Saturday, October 16, 2010

Winning Percentage of Winners

Many people say they can picks the winners of the NFL games,
but not against the spread. The truth is if you can pick the winners
you'd do great against the line. For example, through week 5 of the
2010 season, the winning team is 62-11  84.9%. against the spread.

Week 5 Results and Trends

Best Bets went 3-0 last week! Free picks had a winning week as
well at 6-5. The dogs are howling in the NFL right now. They've won
every week! I can't remember ever seeing dogs win every week.

The favorites haven't had a winning week yet. This is going to end,
and when it does the Favs will have a huge week. My research has
shown that when things get out of whack in a certain categories, it
 tends to snap back in a big way. So far the dogs have covered
63.0 % of the time.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Week 4 Results and Trends

Best Bets went 1-2 last week. I've been working hard to pinpoint the problems this season.

Home favorites went 2-6 this week making them 12-22 35.3% for the season.

Home dogs are 16-9 64% for the season. The dogs have won every week so far.

That trend is going to end. I'm still looking for the favs to have a big week. The totals for the season are neck and neck, with 30 games going under the total and 31 going over.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Week 2 Results and Trends

Best Bets went 2-2 last week. A late pick took me from a winning week to a tying week. I'm not happy with that mistake, but I'm ready to break out this week.

Home favorites went 5-6 this week. Home dogs went 4-0, which makes them 9-2 for the season. Home teams went 9-6 and favorites went just 5-10. I'm looking for the visiting favorites to have a good week.

I have been tracking how the unders did during the first two weeks. Seven games went under this week, 9 went over. So for the first 2 weeks, 17 games went under and 14 went over for a net profit of 1.6 units. Be sure and keep this research in mind next season.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Week 1 results and trends

I got off to a rough start last week, with mixed results. My Best Bets went 2-3. The good news is my free picks went 7-3, which is very encouraging. In earlier blog  posts I wrote about taking the under in the first 2 weeks of the season and week 1 proved no exception. Ten games went under last week and 5 went over. I highly encourage anyone out there to look at playing the unders in games this week. Home favorites went 4-3 ATS last week while home dogs went 5-2. Overall home teams went 9-5 last week, while all favorites went just 6-8.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

First 2 weeks totals

Over the summer I decided to do some research. I wondered how fast offenses and defenses come together to start the season. Did one have the advantage over the other? It seemed to me that a good place to look would be unders and overs. So I looked at totals for the first 2 weeks of the season, going back 6 years. Below are the numbers:

----------------Week 1----------------------Week 2
------------under -------over -------under -------over -------total under ---total over ---Win % ----units won
2009-------8-------------8-------------7------------9-------------15---------------17--------------------------- -3.7

2008 ------9-------------7------------ 7------------7-------------16---------------14--------------------------  +0.6
2007 -----10 -----------6 -----------10 -----------6 ------------20---------------12--------------------------- +6.8
2006 -----12 -----------4 ------------7------------8-------------19----------------12-------------------------- +5.8
2005 ------9------------6------------12------------4-------------21----------------10------------------------ +10.0
2004 ------9------------7------------10------------6-------------19----------------13-------------------------- +4.7

-----------------------------------------------------------------------110---------------78-----------58.5------- +24.2

In the 12 weeks that were checked, 8 of them showed that under the total was the way to go. All in all, 8 winning weeks, 4 losing weeks ( I'm counting the 2 tying weeks as losses of course.) In fact, every season for the last 6 shows that if someone blindly bet the under in every game for the first 2 weeks, they’d have won. Over those 6 seasons, this blind system hits at 58.5% for a profit of 24.2 units. Of course, the catch is making 16 bets a week blindly can lead to devastating losses if (and when!) you run into a bad week. Sixteen blind bets is too risky.

However, it can help point us in the right direction. Simply put: You should tend to look for games to bet under. This is a concept that I haven’t seen discussed much. When you pick a game at random, it’s 50-50. Imagine a box with 100 marbles in it, 50 black and 50 white. Every time you reach into the box and pull out a black marble, you win your bet. A white one, you lose. When someone handicaps a game, what he’s doing is finding reasons that make him believe that the odds are better than 50-50. As long as he can pick 53% or better, he’ll win. As he does his research, he finds reasons to bet on a certain team. When he gets to a certain point, say where he feels that his pick has a 60% chance of being right, he makes his bet. In his mind, the selection isn’t 50-50. The selection is 60-40. So, in effect, after all is said and done, he’s reaching into a box with 60 black marbles and only 40 white ones.

