Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

As an update to this post , my automatic picking of the totals are now 24-11-1 (68%). That's pretty good. My automatic picking of the lines are 82-78-1 (51%). That's not very good. Picking the favorites are actually killing me - 31-40. Picking the underdogs is 51-38-1 (57%). That 57% isn't enough to quit my day job by any stretch, but it's way better than 43.7% for picking the favorites. It looks like I'll have to change my criteria for when I go with the favorite. In other words, I think I'll have to make more strict criteria for picking the favorite and keep the existing criteria for picking the underdog.

For a few years now I've been playing around with my own college basketball RPI and a way to predict the outcome of games. I always wait until the calendar changes before doing any of the predicting, which gives me three full months of picks every year. This year is only a few days old so far. My system has made 27 line bets and 9 total (over/under bets) with limited success. It's only 5-4 on the totals and 14-13 on the lines. But the interesting thing is the difference when it picks the favorite and when it picks the underdog. When picking the favorite, it's 4-10, which is terrible. But picking the underdog it is 10-3. I'm going to see if this trend keeps going, since it is such a small sample size so far this year.