THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Great timing with this. Just the other day when I said “No” to another one of these pools I considered posting the question here on how likely one was to win, if buying more than one square was better, etc.

In terms of money value, I wonder what the number of purchased squares would give you the best chance of earning a profit. Is there a difference between 1 square or 10 squares? I wish I were better at math because it seems like the hard part has been done and what I’m wondering would be fairly easy.

And, for what it’s worth, all the pools I’ve seen were 25% for each quarter, not 10/10/10/70.

Don’t forget that these numbers are probably dependent on the scoring environment and the difference between the two teams’ abilities. (in other words, the over/under and the spread) I’d love to see this same data but bucketed into games in which 20 or less pts were scored, 20-30, 30-40, etc. and likewise bucketed into games where the score difference was 0-3, 3-7, etc.

I don’t know where to get the data he used for quarter by quarter so I can’t do it myself at this point. It would also be neat to bucket based on historical spread and over/under, but historical gambling data I think is hard to obtain.

We just did squares at a party I went to.  After picking our squares, we randomly assigned the numbers so nobody had an edge.  Prizes were awarded at the end of every quarter.

I won the 2nd and 3rd quarters, obviously since nobody scored in the 3rd.  If Maroney had scored his TD on the last play of Q1 instead of the 1st in Q@, I would have won 3.

Sometimes its better to be lucky than know the system.