Back to business after the holiday break! And for a while, posts will just consist of each day's bets...

_
NBA: New Orleans Hornets +120, Minnesota Timberwolves +115, Milwaukee Bucks +120, Golden State Warriors +130; NHL: Carolina Hurricanes +100, Montreal Canadiens +120, St. Louis Blues +110.

Game starts are from 4:05pm PST to 7:35pm.

Sunday, December 27 at 09:20am

Something a little different, courtesy of Windows 7 (which makes my new laptop more like an Apple, at 1/3 the price!)...


I will use these snaps from now on, before and after the results are in. The numbers to the right of the pick indicates odds, followed by the spread and the total. On the far right is the bet value. The red number on the far left is the total wagered that day, and below that is the overall DWR (dog win rate), which shows 100% before scores are entered.

Below is an update of the win to date for the 7-dog trial that today began its 57th day with a profit of 44 units ($4,400).

Dognostics will no doubt protest that a win of two grand a month isn't enough - those among them who don't dismiss the data outright, that is.

What we see below is confirmation that a dogs-only selection method paired with target betting is reliable and viable.

As predicted, the DWR has settled at very close to 45%, although it took a while to get there.

Also as predicted, backing underdogs has proved more profitable than putting money on the favorite in the same games (up $4,400 vs. a LOSS of $3,600 to date).



Monday, December 28 at 01:15pm

Let's not talk about Sunday (today's another day).

The bad new is summarized below, and the bottom seven lines show today's bets:-



NOTE: The DWR for Sunday was 28% overall, and the red numbers on the far right under today's date will not count as a loss unless all of Monday's dog picks go south...

Tuesday, December 29 at 09:20am

Dogs bounced back Monday, but one of our three wins was a minimum bet, so the benefit was...minimal!

That's how it goes sometimes, and these things always even out over time.

We have now had three bad days after one so-so day, but there have been no surprises. Monday, I entered the wrong pick on the chart and the right one won.

But again, that's how it goes. Mistakes happen, and once a ticket is in hand, the bet can't be reversed (unless, of course, you spot the error while you are still at the bookie's window).

Today's bets:-


Wednesday, December 30 at 02:20pm

Five right picks in seven is becoming almost a habit!

As it happens, with a 37% win rate, dogs didn't do especially well yesterday.

But there were five underdog wins in 13 games...and we nailed every one of them.

Sweet!

Right now, we're at just under 83% of our best win to date in the 7-dog trial, and all of the ups and downs we have seen so far have followed the predicted pattern.

I'm not always right, but it makes me very happy when I am, especially when there is money at stake.

Here's the latest update, including today's bets:-


And here is a chart that tracks each one of the seven series to date. The red lines are for series that are a drain on the overall win/profit number. Four out of seven lines are ahead of the game, and unrecovered LTDs total about $6,900 before today's game times.



Remember that when dogs lose, the bookies lose, which is why those three red lines trending below zero will all be in profit in time.

It's just the natural order of bookie economics...

Thursday, December 31 at 03:20pm

Maybe the last day of the month and year will be kinder to us than Wednesday was!

Two dog wins out of seven might have been OK if both of the picks had not been $100 bets.

But having started out by treating each line as a totally separate entity, I'm stuck with that methodology, at least for this test.

Next time, I will probably spread the load so that if there is a substantial LTD to be recovered, minimums will not apply.

And the max should certainly be more than 5x the minimum, to better exploit winning patterns that have shown themselves as frequently in the past two months as I predicted they would.

I have no complaints about where we're at right now. What matters most is that we are still in profit, whereas a punter backing favorites all the way would be in a hole almost $4,000 deep.

Here's the latest summary, with today's bets in the lowest panel, as usual:-


Friday, January 1 at 11:50pm

Most of the time, I manage to get each day's dog picks up ahead of game times, but today I am allowing myself a little leeway in honor of the start of a new decade!

Pickings were thin today but as I type this, no games are even close to over, and in any case, dog odds dictate my choices, whatever mid-game scores might suggest.

In the next few days, I'm going to have to deal with the task of partitioning the hard drive on my new laptop so that I can run Windows XP and Windows 7 separately.

This is a process forced on countless thousands of folks with new computers, so I know I have plenty of company as I try to work my way through this.

I also know that I am not about to shell out hundreds more bucks to upgrade all my software, especially since my old files will mostly be inaccessible if I do that.

I can't imagine I will ever use up close to 500GB of storage!

My cranky old Dell Inspiron 1100 has 40GB and after five years of pounding away and creating thousands of spreadsheet files ranging in size from 0.5MB to 40MB, there is still a ton of room remaining (admittedly helped in part by my use of an add-on drive).

