THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’m hoping to have a blog up next week that predicts pregame win probabilities.  My system’s pretty intuitive, and I’ll compare it to two or three money lines, and predictions from AccuScore and egrandslam.com .  It’s interesting that so little time has been spent looking at the gambling aspect of sabermetrics (or maybe the work being done is, understandably, proprietary).  Doesn’t mgl have a Vegas background?

Harry

Let me know the link when you get it up ...

Newsfutures is a great game if you’re afraid of running afoul of the US congress. http://sports.us.newsfutures.com/market/market.html?symbol=B4167ATL (check closer to game time when the volume picks up)

I still like the interface better than Betfair with its reciprocal odds (always have to convert 2.36 in my head to 42% likelihood). With both games there’s also a lot of fun in terms of the bid/ask dynamic. It’s 25 minutes before first pitch, you want Boston at $61 but no higher, the bid/ask is sitting at 60 (50 contracts)/62 (200 contracts), so should you wait for someone to chew through the 50 contracts at $60, or do you sidle up and increase your bid to $61 (or maybe even trump the $61 at $62, getting the $61 to trump you at $63, then flipping over to the other side and selling at $37). A nice cat and mouse game develops. Good times.

Also, handicapping is a great arena for applying sabermetric ideas. I quickly learned that the real game is a lot “dirtier” than the laboratory. It’s easy enough to plan on forecasting the runs scored by the starting nine using a good run estimator and regression to the mean, until you come across one guy in the opposing lineup making his major league debut, another guy played 60 games in 2005, was out for 2006 but is hitting .420 at the beginning of 2007 (with most of those ABs vs left-handers, but there’s a righty on the hill tonight). Which relievers will pitch, how do I account for lefty/righty, will turf play a factor, I wonder if the weather will reduce runs scored, what about FIP? Food for many studies.

You can take it further and check out the crowd opinion on the crowd opinion—http://www.wagerline.com/Handicapping/ConsensusPick/consensus-pick.aspx?sport=MLB&eventID=282534&sportID=5&contID=8124&t=0
At the moment, 1262 of 1710 wagers think Atlanta is a bargain tonight.

The Vegas lines are incredibly good.  You cannot believe how good they are.  There is a ton of collective wisdom there, which includes a sabermetric crowd PLUS many things that a sabermetric approach will not pick up.

Wagering online is probably not illegal according to Federal law, including the new UIGA (which merely prohibits transfer of gambling funds and is clearly geared towards financial institutions and not the gamblers themselves).  No casual gambler has EVER been prosecuted under the Federal Wire Act either.  Now, if you have a state law which prohibits internet wagering (which some states do), that is another story, although it is extremely unlikey you will ever be prosecuted, again, for casual betting on the internet.

"The Vegas lines are incredibly good.  You cannot believe how good they are.  There is a ton of collective wisdom there, which includes a sabermetric crowd PLUS many things that a sabermetric approach will not pick up.”

Incredibly good as in unbeatable?  People do make money, don’t they?  I know that, say, the teams listed at -150 will win 60% on average, but lines on individual games can still be off both ways, cancelling the errors out.  It seems like peculiarities designed to reel in casual fans (inflated lines for the Yankees, lower odds for dogs in general) are opportunities for people who know what they’re doing.

I’m sure it is beatable to some extent.  All sports are - some more than others.  Baseball lines tend to “cater” to the sharp bettors whereas the NFL, for example, tends to cater to the casual bettor.  Baseball is traditionally the most difficult sport for the handicapper to beat, despite the lower vig (2% and change depending on the place/line versus 4.5% [11 to 10] or so for most other sports).  I’m not sure why, other than the ratio of sharps to squares (money-wise) may be much larger in baseball than in the other sports.