Baylor Wins NCAA Championship

Congratulations to Baylor winning the NCAA Championship. The game did not even come close to living up to its hype. It featured undefeated #1 Gonzaga and the 2-loss #2 Baylor Bears. It was the highest winning percentage for a championship game ever. The teams were supposed to play in December when they were ranked #1 and #2, but the game was canceled due to COVID-19 issues a couple of hours before the game. 

Baylor started the game 9-0 and it was 11-1 at the first media time out. There was only a short period of time in the second half when the margin was under 10 points. Baylor led by 10 at halftime and ended up winning by 16, 86-70.

The game was under 159.5 points, which is fitting because the unders dominated this tournament. Out of the 67 games, 40 of them went under. That's 60%. And Gonzaga was the favorite (lost the game outright) which means that underdogs were 35-32 against the spread and underdogs won the game outright 23 times. That's 34%, which is really high for underdogs to win the game.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tasker: Get Voice Command

The way I decided to set up Tasker is to use some reusable tasks that can be called from other places. The first one I'll talk about is the Get Voice Command. This task listens for some stock commands like "yes", "no", "cancel", or "repeat". It is a quicker listener than the "Get Voice Input" command which I'll talk about in another post. This is meant some some quick one or two word commands. It uses regular expressions to match commands (meaning, you can say "yep" or "yeah" or "yes sir" and it will return "yes"). Being generic like this means that I don't have to duplicate all these regular expressions everywhere. I can just call this task and if it returns "yes", then I know the user (me) said something like "yes" or "yeah" or whatever. There's an input parameter to the task of the message to speak before listening for the answer. The task will re...
Read more

Blackjack Streak House Advantage

One of the side bets you can play at several casinos in Black Hawk is called "streak". This is a bet where you get paid if you win that many hands in a row (2, 3, 4, or 5). How much is the casino advantage on this game? Well, it all depends on the payout. There are several factors in play, but as a general rule you can assume that the odds of winning one hand in blackjack streak is 47.51% (or .4751) - thanks to Wizard of Odds for that. So the odds of winning "x" hands in a row are .4751^x, which is .22572 for 2 hands, .1072396 for 3 hands, .0509495 for 4 hands, and .0242061 for 5 hands. If you take that number, multiply by the amount you get if you win a streak of that size, and then subtract from 1, you will get the casino advantage. A typical streak pay scale is 3, 8, 18, and 38. So, for a streak of 2, the casino advantage is 1-(.22572*4)=0.09712 (9.71%). For a streak of 3, it's 3.48%. For 4, it's 3.196%. For 5, it's 5.596%. So the best bets are strea...
Read more

Picking 87 NCAA Basketball Games

My friend Tim and I picked 87 NCAA basketball games against the spread on Saturday. We alternated picks - first I would pick one, then he would pick one. Once a pick was made, the other person was automatically the "house" for that pick (meaning, you automatically had to take the other side). The way the picks were made, you wanted to make the ones you were most confident about early (before the other person had a chance to pick it). We made the picks in 3 waves - morning games, afternoon games, and night games. There were 24 morning games, 35 afternoon games, and 28 night games based on our breakdowns. In the morning games, Tim was 4-7-1 and I was 8-4. Our "top half" (picks 1 through 6 for this set) were both 2-4, however. That means I was 6-0 in the games lower down the list (ones I was basically guessing). In the afternoon games, Tim was 8-10 and I was 6-11. Our "top half" (1-9) picks were both 2-7. Again, we did better on the ones where we were guessin...
Read more