Today's bets:

(College FB) Florida State +125
(NHL) Philly Flyers +115 and Atlanta Thrashers +160
(College BB) Creighton +100, W Virginia +175, S Illinois +110, Illinois State +170

There are some longshots in there and I don't expect miracles.

Thursday set us back a little (-$315) but as always, I am confident that a rebound is a-coming...

Saturday, January 2 at 12:00pm

So far, I'm not liking January much!

Today's bets:-

(NBA) Chicago Bulls +135, OK City Thunder +100
(NHL) Vancouver Canucks +105, Tampa Bay Lightning +120, Colorado Avalanche +105, Atlanta Thrashers +120, Detroit Red Wings +115

It would be nice to see more than two dog wins out of seven picks, but if wishes were horses...

Sunday, January 3 at 10:00am

Five right picks out of seven again yesterday. Ho hum...

It means we're on an upswing again, thanks to a DWR that averaged out at 50% overall.

I will start a new chapter later in the week, with the usual charts and summaries, but for now here are today's bets:-

(NFL) Jacksonville Jaguars +115, Philadelphia Eagles +130, Miami Dolphins +135 and Tampa Bay Buccaneers +110
(NBA) Toronto Raptors +135 and Philadelphia 76ers +165
(NHL) Florida Panthers +125

Monday, January 4 at 09:55am

The NFL was a total bust for the 7-dog trial yesterday, but the remaining three picks were winners, reducing the overall loss for the day to just over five units.

When my anonymous friend "Peter Punter" was depending on so-called 'Cappers for his sports book picks, he and I had a standing disagreement about what I called throwaway wins to describe bets that were disproportionately small and had an insignificant impact on the long-term recovery goal.

That same problem is has dogged (!) the current target betting trial almost since it began on November 1.

Since I am not about to change the rules in mid-trial, I have created a "shadow" spreadsheet which allows me to assess the effect of keeping bets at or near the maximum even after an individual series or line has achieved turnaround.

The target betting variation that has applied to the 7-dog trial since the beginning now stands at 14 units ($1,400) ahead with $10,000 in unrecovered LTDs.

The win to date represents just over 1.0% of total action, which is no small achievement given that "dogs" have a win rate of less than 45% right now.

The win also represents a little more than five average bets.

In contrast, spreading the load to avoid throwaway minimum wins when unrecovered LTDs at any point exceed $700 or 7x the lowest permitted bet steps the total profit up to 3.0% of action and 13x the average bet.

Another significant contrast: Backing favorites throughout the 429 games in the trial so far would have resulted in a LOSS of $3,540 to date, or -8.25% of action given flat bets of $100 a pop.

In the next few days I will know how the trial would have done if all qualifying dog bets in the +100 to +180 range had been included.

For now, it's enough to know that we are still in the black and that we are poised for a comeback when nature takes its course...

Today's bets:

(NBA) OKC Thunder +125
(College BB) Drexel +120, Utah State +110, UC Davis +100, Idaho +110, Canisius +115, Rider +115

No screaming long-shots today, but college basketball is always scary territory to me!

Tuesday, January 5 at 03:45pm

I hoped to get a new post started today (who knows, I may yet manage it!) but the clock is ticking towards Tuesday game times and I need to get new picks up before the buzzer goes.

Monday was another day for five right picks (almost six but Idaho blew a solid early lead in college basketball and spoiled our fun) and almost every time that happens, someone warns me that I can't hope for that kind of "dumb luck" too often.

For the record, there is nothing dumb or fluky about days in which dogs win more often than they lose.

Monday was our 65th betting day in this 7-dog trial that started on November 1, actually #64 allowing for the Christmas break.

In that time, dogs have brought home the bacon in four games or more out of seven a total of 23 times or 36% of all days. Hardly a fluke!

There were 13 days with 4 right picks out of 7, 8 with 5 wins out of 7, and 2 with 6 out of 7. Sadly, no clean sweeps. Yet.

So how about keeping this whole dog thing in perspective and recognizing that we are betting with the bookies rather than against them, with long-term losses ergo being very unlikely indeed.

After cashing in yesterday's tickets, we are up $2,890 or +2.4% of all action to date, and the win now represents 10.5 average bets at $276.

We have done better in the past, and we will again.

Today's dog picks:-

(NBA) Sacramento Kings +125 and Portland Trailblazers +100.
(CBB) Rhode Island +100, South Florida +110 and New Mexico +145.
(NHL) Florida Panthers +110 and Edmonton Oilers +100.

