Sooo, I did a little research on ML and RL -1.5. (BTW, I'm not trying to stir up trouble here. I'm only presenting some research I did. I understand, 165, that you are just trying to help downtrodden gamblers. Maybe we can talk about this in detail, as I have just been introduced to the idea of actually playing RL -1.5 this year)
Obviously if every fav play results in a loss or a 2+ run victory, there is only upside to playing RL -1.5 because of the reduced juice paid in the losses.
My question is: what percentage of the fav ML victories can we afford to be RL -1.5 losses (or one-run ML victories for the fav) before we say it's probably more profitable to play the ML instead of the RL -1.5?
We have to make some assumptions before we come up with the answer. I'm going to assume that the reduced juice on a fav play is
-80 on the odds. Example: a -190 ML gets reduced to -110 RL -1.5. Also, we will assume that the average odds we are playing on ML favs is
-150, which in truth only serves as a flag that on the average our RL -1.5 plays will be as
dogs.
So, the give-and-take goes like this:
(1) Each RL -1.5 win has no effect on our scenario.
(2) For every true loss (ML loss), we are gaining
+80 on the RL -1.5 because of reduced juice.
(3) For every 1-run ML win which is a RL -1.5 loss, we are losing our bet (
-100, we were dogs) plus an extra
-100 due to the fact that the ML won by comparison. So,
-200 total.
Observation: Since we gain +80 on true ML losses and lose -200 on 1-run ML victories, the true ML losses will have to outnumber 1-run ML victories by a factor of 200 / 80, or 2.5 to 1.
Example: A bettor who goes 60-40 on ML fav bets can benefit from RL -1.5 if less than 15 of the 60 ML victories are 1-run ML victories. This is because (15x200 =
3000 lost to 1-run wins) is less than (40x80 =
3200 gained from reduced juice on true ML losses).
Conclusion: As a bettor wins more-and-more, the attractiveness of the RL -1.5 bet diminishes, because there are less losses that the RL -1.5 is absorbing with the lower juice. Also, this is
just my opinion, but I feel that
as an MLB bettor gets hotter and hotter, the number of 1-run victories he's getting will approach 50% of the total victories. It's called luck. No MLB bettor is going to go on a 12 game winning streak and not have at least 4 of those games be 1-run victories. I really do believe that. And that is a killer to the argument to play RL -1.5. So, in my opinion, the time to play RL -1.5 is when the bettor is treading water or slumping. In this scenario there are more losses which RL -1.5 will blunt, and in my opinion there will be a lot less 1-run victories for the RL -1.5 to lose on.
Just my 2 cents on RL -1.5.