So, using what we know about the first 2 weeks of the season, we can say, at least for the past 6 seasons, the box of marbles isn’t 50-50. The box has 58 black marbles in it, representing unders, and 42 white ones, representing overs. What this means is, if the trend continues, betting on the under is much preferred for the first 2 weeks. Betting on the over would lead to serious trouble. Would you want to reach into that box looking for a white marble, if there were only 42 white ones out of 100? Clearly, given this information, you’d bet a game under or not at all in the first 2 weeks.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

To monitor or not to monitor... that is the question.

I've struggled, throughout the 14 years I've been doing ProgsPicks.com, with the question of whether or not to use a monitor service.

I've had several bad experiences with monitor services in the past, from mistakes being made to the service going out of business and me losing all the money I paid them. But by far the biggest reason I don't use them is that they don't do what they're supposed to do. What I mean by this is that they don't always confirm picks.

Virtually all the monitor services out there don't just monitor picks. They have contests and competition between handicappers. The only way to do this fairly is to have them all picking from the same line. But that's the problem. An example may help here:

Most services judge all handicappers based on the Sunday line, no matter when they release their picks. I release my picks using the Thursday line. Say I release the Colts -2.5 on Thursday, but Sunday lots of money comes in and moves the line to Colts -3.5 and, of course, they wind up winning the game by 3. My clients got and bet the line at -2.5. I'm taking it as a win. But the monitor service counts it as a loss! I'm being honest, they're being honest, yet two different results are recorded! And that will happen a few times a season with the 80 or so Best Bets I make. How would you feel when what I say doesn't match what they say?

I feel that a monitor service should do only one thing - verify that what I post as my record is what I released on my web site, but that isn't what happens. Can you see my dilemma with this? That isn't really the way they set it up.

I've tried to get around this by doing it myself. I did this by having people sign up for a newsletter, and within a few minutes after kickoff, I sent out my picks so they would know exactly what I picked. So if they had any doubts at all, they could watch me for a few weeks and know that what I released is what I had as my record. I made that very clear as they signed up for the newsletter. However, I kept getting e-mails from people saying something like this: "I got your picks but it was too late to bet on them! They didn't do me any good!" As much as I tried to tell people that the picks were being sent so they could see them and know what they were, NOT for them to bet on, they didn't seem to get it. I gave up on the idea.

All that being said, you do have to be sure that a site does what it says. You'd be right in saying anyone can post that they went 3-0 last week. I feel that new handicappers should use a monitor service, no matter that the records will be slightly different, because they have to build that trust.

So, how can you trust me? Glad you asked! Three reasons come to mind:

1. I make most of my sales from repeat business. If I were to juggle the numbers, even once a year, I'd lose all the people who bought that week. If I were buying from someone and they said they won when they lost, I'd NEVER give them another chance at my money! I'm sure you agree with that. I've been doing this for 14 years, and I'd have lost all my clients by now if I was dishonest. Repeat business is too hard to come by.

2. I think you can trust me when you look at my past records. I've got some excellent years posted. I also have some losing years posted. Someone trying to fake you out wouldn't show you the bumps in the road. I strive to be honest with my clients, and as self-serving as it sounds, I don't want to lose anyone's trust. It's too hard to get in the first place.

3. How do you know this isn't my first year on the web? How do you know I've been around for 14 years? There's a neat little site that helps out. It's an Internet archive, and they take a snapshot of web pages several times a year. You can put in any web site and see how things have changed. I just went there and typed in ProgsPicks.com. Very neat web site. It's very interesting to see how things have changed. I'm saying this because this shows you that I've been around for a long time. This only lists my web site from 2000 on, but I did switch to a different webhosting service around that time, so I guess that must have had something to do with that. As you can see, I've been here for a long time. I hope that this, in some way, makes it easier to trust me. Wow. I just went there and clicked on the Aug. 15th, 2000 link, because it was the first link, and right there on the front page I'm talking about the newsletter and people getting the picks after kickoff. LOL That's too funny. What are the odds of that?? I'm writing about it and then I find it. Here's the link to the Internet archive. Have fun with it.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.progspicks.com

Fair warning, the website looked terrible back in 2000. It's changed several times over the years. It's interesting to click on all the different years.

Why The Prog?

Handicapping has changed over the past few decades. Thirty years ago people would pay for inside information. That certainly could get you a winning edge, but nowadays there isn’t inside information to get for the most part. Virtually all information is made public. So what good are handicappers today if anyone with a computer can have access to the same information? Well, the truth is that yes, every Tom, Dick and Harry does have, or can get, the information with just a few clicks. But that’s also the problem. There’s too much information to sort though, too many factors that go into a play.

That’s where we come in. We've been online and picking winners since 1996! With our years of experience, we hone in on the relevant facts, throw out the trends that don’t matter, sift though useless information to concentrate on what really matters and form a logical opinion.

We offer our Best Bets at a reasonable price and analyses and free picks on the rest of the week's action. Don't make a move until you check us out at ProgsPicks.com!