Catching up after the holiday break may take me the rest of this week, and as soon as I can, I will post results from bets on all qualifying underdogs.

Wednesday, January 6 at 04:00pm

I have just a few minutes to go before the first Wednesday game times, and my plans to open a whole new post will have to wait another day (catching up from the holidays is taking longer than I hoped).

Tuesday was a disaster, although at least wasn't a skunking.

Our win to date was slashed in half, but given the hammering an all-favorites bettor would have suffered since November 1, being ahead $1,400 is something to be at least a little bit proud of, I reckon.

We now stand at just over 33% of the best win to date, which is disappointing but far from fatal.

I plugged in a new test today to continue the day-by-day win analysis that I started yesterday.

It turns out that 3 or more dogs have been winners just over 60% of the time, 3/7 being a few pips shy of a 43% win rate.

There have been two "skunkings" in the last 64 days, and on 3 days, the best we could manage was a miserly one right pick out of seven underdog selections.

We were right 3/7 on 16 days, 4/7 on 13 days, 5/7 eight times, and 6/7 twice. Clearly, a clean sweep is long overdue because we haven't had one of those yet!

Today's dog bets:-

(NBA) Miami Heat +110 and Golden State Warriors +140
(CBB) VA Commonwealth +105, Providence +145, Duquesne +120
(NHL) Dallas Stars +115 and NY Islanders +135

Can today be worse than Tuesday? Probably not...

Thursday, January 7 at 04:45pm

Today's best-laid plans ganged aglay (as a Scotsman with a mouthful of haggis might put it) because I had to spend an hour on the phone with an AOL tech support gent in India and the service is as crappy now as it was when I started.

I hate to post after game starts, but the truth is it makes no difference.

As I have said before, dog picks are made on the basis of odds, not of what may or may not be the score mid-game.

Yesterday was only a little better than Tuesday, with two right picks instead of just one, but the dog win rate was well below half the long-term average.

The good news is that things will get better. They always do.

Today's bets:-

(NBA) Charlotte Bobcats +145
(NFL) Boston Bruins +110, NY Rangers +105, FL Panthers +120, Col Blue Jackets +110, St. Louis Blues +135 and Detroit Red Wings +105.

I'm still working on a result for all qualifying dogs being bet rather than just seven a day, and have at least finished keying in all the games between December 16 and the start of the New Year.

One hard fact that has jumped out at me is that favorites won more than 65% of all games in the NFL season that is now winding down.

That suggests that either "Harrahs Dave" was indulging in chronic wishful thinking when he scribbed "Dogs 51.5%" on my betting schedule way back when, or he was callously leading me to slaughter.

I don't believe the latter (he seemed like a nice guy) but it really doesn't matter either way.

What does matter is that backing the favorite in every NFL game since August would have left a punter in a deep and wide hole in spite of that huge win rate.

More about that next time...

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.
_

A funny thing happened on the way to Christmas: the 7-dog trial hit a new high, then slid back a few bucks. The only one who wasn't surprised was me.

_
Something I learned about modern technology this year, with just a few days to go before we start a new decade, is that sometimes, things don't go as planned.

I figured that with Touch in hand, I would be able to read all the data I needed on www.freescoresandodds.com and stay on top of each day's bets that way.

Not so.

The service (which is excellent, by the way) is naturally set up for wide screens, so with a PDA, the choice is between illegible and inaccessible.

Then the WiFi went down at my son's house, rendering two Mac laptops and a Mac desktop and the Touch virtually useless.

By then I was cross-eyed from squinting at the small screen on my gizmo, and about ready to defenestrate it next time I hit the freeway.

The problem was solved when Santa came early with a new laptop that has an 18.4ins screen, plus six times the ram and 120 times the storage of my dying Dell.

Combine that with the blazing speed of the Wi-Fi at my friend Pat's gorgeous B&B in South Pasadena, and you have easy access to anything anywhere in the 'Net.

I won't have final figures until I get home, but the preliminary pre-Christmas bottom line for the 7-dog trial is a win to date of $3,720 or 86% of the new BWTD.

LTDs have dropped to less than $6,000 and that keeps us on target for an overall win to date (WTD) of a little over $10,000 when all the series are back to minimum bets after full recoveries.

Four of the seven series are substantially in the black right now, and we can be sure that the others will fall in line in due time.

It stands to sense that we're going to take it in the shorts on days when underdogs underperform.

But it also stands to sense that as the sample grows, the DWR will move closer to 45%, or the win rate at which a profit is inevitable.

