Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

This year my friend Tim and I are picking the lines, totals, and money lines for every NCAA tournament game. Picking the money line is basically picking the winner of every game. But it's not quite that simple. You are involving money with the pick. For example, in the Cincinnati/Ohio St game in the sweet 16, if you picked Ohio St to win, that was -375. Cincinnati to win was +310. For a $30 bet on Ohio St, if Ohio St wins, you win $8. For a $30 bet on Cincinnati, if they win, you win $93. That's a big difference. If you think that Cincinnati has more than a 25% chance of winning, then the bet on Cincinnati is the better choice, even if you think Ohio St has a 70% chance of winning. On my Money Line picks, when I pick the favorite, I'm 31-14 (69%). When I pick the underdog, I'm 7-12 (37%). Line bet and total (over/under) bets are more traditional. In line bets, I'm 34-28-2 (55%) - enough to make money in the long run. For totals, I'm 33-31 (52%) - losing mo...

As a follow-up to this post , I have finished picking 1 game every day during the regular season and conference tournaments. That was a total of 122 games in 122 days. I really stumbled to the finish. I went 2-1 in my last 3, but right before that I was on an 12 game losing streak. So I was 62-43-2 at one point (58.9%) but ended up 64-56-2 (53.3%) - barely enough to make money for the season. Of course, if I was doing this for a living, I wouldn't bet exactly one game per day. Some days would be more, some days none at all. When picking the favorites, I was 24-24-2. When picking the underdogs, I was 40-32. Over those last 15 days, I picked 8 favorites (1-7) and 7 underdogs (1-6). So, before my collapse, I was 23-17-2 (57.1%) picking the favorites and 39-26 (60%) when picking the underdogs.

As a followup to yesterday's post about picking all the games, I basically had a "meh" day. I went 42-46 overall. There were 48 total games - 2 of them didn't have any odds posted, 6 of them had totals (over/under) only, and 41 had both lines and totals. Of the 41 games where there was both a line and a total, 7 times I won both, 9 times I lost both, and an astonishing 25 times I won one and lost the other.

Today is the first day of the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Mountain West, and some other "big conference" tournaments. Conferences like the Big 12, Big East, and Pac-12 have already started. But that means there are a lot of games to pick. For grins, I picked every game that had a line and/or a total today. That's 88 bets spread out over 47 games. Since a lot of these picks are wild guesses, it will be interesting to see how I do overall.

For the 15th time in the last 16 years, the Vegas sports books posted a profit on the Super Bowl. Compared to last year's modest $724,000 profit, this year's profit was $5,064,470 - very nice. Here is an article from the The Vancouver Sun, via Reuters : The value of bets placed in Nevada’s 184 sports books was $93.9 million US, up 7.3 per cent from the $87.5 million wagered on last year’s Super Bowl between Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Sports books in Nevada kept a combined $5 million from Super Bowl bets, or 5.4 per cent of the total wagers placed, unaudited figures showed. That was up significantly from the $724,176 they pocketed last year when the Packers beat the Steelers. Casinos in Las Vegas were initially hoping for a Patriots win in Sunday’s championship game but a slew of late bets for New England over the weekend altered their allegiances. I got the actual number from this web site which lists the actu...