THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tango, that is my interpretation from the table you posted.  I can’t get to the site (firewall-work) to read more in detail.  If so, betting the same on every game is not good.  I wonder if he is also accounting for the “vig” in his study and if so is using opening or closing lines.  Either way, a ROI of 1.24% is not very good.  Could you expand a little on his methodology.
vr, Xei

A positive return against the vigorish is pretty impressive, if, indeed, that’s what he’s done.  I’m not saying it’s necessarily difficult, though ... I haven’t seen any sabermetric attempts before.  At a 1.24% advantage, it’s not like you’d have half the world trying it.  As Xeifrank says, that’s a pretty crappy risk-adjusted return.

And why should we care about some guy writing about his gambling picks on the internet?  99.99% of them are hucksters, although not all of them are intentional hucksters (i.e., they actually believe they can get a long-term edge).

“copyrighted mathematical model...”

You can’t copyright a math model. In some cases, you can copyright computer code, but I doubt he did that either.

The web site looks like something out of the 1980’s and is horrible to navigate.  I cannot find the results that Tango mentioned anywhere and I am not about to waste my time looking around a “handicapping” web site.  I also cannot find where he describes his methodology.

The guy also sounds like somewhat of an numskull.

And yes, it looks like $100 bets per game and that his edge over those 9 years was 1.24%.  As Xeifrank said, that is nothing to brag about.  The vig on baseball is only around 2% and if you bet dogs it is even less than that (the public likes to bet favorites).

Given that the guy can write anything he wants as far as his results are concerned, and given that ALL internet handicappers lie about their results, the guy is either the most honest tout ever or a complete idiot.

And yet somehow a story about him and his site landed on Foxnews.com

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/10/mathematician-predicts-baseball-season/

I’d say he’s doing a pretty good job of getting noticed…

He’s done this before:

http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/search?q=bukiet

I think if you search BTN, I reviewed something about his work there too, many years ago.

Assuming this guy is telling the truth, 1.24% is a reasonable return for someone who is betting big (5 figures/game)--a lot of pros wouldn’t mind that kind of ROI.  If he’s a $100 bettor, he should have better things to do with his time than to make $1.24 per game.

People who boast of their gambling prowess usually claim a greater ROI than 1.24%, precisely because that number does not seem very impressive.  This doesn’t mean he’s being upfront about it, but he’s not doing the best job of suckering anyone into buying his picks.

A savvy bettor should have access to enough different sportsbooks that the effective vig is well under 2%.

1.24% is a reasonable return, but the problem is that a system that can expect to make only 1.24% will have some very large downswings and if you just happen to start betting using this system at the wrong time (think of buying a stock at its peak) you will lose a good chunk of your bankroll.  When you start, you don’t know if you are buying high or low or somewhere in between.  The big time gambler will NOT use a system that has an expected return of 1.24%.  But sure, an after the fact ROI of 1.24% is nice as is any positive ROI.
vr, Xei

Right, I showed the year-by-year numbers.  He had winnings from minus 2000$ to plus 3000$.