A couple of updated screen shots:





The first shot above illustrates how target betting does much better than flat $100 bets against the same sample of underdogs, and the red line tracks the futility of betting a fixed $100 against every favorite in the same set of games.

There is, clearly, no money to be made from backing favorites.

If you were a bookie, your money would be on underdogs, but you would be perfectly happy to take bets on so-called sure things knowing that even if your customers win more bets than they lose, they can't beat the odds and walk away with a profit.

Christmas brings a two-day near shutdown to the world of bettable sports, so I won't be looking for more investment opportunities until December 26, or Boxing Day back in the old country.

We're also descending en masse on Santa Anita Racetrack for opening day that day, so there will be plenty to think about...

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.
_

Why those LTD numbers matter: They tell you how far ahead you'll be when you hit all your targets - and while the wait can be hell, you will hit them!

_
Sunday was a mirror image of Saturday, with two dog wins and five losses.

But one of the many benefits of backing underdogs is that you lose less when you lose than you win when you win...except when the "wrong" pick wins and you miss out on a maximum payback!

The 7-dog trial is now just one unit away from breaking even, which represents a trivial return on more than $50,000 worth of action and a month and a half of time and effort.

The good news is that unrecovered targets (LTDs) total almost $7,700 at this point, providing an encouraging glimpse into the future.

As I have said in many past posts, one of the great positives built into target betting is that the rules tell you when you should stop betting the max and fall back to the baseline.

Most punters will increase or at least repeat their bets when they feel they are on a winning streak, and that can be very profitable - for a while. Then what?

Downturns are a thin hair more probable and therefore more frequent than upturns, but you can't know you are in one until serious damage has been done.

Better to recover your losses, be happy with a relatively small profit on top of those losses, and reduce your bet values along with your level of exposure.

Today, we have four "max" bets in play, two at $200, and one at the $100 minimum.

I will be happiest if the maximum bets all turn out to be winners, but this long-term process is not about me getting what I want all at once.

It takes time, and although yo-yo patterns like the one we are in right now are frustrating and disappointing, the long-term prognosis is for profit, profit, profit.

Before today's games, dogs are $127 ahead in the 7-dog trial that began on November 1.

Favorites won 57% of all games, but flat-betting $100 on the "smart choice" every time would have put us in a hole $2,290 deep.

It's as well to keep that in mind as the trial goes into the second day of its seventh week!

Today, Monday, our money is on the NBA's Washington Wizards at +115, then six NHL teams, Florida Panthers +120, Atlanta Thrashers +120, Nashville Predators +110, Ottawa Senators +115, Philadelphia Flyers +125 and Montreal Canadiens +115.

Wednesday, December 16 at 2:15pm:

Monday had four dog wins and a day's profit of $555, then Tuesday delivered one dog win and six losses costing $1,970.

Talk about a rollercoaster!

One bit of good news is that I get to take a break for a couple of weeks, even if the 7-dog trial does not!

I'll be away from my home base at least until December 27, so posts and updates to the Google docs spreadsheet will be sporadic.

I will, however, keep track of qualifying bets every day, updating the files whenever I can from various family computers.

After yesterday's almost dog-free debacle, total LTDs now top $10,000 and we're about $1,300 in the hole.

The LTD number tells us where we will be after everything has come together the way the numbers predict.

Today can hardly be worse than Tuesday! Can it...?

Our picks are: (NBA) Charlotte Bobcats +135, LA Clippers +100, OKC Thunder +110, Washington Wizards +130, (NHL) Carolina Hurricances +105, NY Islanders +125, Phoenix Coyotes +115.

Whenever I can, given the perils of other folks' access, I will make sure each day's dog choices are posted ahead of game times.

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.
_

Another day, another fluke. Or maybe underdogs really are supposed to win as often as the numbers say they should.

_
Sunday brought five wins out of seven picks again, but no doubt there are people out there who will view this statistical correction (my interpretation) as a short-lived anomaly.

The 7-dog trial is now officially out of the hole, and hopefully headed back above its peak to date, which at this point seems like a lifetime ago.

The peak (+$3,065) actually came on November 19th after a week-long winning streak which would also be considered an aberration by diehard dognostics.

Here's the the state of the bankroll prior to bets for today, Monday, December 7, 2009:-


Today's selections are the NFL's Baltimore Ravens at +165, NBA's San Antonio Spurs (+115), then five puck picks, the New Jersey Devils (+120), Atlanta Thrashers (+105), TB Lightning (+115), Edmonton Oilers (+100) and Colorado Avalanche (+125).

