even if it doesn't come as often.

My commitment to maximum objectivity is exposing me to all manner of temptation, but I don't plan to cave even though it stands to sense that intelligent choices are more likely to help the bottom line than hurt it.

When the 7-dog test has run for a few more weeks and the BR is too large to fall back in the red, I may revisit the idea that I should adopt a more selective approach.

But for now, accepting dogs in the order in which the NBA, NHL and NFL schedules drop them on my plate is working just fine.

I did not much like today's options, I should add, but sucked 'em up anyway: Edmonton, New Jersey, New York, Anaheim and Tampa Bay on ice, and Portland and Dallas from the wimpy three-game NBA line-up. As I type this, the 7-Dog BR is at its highest level to date.

Watch this space...

Tuesday, November 17, 2009:

I may have to ease up on my aversion to skimpy Monday line-ups! Yesterday's dogs did pretty well for me, winning the bigger bets, losing the smaller ones, and putting me another $400 or so up at day's end.

It's too soon to check today's finals (it will be about 6:30pm by the time I post this) and I can understand why some people feel it's reckless to get almost two grand ahead and then shell out $1,400 for a new crop of betting slips.

I look at it a little differently.

To me, a sports books is seeming more and more like a bank, where you waltz in, make a deposit, and plan to withdraw your money, plus a little interest, when you need it.

The big difference is that with the bookies, you are on a 24-hour cycle: Money down by lunchtime as a rule (earlier on weekends, of course), then back to the cashier a day later to either cash your winning tickets or make a new set of bets and hopefully still walk away with a little extra dough.

I spent some time today trying to figure out how strategic or systematic betting might profit from backing favorites all the way rather than dogs, keeping in mind that faves generally win more often than they lose.

That was Pete's idea way back when, and all this time down the road, I still can't figure out how to make favorites consistently profitable in the way that underdogs are.

It all comes down to losing 100% of your bet when the favorite goes down, and getting ahead by pennies on the dollar when it wins.

Interestingly, no one who has looked at this dogs-only concept for more than five minutes supports it.

No one has come up with contradictory math to disprove it, because no one has actually spent serious time studying the numbers.

The consensus is that these are underdogs fer %$#@&sake so how can they possibly make money in the long run?

Back to the arithmetic again: lose 100% when you lose and win 87% on average when you win, and you have a problem; lose 100%, but win 132%, and you don't have a problem - the bookies do.

It's always possible that all today's picks will go down and I'll be back to just a few hundred bucks ahead.

But it's not very likely.

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.
_

Hindsight has its uses and history supports the "Dogmath" concept. But what happens today and tomorrow is all that matters to the bottom line.

_
My ever-stronger belief that backing underdogs exclusively offers the only positive expectation in sports betting has a whole season of baseball games behind it, plus around 700 NBA contests, and a couple of hundred games apiece from the NHL and NFL schedules.

But there is still this nagging worry that the validation I have found in almost 4,000 long-gone betting opportunities is a temporary phenomenon that will even out over a few more months of ball-chucking and puck-whacking.

The math says otherwise, and I trust the math with a passionate devotion, but starting November 1, I set the ball rolling on an experiment that cannot benefit from hindsight.

It's simple enough: seven underdog picks each day posted ahead of game time on Google Docs (a nifty platform Peter Punter and I used for a couple of months), then updated as the last of the day's results come in.

I have talked about subjectivity before and my quest to eliminate it, at least for now, and so I am letting the odds-makers choose my picks for me, ignoring what I suspect might be smarter selections.

The first two days were woefully low on underdog wins (30% overall vs. the 45% that arithmetic says is the level at which "dogs" can make steady money) and it took me until Friday to get out of the hole and start making progress.

As I type this, the 7-Dog strategy is a little more than 3 units ahead, down from a high of 12.7 units late on Sunday, a unit being $100.

I am applying the target betting rules here, and right now, four of the seven lines or series are in the red and so bet values are rising.

