THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Yes, it’s almost not worth trying, if you are delusional enough to think you can beat the closing numbers at the sharpest book.

Article is blocked here at the office for fairly obvious reasons.  What is the gist of the article?  Can’t beat the Vegas Sports Books in football?

As someone who makes a good living betting MLB and NFL futures markets, I have to strongly disagree with this conjecture.

It is just possible that the Football Outsiders projections are not that good.  None of the pro sports bettors I know use them in their handicapping, but the same guys will happily use advanced baseball metrics.

#2, it is just a quick comparison of the win projections from Football Outsiders (a football stat/analysis/projection site) to the Vegas line over the last 5 years.  The RMSE for the FO win projections was 3.06, compared to 2.98 for Vegas.  There was also a regression equation that combined the two lines to predict actual wins for each team to see which line carried more weight in the regression.  Vegas again won out by a small margin:

Actual wins = 1.42 + 0.44 * Vegas + 0.39 * FO

There’s not much to the article aside from the data.  The article doesn’t focus on the point Tango is emphasizing.  It’s just an example of data that supports his claim.

Here’s an even better comparison of most systems out there (tons for college football):
http://www.thepredictiontracker.com/
Results for football are
http://www.thepredictiontracker.com/nflresults.php
and
http://www.thepredictiontracker.com/ncaaresults.php

Basically, after watching these for several years, and even participating with my own system one year, yeah, no one is going to beat Vegas consistently. Every year, a few or several systems will beat Vegas. But not the same system every year.

A wild crockpot appears! (Holzhauer, for those unaware)

Anyway, he’s certainly right. FO’s projections are just not very good.

#5 is also simply wrong. There are handicappers consistently beating market prices. Perhaps not closing lines, as #1 said, but that’s a different story altogether.

Maybe a more accurate variation of #5 is that no automated, entirely objective, published system has been shown to beat Vegas consistently.

Perhaps there exist handicappers who use data along with subjective interpretations of information not easily quantified (injuries, weather, other intangibles) based on experience can indeed beat Vegas.

But then again, didn’t James Surowiecki argue in Wisdom of Crowds that no more of these so-called sports “sharps” exist than one would expect by chance?  In fact, I seem to recall mgl saying as much here a couple of years ago.

FWIW, it’s also worth following the link to FO’s analysis of why their projections were so poor last year.  Prior to then, their projections were actually quite good.

Is is reasonable to conclude that Vegas knew that the NFL would be so offense-dominated in 2009 unlike any other year in the past decade?

Yeah, sorry, #7 states more clearly what I meant. An automated, “computer” system is not going to beat Vegas year after year. It was clear in most of my sentences but not the one that read “no one is going to beat Vegas...” which should have substituted “system” for “one.”

I am agnostic as to handicappers beating Vegas; haven’t seen the research to support either #6 or #7. Seems like an easy study to do.

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An automated, “computer” system is not going to beat Vegas year after year.
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Depends how sophisticated it is and how it re-calibrates each year.

You’re confusing a lot of things here, Tom.

Firstly, Vegas is exactly as relevant to odds setting as Barbera Striessand is to popular music.

Secondly, the odds reflect the position of maximum rate of return.  Bookmakers aren’t doing God’s work, just trying to make a living.

In the first four weeks of the NFL season, bet on the point spread underdog every game, see what happens.

It is likely that you will both beat the market (i.e. the natural hold of the wager) and also lose money on the whole.  That’s the beauty of it really.  Any fool can beat the market, the market is gawd-awful.  Beating the odds-setters is a different matter altogether.

If you think I’m full of beans, by all means call me on it, Tom.  We’ll wager on the outcome of your wagering.  Wagering on wagering, could anything more decadent?  It would be beautiful in it’s own way.

Let me know.