Bets are high right now with more than $6,000 in LTDs in our sights, but not as high as they would have been with a max higher than the 5x I chose to apply at the start of the 7-dog trial.

I haven't crunched any numbers for favorites for weeks, because for the life of me I can't see why anyone would risk good money on a bet that returns substantially less than a buck for a buck.

I admit I'm biased, because for years I have been telling baccarat players to stay away from bets on Banker at all costs, since the house rake cuts the payback on a win to 95 cents on the dollar.

One day, I will gather together a few thousand real outcomes and find out what woulda happened if target betting had multiplied each LTD by the known payback to set the NB value.

For those who don't speak the lingo, that would mean that if after a win, the LTD was -$500 and the odds on a favorite offered -150, the next bet value would be 1.5x$500 = $750.

(Odds of -175 would multiply the target by 1.75 to get the NB, -200 would double the LTD value, and so on).

It would be great to see another "dog day" after a week's worth of painful losses, but as usual I'm not counting on anything other than statistical probability.

Tuesday, December 8 at 10:40am:

Yesterday was another treadwater day, with three dog wins covering the losses from four wrong picks, leaving $25 in change.

That's only the fourth time in 37 days that we have ended with a win of less than $100, and while I don't subscribe to the common casino mantra that "a push is as good as a win" I can certainly concede that a piddling profit is preferable to a punishing loss!

As before, this is a critical day for the 7-dog trial, with $2,500 in bets chasing LTDs adding up to $7,445.

Feedback I have been getting lately suggests that the $3,000 best win to date and the "hole" of about the same depth that was recently conquered, represent a floor and a ceiling that we will bounce between indefinitely until the wheels finally come off and we crash and burn forever.

The models based upon two seasons of outcomes for four different sports do not in any way bear out that dire forecast, but models can never be as revealing or relevant as an ongoing trial like this one.

Slumps are, we know, inevitable - but so are spikes like the one we saw last week (the best so far, netting almost $4,000).

Punters who secretly relish their losses, or bookies who rely upon the chronic innumeracy of their clientele, will never accept that "the numbers" hold the key to consistent profits from sports betting.

Bookies, of course, revere the arithmetic: they just don't accept that there is any way it can serve their customers rather than their own bottom line!

You can't win without losing.

That's what betting always comes down to.

But that does not mean that losses must always wipe out prior wins, resulting in an eventual, inescapable deficit.

Wednesday, December 9 at 10:00am:

There's just one word for yesterday's underdog performance: Ouch!

We didn't stand much of a chance with an overall DWR that barely topped 20%.

The NBA had three dog wins, and we caught one of them.

The NHL lineup had one and we picked it.

There were two underdog victories in the 17-game college basketball schedule, but our five picks all went south.

I'd take the NCABB skunking as a warning to stay away from college games, but they have been kind to us in the past.

All we can hope for is a better day today, from these picks: (NBA) New Jersey Nets +110, Minnesota Timberwolves +135, Houston Rockets (+125), (NHL) Columbus Blue Jackets +150, NY Islanders +135, St. Louis Blues +150 and Minnesota Wild +130.

If I believed in luck, I'd say it was tough luck that neither of Tuesday's wins were max bets, but I don't, so forget I said that.

Meantime, green ink is red again.

For now!

Thursday, December 10 at 11:20am:

Four wins Wednesday, although one of them leaves me with egg on my face. Again.

I had the Columbus Blue Jackets listed as a "dog" at +150 when in fact the team was favored at -170.

The last time I messed up on bets, it cost me dearly, but this time the "mis-pick" won.

As regrettable as they are, occasional errors are inevitable, and the reality is that yesterday's #52 went on to the next stage (the bookie's window) with money down.

Obviously, I won't be refusing today's payback and saying, "Oops, I meant to bet on the losers, so keep your money."

We ended the day recovering half of Tuesday's damage, and out of the red by less than one unit overall - a lousy return on 39 days of betting, but a lot better than staring up at distant daylight from the bottom of a very deep hole!

If we'd backed favorites, reversing every bet so far but putting down a fixed $100 each time, we'd be almost $2,000 in the red in spite of an overall faves win rate of 57%.

That doesn't seem to me a preferable option!

Perhaps a case could be made for backing favorites on a sliding scale, risking more on shorter odds, but I can't bring myself to embrace an arrangement where you lose 100% and win a small fraction of what you risked.

Sure, you get your original bet back (as in yesterday's mistaken win, which returned $790 on a $500 bet) but the big red -$2,000 that applies to the 7-dog trial so far is a powerful disincentive to backing favorites, don't you think?