I am also tracking flat betting (down 4.5u) and scaled betting, which puts 3u on dogs with short odds, 2u on "middling" selections, and 1u on the longest odds in the range (down 3u).

So, I am 10 days into this little open experiment, conducted under the scrutiny of a couple of skeptics who were helpful to me when I first ventured into the brave new world of sports betting and who have zero confidence in betting by the numbers as an alternative to wisdom, experience and insight.

Who can blame them? After all, their special abilities took years to develop.

I start each new day scanning all the available options, and often wincing as objectivity denies me the right to place the largest bets on the teams with the shortest odds, or to favor underdogs defending their honor on their home turf.

Of course it makes sense to pick and choose, but for now I am not permitting myself that luxury because my whole theory rests on successfully demonstrating that in the end, it's just the math that matters.

As I work on my sports databases (sheer drudgery but always worth it at the end of the day!) I see countless examples of why it's just the math that makes the difference between winning and losing.

January 14 this year was an all-NBA day, for instance, with nine games matching the odds range criterion identified as optimal by databases already completed.

Five of those "dog" selections were losers, flushing $500 down the the drain.

But the four winners brought in $635 in profits, giving me an end-of-the-day surplus of $135 that represented a healthy +15.0% return on my original "investment" - a performance that was repeated over and over again as I kept punching in results from the 2008-09 NBA season.

The math that matters most is that if I had backed the favorites instead of the underdogs in those nine games, I would have had five winners and four losers, winning $332 and losing $400.

Result: a LOSS of $68 on the day in spite of being right more often than I was wrong.

What kind of crappy deal is that?

Betting the book this way, online and out in the open, is sure to have some seriously expensive down days.

But I confidently predict that soon enough, the bankroll will fatten dramatically, and prior winnings will fund each day's new investments.

I started out with a $1,000 stake for the 7-Dog Experiment and may have to dig deeper.

But the math is loud and clear: as long as the overall dog-to-favorite win ratio remains within a few pips of 0.82 to 1 (45%), the numbers will get greener as time goes by.

Worth noting, in spite of the fact that this test is less than half a month old, is that so far, "dog" odds have averaged +140 or $1.40 on the dollar, and the average bet was 1.37 units ($137).

The win right now, with $850 outstanding from four LTDs, equates to +3.3% of action.

Favorites outnumber underdogs 3-2 in wins to date (39/26) which, at 40% for dogs is below the overall win percentage that is not just needed but confidently expected.

I have learned one very important sports betting lesson among many others, and that is that bets on anything other than the money line, which is a no-frills bet that your selection will score more goals or points than the other guys, seriously screws up the math.

After several cash-less tutorials in the sports books at my local casinos, I cautiously opened my wallet and confined my picks to straightforward scores or "sides" bets, and did pretty well for a few weeks.

Then I talked myself into simultaneously trying multiple doubles or "round robins," and all of a sudden, the wheels fell off.

The damage was not great, but I was mad at myself from defying the arithmetic that I have always relied upon as the bedrock of everything I do with my money when I am inside a casino.

My friend Pete had the same experience and I was well aware of the trouble he got into, so that makes my mistake even less explicable.

Pete was several grand ahead of the game, even while ignoring my advice, until he started betting spreads and totals instead of plain and simple scores.

Jumping the tracks was a far more expensive mistake for Pete than it was for me, to the tune of around $10,000. Ouch!

Each one of the databases I am working on includes run lines, puck lines, spreads and totals so that one of these days I can take a closer look at betting options that for now are a mystery to me.

Did my guys win or lose? That's all I care about at this point, aside from remaining confident that picking more losers than winners won't hurt me because (sing along with me!) I'll win more when I win than I lose when I lose.

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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Surprise! Even a 58.3% season win rate is not enough to turn favorites into moneymakers. But "dogs" squeak by at 41.7%.

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My baseball database for the full 2009 season is finally done, and in a while I will be posting all kinds of charts and summaries that will enable anyone with iron discipline and a little money to make a long-term profit at sports betting.

