In our second week of looking at games in which the public has gone overwhelmingly to one side, we notice one thing. NONE of these bets (which for our purposes are games in which over 66% of the action is on one side), not ONE of them are underdogs. Amarillo Slim said in his book Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People that most people would rather not bet at all than to bet on an underdog. This trend of bandwagon betting would seem to bear out his supposition.
Whether it's people's desire to associate themselves with a winner, nerves at betting a bad team will be able to cover, or maybe the only people playing these games are fans of the teams excited at the chance to pound a weak opponent, these games are being overwhelmingly played on the favorites.
This week we'll track the games with over 2/3 of the action on them, and we'll update the results after the weekend.
Ball State @ IU -7 - 69%
Clemson -16 @ Duke - 73%
Texas Tech -20.5 @ Baylor - 66%
Mizzou -4 @ Colorado - 69%
FL Int @ ArkSt - 17.5 - 66%
Mich -4 @ MSU - 69%
Army @ Air Force -16.5 - 67%
MidTenn -4 @ ULMon - 67%
Marshall @ CenFL -13.5 - 73%
ULaLa @ UTenn -27.5 - 69%
CMich @ Tol -8 - 69%
FSU @ BC -6.5 - 69%
ILL -12 @MINN 67%
Wazzou @ Cal -14.5 - 68%
SMU @ Houston -19 - 65%
That's a whopping fifteen contests with more than twice the players on one side of the game than the other. Conventional wisdom suggests oddsmakers want all games to be 50/50 so they can profit off the juice. I think it's more reasonable to suggest that the oddsmakers know when the public is too in love with certain teams, and they set a huge line and let the public hope their crush will cover it.
Another point you may notice: four of the games I picked for the weekend appear on this list. Doh!
3 comments:
I agree with you assessment of sports books normally wanting to have equal amounts of money on each side of a game so they don't have to sweat the outcome. Additionally one good friend of mine has been running a NFL football pool for a number of years. With the information from this pool he has been betting against the two or three biggest pool picked favorite choices for a number of years. Initially his picks were very successful but for whatever reason more recently betting against these pool favorites has not been so profitable.
For me I have tried a few things but now I am convinced that some usage of mathmatical stats should at least be considered. I am also trying this year to concentrate mainly on totals utlizing this seasons data points. So far in the NFL I have gone 16-10 on them so I will continue to focus on this type of bet.
I think that individual games will most always be off, but overall they should break about even... that is, a book should win an even amount of games that the public is on 66% or 33%, etc.
A combination of stats and gut feeling is always encouraged Adam, thanks for the comment. We appreciate the input.
Well written article.
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