Friday, December 11 at 9:00am:

A three-dog day yesterday, but we slid back into the red for a while because only one of the winners had a max payback.

No complaints: that's just how it goes sometimes.

Today's bets add up to $2,100 chasing LTDs of $8,680 (and they will catch them eventually!).

I crunched the numbers for scaled betting on favorites, and the ink on the bottom line stayed red.

There have been 271 bets so far, and betting a flat $100 every time would have dropped us in the hole to the tune of $777 to date, nice numbers on an old-fashioned slot machine but not when they're all in red ink on our bottom line.

Four of the seven separate lines or series are in profit, but the three that are not ahead of the game(s) are way behind at -$1,245, -$1,971 and -$3,915.

Time will take care of them.

Obviously, I would prefer to see green in all directions, but this is a long-term project and I am trying to teach myself patience.

They say it's a virtue, after all.

Today's bets: New Jersey Nets (+145), Philly 76ers (+125), OKC Thunder (+115) and Orlando Magic (+135) in the NBA, and Edmonton (+115), Minnesota Wild (+155) and Tampa Bay Lightning (+145) on ice.

Saturday, December 12 at 12:55pm:

We inched ahead by three units yesterday, halving the deficit and leaving us with $2,500 in wagers for today, chasing LTDs of just over $8,000 in all.

I usually mention LTDs in even the briefest of my summaries, because they are the essence of what target betting is all about.

The whole idea is to know when to stop betting large sums and fall back to the minimum.

The "stop win" rule is also critical to a simple Martingale, of course, but a Martingale could not be applied when the maximum permitted bet is only 5x the minimum.

Losing streaks that don't end until the 7th bet have occurred several times since the 7-dog trial began on November 1, and Line 3 suffered 11 consecutive losses at one point before turning its losses around.

A Martingale starting out at $100 would be betting well into six digits after 11 losses, so comparisons between target betting and a double-up progression are irrelevant!

When to quit may be the most important question any bettor has to face, although for most people the answer is simple: When the money runs out.

Quitting when you are ahead is always more profitable than cutting your losses, and giving up too soon, for even the best of reasons, is a fatal error.

Sure, target betting sometimes pushes bet values past the average punter's comfort zone, but it does so methodically and in strict accordance with statistical expectation.

When the target win is achieved, you either quit or start over with a minimum bet. Pressing your luck the way the casinos want and need you to is never an option.

Today's picks are all on ice: Toronto Maple Leafs +110, Montreal Canadiens +130, Buffalo Sabres +100, NY Islanders +105, Detroit Red Wings +115, Phoenix Coyotes +110 and Dallas Stars +120.

Underdogs are due for a boost and we are a long way short of our best win to date.

But as always, today is another day!

Sunday, December 13 at 11:30am:

Saturday brought us five right picks and just two wrongs, and as everyone knows, two wrongs don't beat five rights!

The 7-dog trial starts its seventh week today with all the dog picks coming from the NFL schedule, which according to Dave should not make me nervous, but according to history most certainly does.

The trial is back in the black by just over ten units after Saturday's great showing, and I have my fingers crossed that all those over-sized gladiators in suits of armor don't mess things up today.

It's always tough to make those early game starts on a Sunday, what with snow-shoveling and church-ferrying and other "Day of Rest" chores, and today I missed the starting whistles by miles.

It doesn't mean a thing because my picks are based on pre-game odds, not what the points tally is in mid-game, so here are today's dog selections: Chicago Bears +175, Miami Dolphins +110, KC Chiefs +125, TB Buccaneers +165, Oakland Raiders +110, SD Chargers +160 and NY Giants +105.

The sports book spreadsheet won't be posted until later today because I'm already late climbing back aboard the Sunday treadmill, so those of you who are watching it regularly will have to take my word for it that the bet selections are all pre-game and completely legitimate.

As I always say, what's the sense in cheating when there's no need (or even when there is!)?

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.
_

Saturday is a dog day on ice, with 10 wins in 14 hockey games. Blind luck, or another sign that the math always corrects itself?

_
This just in: "You can't take one good day, or even one bad one, and claim that it proves anything. What will happen to this daffy dog idea of yours is that over time, lucky days that put you ahead will be outnumbered by regular losing days, and you will end up so far in the hole that you will never be able to get out of it."

Let's first of all look at Saturday, December 5, which saw a 70% DWR on the NHL schedule and a more "regular" 44% (4/9) in the NBA lineup.

The total win in the 7-dog trial was $2,650 - not quite enough to get us out of the hole, but it left us hanging onto the edge of it by our fingertips, ready for the boost we need to pull us back into the black (pardon the mixed metaphor).

