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/// R. J. Miller on Money Management A Very Important Thing to Know ///
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HANDICAPPING & COMMON SENSE Some 'evidence' is not evidence at all /// Many sports handicappers, when looking for evidence of upcoming winners, remind us of the drunk crawling around under the streetlight. When the policeman asked the drunk what he was doing, the drunk answered, "I’m looking for my wallet." The policeman helped him look for the wallet awhile, then finally asked, "Are you sure you dropped it here?" The drunk answered, "No, I dropped it up the street, but the light’s better here." Many handicappers are like that drunk insofar as they don’t want to look for evidence where it’s difficult to find. They don’t want to tackle the difficult stats and interpret the tough stuff, so they look wherever "the light’s better." They cite such nonsense as so-called ‘trends,’ and other mathematical glitches without a shred of logical explanation. Take a look at this bit of advice concerning a 1999 Monday night game with Dallas visiting Minnesota. This was published on the internet by a prominent sports tout as his ‘free pick’ of the week. We won’t publish his name because there’s no need to be that hostile: November 8, 1999 We don’t know how many years you’d have to go back to collect Dallas as a "Monday night dog coming off a loss" seven times, but we bet it’s plenty. In fact, we suspect the tout made up those figures out of thin air. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because what happened 2, 4, 6 or more years ago has nothing at all to do with what’s happening now. Such reasoning is laughable. Our take on that same game in PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER Newsletter was precisely the opposite. Here’s what we said about the game:
The final score of the game was Minnesota 27, Dallas 17. We won both the pointspread and the UNDER. Dallas did, indeed, lean heavily on Emmitt Smith - just as we expected - and Smith rushed for 140 yards in the first half alone. In fact, the strategy we predicted Dallas would use worked for nearly the entire first half of the game. Minnesota's quarterback Jeff George wasn't able to complete a pass until late in the second quarter. Halftime saw Dallas leading 17-7, and our pick on Minnesota –7.0 seemed to be in deep doo-doo. However, the Cowboys were not able to keep the ball away from Jeff George for the entire hour - just as we expected - and George and Hoard and the Minnesota defense managed to right their ship. They stormed back – just as we expected – to win the game by 10 points.....just as we expected. But believe it or not, we’re not writing this article to gloat. You can believe it when I say we don’t always look as smart as we were in the above analysis. No, the point here is not to gloat; the point here is, if you want to predict the outcome of an NFL game you have to examine the factors that figure to determine that outcome. It hardly matters whether or not these teams scored a lot of points last year, or the year before that, or 5 years ago. Such superficial ‘handicapping’ as exhibited by the above tout is just so much worthless record-keeping. Touts don’t make their living betting on their picks. They couldn’t. They make their living by selling their useless predictions. Who cares if "teams in blue uniforms are 10-1 after playing Chicago in the rain in October?" or if "East Coast teams are 10-1 against West Coast teams after playing on Monday night?" Without supportive, logical, causative reasons for such records, the records are meaningless.
Probably the most outrageous claims I’ve seen concern the use of the paranormal. We’ve seen at least one tout claiming to use astrology. If you believe in astrology, my advice is to keep sports betting only as entertainment; do NOT risk serious money. If you believe in astrology, you’re simply too stupid to be betting on sports. Check this advertisement by a guy actually claiming to use biorhythms:
I don’t know much about this outfit "Sports Watch," but how many categories do you figure they can have? It seems like every tout in the country claims to be "Number One, as documented by Sports Watch." How many Number One’s can there be, anyway? And I doubt if the Las Vegas Sporting News polices this guy’s picks real close; I doubt if they police anything real close. In any case, I don’t believe a word of it, and if you do, good luck to you, because you’re going to need it…Biorhythms, my ass. Don’t be suckered by these wanna-be phonies. If calling winners were as easy as keeping track of such superficial things as won-lost records, anybody could do it and the bookmakers would be out of business in no time at all. If teams with the best records won every time, we’d all soon be batting a thousand, the bookies would be broke, and that would be that. One of the most popular forms of handicapping used by beginners is to spot "trends." For example, let's say the 49ers are 9-1 against the pointspread the week after playing on Monday night. That's a "trend," and many non-professionals would need no more evidence than that to place a bet on the 49ers. Allow me to cite a parallel. Let's say you have 100 quarters, each of which you flip 10 times, keeping careful track of each quarter's results, heads or tails. After you've flipped the 100 quarters 10 times each, you will definitely see "trends" in the "performance" of the individual quarters. In fact, the odds of going 9-1 (or 1-9) with one or more of the quarters is almost 2-to-one! Such a 9-1 (or 1-9) "trend" figures to happen about 2 percent of the time when flipping a coin. That's one time in fifty trials. For one thing, the first toss can be either heads or tails; it doesn't matter. It only matters if the following 9 tosses happen to match the first toss. The point is, after tossing 100 quarters 10 times each, you cannot after the fact look back and think there is special significance to an individual quarter's performance. Most likely, at least one of the quarters (probably more than one) has produced 9-1 (or 1-9) results simply because of the probabilities involved. That particular quarter is no more likely to continue that "trend" than any of the other quarters. In professional football, all manner of these types of "trends" can be found to have happened. Teams can suffer losing streaks of 1-9 after playing in a certain city, or winning streaks of 9-1 after playing in the same city, teams with gold jerseys can go 9-1 against teams from west of the Mississippi, teams can go 9-1 in their "home" uniforms or 9-1 in their "road" uniforms, and on, and on, and on. You cannot after the fact look back on such an event and attach significance to it without more substantive supportive evidence. It's no surprise that such trends occur; it would be impossible for them not to occur. Trouble is, they are almost always meaningless. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts when it comes to forecasting the outcome of professional football games. Biorhythms won’t help, astrology won’t help, and what happened years ago won’t help. When handicapping the NFL you’ve got to evaluate those stats that are proven to be the most ‘predictive,’ such as offensive and defensive yards-per-rush, offensive rushing yards gained, defensive rushing yards allowed, offensive total yards gained, defensive total yards allowed, etc. In other words, forget about finding some sort of 5-minute magic formula. Effective handicapping begins with the simple application of common sense. And common sense dictates that no mathematical formula nor any other kind of formula will predict winners as much as 70% of the time against pointspreads. At least 75%-80% of all NFL games v. pointspreads are decided by sheer luck; a bad bounce, an unlikely fumble, a miracle interception, a panicky Hail Mary pass, a penalty, or whatever. That leaves only about 20% that figure to end in a manner predicted. That 20% and half of the 80% which you figure to win by luck could possibly give you a 60% winning rate, but most probably no more than that. -- J. R. Miller /// |
