Great stuff BWS and Bridge. There are many approaches to handicapping and I find that I have to make adjustments with and to the capping tools I use every new season.
Among the number crunching I do on the individual contests, here's something I look for:
What I like about Sagarin is his numbers are usually very close to the lines hung by the books. It is the lines where I find a discrepancy that I dig deeper on. I have found that where there is a discrepancy, typically, you should bet the line that is getting shorted, unless there is news that would explain the discrepancy.
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a specific example from last football season, it seems like it was so long ago (yet there were many). An indelible memory from college hoops was this past season when SMU was undefeated and going up to Temple. Adding in the standard home court advantage, Temple should have been around +9. Books had them at +6, shorting them by 3 points. Temple won the game. (It is also when I will hit both the spread and the moneyline on the dog. A ratio of 4 units on the spread and 1 unit on the moneyline has been a winning formula.)
What most sports guessers see is the "value" offered by having to lay fewer points than they thought the line should be. Or think it's a mistake and they are getting the best of it. They aren't.
This happens in college football frequently, which is the main reason I do not come up with my own power ratings. Well, that and I'm lazy. I look for these outliers every week.
Bridge mentioned Steele's Pressbox. I get it every season because he packs a helluva lot of recent trend data onto the individual game write-ups. It's often easy to forget that one team recovered 4 fumbles last game, which they probably won't this game. That kind of stuff.
However, with Pressbox I offer this caveat: Steele is first and foremost a FAN of college football. His fandom often gets in the way of his objectivity. As an author/editor he is excellent. Around my house, his College Football Preview is known as the Football Bible. But as a capper or tout, do not follow blindly! He also guesses at the NFL lines. Go opposite of his NFL picks.
There are so many angles to doing this. If anyone could come up with an algorithm that measures "heart" or "desire" then that person would crush it every season. It is up to us to fill in that variable, I reckon.
As for screens, I have 4 games going on 4 different screens all day Saturday. And love it when Hawaii is playing at home!
Best of Luck this season
Great stuff BWS and Bridge. There are many approaches to handicapping and I find that I have to make adjustments with and to the capping tools I use every new season.
Among the number crunching I do on the individual contests, here's something I look for:
What I like about Sagarin is his numbers are usually very close to the lines hung by the books. It is the lines where I find a discrepancy that I dig deeper on. I have found that where there is a discrepancy, typically, you should bet the line that is getting shorted, unless there is news that would explain the discrepancy.
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a specific example from last football season, it seems like it was so long ago (yet there were many). An indelible memory from college hoops was this past season when SMU was undefeated and going up to Temple. Adding in the standard home court advantage, Temple should have been around +9. Books had them at +6, shorting them by 3 points. Temple won the game. (It is also when I will hit both the spread and the moneyline on the dog. A ratio of 4 units on the spread and 1 unit on the moneyline has been a winning formula.)
What most sports guessers see is the "value" offered by having to lay fewer points than they thought the line should be. Or think it's a mistake and they are getting the best of it. They aren't.
This happens in college football frequently, which is the main reason I do not come up with my own power ratings. Well, that and I'm lazy. I look for these outliers every week.
Bridge mentioned Steele's Pressbox. I get it every season because he packs a helluva lot of recent trend data onto the individual game write-ups. It's often easy to forget that one team recovered 4 fumbles last game, which they probably won't this game. That kind of stuff.
However, with Pressbox I offer this caveat: Steele is first and foremost a FAN of college football. His fandom often gets in the way of his objectivity. As an author/editor he is excellent. Around my house, his College Football Preview is known as the Football Bible. But as a capper or tout, do not follow blindly! He also guesses at the NFL lines. Go opposite of his NFL picks.
There are so many angles to doing this. If anyone could come up with an algorithm that measures "heart" or "desire" then that person would crush it every season. It is up to us to fill in that variable, I reckon.
As for screens, I have 4 games going on 4 different screens all day Saturday. And love it when Hawaii is playing at home!
Best of Luck this season
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