I have been saying for weeks that slumps in the overall DWR have to be rectified at some point because the bookies are counting on it, and those folk don't count on anything that isn't a copper-bottomed certainty.

When underdogs get beaten up, so do the bookies, and no one making book is doing it to put extra money in the wallets of punters who like to play it safe by backing favorites.

Since this test began on November 1, there have been 16 losing days and 19 winning ones, with the DWR exceeding 40% only 12 times in 35 sessions.

When target betting was first developed for casino table games, which have a generally higher win rate than underdog teams in American ballgames but very rarely pay more than even money on a bet, the whole objective was to recover losses in far fewer bets than it took to lose the dough in the first place.

That remains the paramount goal when the method is adapted for the sports book.

Yesterday, Saturday, we placed our bets hoping for relief from a slump in which we lost more than $4,000 after coming within a couple of hundred bucks of setting a new all-time high.

The damage exceeded $1,000 a day, slightly relieved that week by two days in which we trod water, winning a total of $650.

Target betting assumes that we are always going to lose more bets than we win, so bet values are geared to the need for a quick turnaround when the time is right.

It is quite possible that bets for today, Sunday, will all be flushed down the toilet, setting us back $2,800. But it's not likely simply because, overall, underdogs have maintained a win rate of around 40%, delivering an average of three wins a day.

Because "dogs" pay at least even money and usually better, each win recovers enough to offset one loss, sometimes with change to spare.

Three wins at average odds of +135 will offset four losses, making it a break-even day for the 7-dog trial, and four wins will push us up the ladder a rung or two.

There is nothing unusual (or "lucky") about days with five or six dog wins out of seven games, especially after several days in which underdogs underperformed!

The charts below should help add a little perspective to this never-ending argument in which dognostics keep reciting their mantra that losses are the norm and wins are anomalies.

The first summary tracks games from November 1 in which all dogs within the +100 to +180 range are bet, but the target betting rules (meaning bet values) are applied as if the games were consecutive.

Statistically, there is nothing wrong with treating the games that way, even though it would not be possible in reality.

We are simply treating the outcomes as samples from reality that are in essence random and objective, since we do not determine which team wins or the odds applied.

The second chart tracks the same outcomes in however many separate lines or series would have been needed to enable us to expand the 7-dog trial to cover all bets falling between +100 and +180 on any given day.

As always, these charts and summaries don't prove anything. They simply show what can happen, and probably (but not certainly) will.


Click on an image to enlarge 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.
_

"You should have taken the money and run when you were three grand ahead. You'll never see a number that high again!"

_
The whole point of this project is to demonstrate that this is an ongoing process that does not deviate from a disciplined plan and is exempt from both panic and greed!

All the data so far collected from past and present MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL seasons confirms that while "dog slumps" are inevitable, recovery from them is equally certain.

The situation the 7-dog trial is in right now ($4,200 below its highest point with more than $7,000 tied up in unresolved LTDs) cannot be interpreted as proof of a permanent slide, any more than last week's high point was proof that the concept is unbeatable.

This is a long-term proposition, not a hit-and-run adventure, and only time will tell whether or not following the rules day by day is as effective a strategy as the arithmetic suggests it is.

It's really not that much different from a cautious long-term foray into stocks and shares: Some days you're up, some days you're down, and once in a while you have to dig a little deeper to keep the plan on track.

As I said last time, when underdogs get slammed across the board, bookies get slammed too, and their business is about as long-term as a business can be.

Working on today's dog picks highlighted what might be the bookies' response to the dearth of dog wins in recent days!

Odds on favorites seem to have shortened quite dramatically, with underdogs naturally becoming longer shots on the other side of each equation.

I don't usually pay much attention to odds quoted outside of my +100 to +180 comfort zone, but I will look into that question more closely when I have the time.

Meanwhile, yesterday's selection lopped just a couple of units off the current loss figure, and the day was made more complicated by a series of careless mistakes I made when I was marking up dog picks.

I had a couple of favorites in the mix, which is not permitted and certainly was not intentional, so even though they won (rats!) I had to delete them and replace them with the correct bets.

That meant that instead of climbing out of the hole by more than 5u, I had to settle for a lot less.

Let's face it, accuracy is more important than a few hundred bucks here or there.

The only good news is that the errors went all the way to the bookie's window, which means I get to keep the paltry winnings even though they could not fairly be reflected in the 7-dogs-a-day trial!

No one likes making mistakes, and I am no exception, but with all that's involved in an enterprise like this, occasional slip-ups are pretty much inevitable.

I will try to do better...