Pity the baseball season is all but dead and gone for 2009, you might think.

But in fact the basic principles that I suspected might apply to baseball and for which I now have a season's worth of evidence can also be seen in basketball, hockey and pro-football results.

College football, with its crazy odds and its plethora of totally unpredictable betting options, is a sport I have decided to save for another lifetime and will probably keep right on ignoring!

I want to backtrack to what got me started on all this: a friend's excited prediction that the high win rates claimed by professional sports "cappers" offered a positive expectation that had to be a sitting duck for target betting.

My immediate response was that more wins than losses sounds like a gambler's dream. But as long as wins routinely pay substantially less than even money, what looks like positive expectation might turn out to be negative after all.

Months later, with 2,485 baseball games keyed in to my laptop, along with odds, money lines, run lines, totals and all manner of other data that I will probably never need, I can safely say that I was right to "diss" my friend's exciting new investment plan.

Between April 5 and October 4, favorites won almost three games out of five, leaving underdogs out in the cold far more often than not.

But 2,305 $100 flat bets on favorites would have resulted in a season LOSS of $8,580 or 3.72% of total action.

That's because favorites paid, on average, what money lines would show as -151, or a shade over 66 cents on the dollar.

Underdogs, on the other hand, paid more than TWICE that amount ($1.35 to $1), wiping out the disadvantage that logic might suggest was insurmountable, and ending the 2009 season with a profit of $1,750 or +0.8%.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone would be up for a happy dance after winning just a few pennies on thousands of bets spread over six months of daily visits to the sports book.

But what we are left with here is a candidate for target betting which does not require endless hours of play in a smoke-filled casino, rubbing elbows with suicidal fools and battling the vicissitudes of cards and dice!

As the database was growing, I "played" bets as if they were in chronological order so that the outcome of a given game would determine the value of the next bet.

Statistically, there was nothing wrong with this approach.

But in a real sports book setting, you obviously can't do what I was doing, unless you limited wagers to a handful a day and adopted a revolving door approach, waiting for a 10:00am game to end before deciding what to bet at 1:00pm, then 4:05pm and 7:30pm, or whatever.

My early suggestion to my friend "Pete" was that he split his betting budget (a large one, as it turned out) into multiple lines or series, so that he could place his bets in a single block once a day.

He would then use the result of Monday's first bet to set the value of the first bet on Tuesday, the second result to determine next day's second bet, and so on, running as many lines as he could afford.

Each line would independently unfold according to a modified version of the standard target betting rules, adjusted to reflect the difference between even-money paybacks on winners and returns that average better than 1.25:1 every time.

Against table games with a persistent negative expectation, for example, target betting needs as wide a spread as possible, often making it necessary to suspend play in mid-recovery because the table limit (the "green ceiling") has vetoed the next bet.

Sports books have limits too, but they are rendered meaningless by the fact that there's always time to split a bet up into fractions to make it palatable to all the books in town (or on the Net or wherever!).

We have seen from the 2009 baseball season that a win rate of almost 60% won't make favorites profitable over time, while a WR of less than 42% for underdogs is a moneymaker because of paybacks averaging 1.35 to 1.

What I am working on now is discovering a range of "dog odds" that eliminates the need to cover every game on the schedule on a given day.

But what I am most anxious to blow to pieces is every subjective element in the bet selection process.

I believe now more than ever that "the numbers" provide all the guidance we need to make steady money betting on sports.

Forget "cappers," forget team loyalty, even knowledge, experience and sound judgment.

And as mechanical or bloodless as that may sound, my guess is that winning steadily is a more than acceptable substitute for reliance on hunches and other emotional methods of bet selection.

Preliminary examination of the baseball data confirms with thousands of bets what's already present in a few dozen basketball results, and hundreds from the current NFL and NHL seasons.

It all comes down to the simple truth that with up to 90% of all sports bets going on favorites, in order for the bookies to win, underdogs must win too.

More about this later...

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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