Here's the current chart summary for the sports betting file that is updated twice a day at Google Docs. I have to add viewers at my end before the file can be accessed, so anyone who wants to join the party should e-mail me.


Thursday, December 3, 10:35am:

O crappy day!

Great news for dognostics: Yesterday pushed us another 10u-plus into the hole as the dog slump continued.

There were just two underdog wins in 14 basketball and hockey games, and we picked both of them.

A 14% DWR could not possibly be expected to stem the tide of red ink, and all we can do now is wait patiently for the inevitable "correction."

Thursday's picks are: pro-football's Buffalo Bills (+145), Boston Celtics (+105) and Golden State Warriors (+115) from the three-match basketball schedule, and Vancouver Canucks (+125), Toronto Maple Leafs (+140), NY Islanders (+135) and Anaheim Ducks (+120) on ice.

Hey, how much worse can things get?

Good thing the slump is just temporary...

Saturday, December 5, 11:00am:

Thursday's picks gave back a little, Friday's took it away.

Obviously, things are not going according to plan right now!

It's especially frustrating when the smaller bets win, and the bigger ones don't.

But raising bet values across the board is not likely to make things any better when underdogs fall behind, as they have been doing these past few days.

Since the 6/7 win a week ago Friday, the DWR hit 50% just once, but otherwise has slumped as low as 14% and has averaged far less than 40%.

That's life.

Other than that, it comes as no big surprise that betting and waiting in real time is a lot more stressful than applying target betting rules to thousands of outcomes from the various sports databases.

I would like to make the selection process more subjective, confining max bets to options with the shortest odds.

But I made my bed when I set the rules before the start of this 7-dog trial more than a month ago, and now I have to lie in it...and sweat a little.

Today's picks are all NHL games: Carolina Hurricanes (+145), St. Louis Blues (+125), Detroit Red Wings (+110), Colorado Avalanche (+135), Washington Capitals (+120), New York Islanders (+100) and Chicago Blackhawks (+120).

The test is $2,750 in the hole right now, and today's bets total $3,100. That's a fairly scary situation, but there's comfort to be had from the probability (which of course is never the same as a certainty) that underdogs are due for a comeback.

Obviously, the red ink is flowing deep and wide for bets on all qualifying dogs, rather than just seven every day.

But ironically, betting every dog within the prescribed range would by now have dug a hole barely half as deep as the one we're in now.

That's because when the risk of picking the "wrong" bets, objectively or otherwise, is eliminated, every qualifying win counts.

The 7-dog trial has had several days when underdogs did well overall, but the selection process skipped more winners than losers.

There is not a whole lot to be done about that, outside of tightening the range of odds that determines where each day's money is applied.

Meanwhile, the waiting game continues.

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.
_

A 7-dog skunking ends Month #1. But if dogs are losing, so are the poor bookies. And that means the slump can't last!

_
The 7-dog trial has had a few bad days since it started on November 1, but none as bad as Monday.

Right now, we are just a little better off (by about $900) than we would have been if we had picked every qualifying underdog since Day One.

More importantly, we are only a little worse off than we would have been if we had backed favorites all the way.

What most sports punters overlook is that backing favorites can be a frustrating and expensive proposition.

There were 489 games on the 7-dog betting schedule last month, and favorites won 321 of them.

But in spite of a 66% win rate, a flat-bet punter risking $100 every time on favorites would have ended November $920 in the hole.

There were 291 qualifying dogs last month and 117 winners (40%) averaging $1.29 to the dollar...a whole lot better than the 49 cents favorites paid, on average, but not enough to stem the red tide.

Dog bets within the +100 to +180 range lost $2,303. The 7-dog loss at month's end was just over $1,400.

It is an absolute mathematical certainty that the current dog slump will end.

And nothing makes it more sure than the fact that a disproportionate percentage of favorite wins puts a big fat dent in the bookies' bottom line.

My heart doesn't bleed for the bookies and never will, but as long as their success means money in the bank for me, I am still rooting for them!

This is also as good a test as my dogcentric strategy will ever get.

Skeptics would have bailed out long ago, assuming they'd ever got started on this.

But the trial is a long-term test and better days are ahead.

It does not require genius-level computer smarts to come up with a simulation that tests the arithmetic that underpins the all-dogs concept.

First, you need a column of random numbers that sets the payback value between +100 and +180.

Then alongside that, wins and losses with a negative expectation around 10%, and next to that a column that applies the simple target betting rules.

There will be tough times, for sure, just like the slump that has us temporarily on the ropes right now.

But every time, the math will set things right eventually.

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.
_

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.
_