Not all baseball players are born with the same gifts. For every home run hunter – like Adam Dunn – out there, there is another guy – think Ichiro – choking up on the bat and trying to slap a ball through a hole in the infield. Both methods can be productive when done right, and there’s room for both types of batters on a major league roster.
The same can be said about betting on baseball. There are those who read the local beat writers, monitor the weather or handicap the umpire calling balls and strikes to help inform their decisions when betting the daily baseball board.
And then there are those like longtime Covers user Cisco.
“I couldn’t pick a game to save my life,” Cisco said. “If I pick a game, I lose.”
Cisco is one of the many bettors who employ trial and tested systems to help beat the sportsbooks. He uses many different systems for multiple sports and he shares his results with the tight-knitted community in the Covers' Systems and Strategies forum.
His favorite sport is baseball and one of his most successful MLB strategy is a chase system which involves fading bad (.470 or worse win percentage) teams coming off a five-run win. He uses Pinnacle’s World Series odds for the first month of the season when winning percentages are highly volatile to identify the 10 worst teams. Those teams were the Braves, White Sox, Reds, Tigers, Royals, Marlins, Athletics, Phillies, Pirates and Padres this year.
There are a few other rules to this system:
1. This is a four-game chase system, which means the bettor must continue his wager until earning a one unit win.
2. The first play doesn’t begin until two games following the five-run win by sub .470 win percentage club. This is rule was added to avoid getting burnt by a bad team enjoying a bit of momentum at the plate.
3. If our future fade team wins again by five or more runs again, we must sit out an additional two games. This happened for the first chase of the system this season. The Detroit Tigers won 6-1 on April 2nd then won by the same score three games later.
4. Players following Cisco’s system would have lost when the Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox on April 7th but then won on the continuation play on April 10th when the Cleveland Indians topped the Tigers 2-1.
5. A team will be eliminated from the spot bet if they win during the sit period and go above .470 win percentage.
6. The system calls on betting underdogs on the runline and favorites on the moneyline with an opportunity to middle when two sub .470 clubs coming off five-run wins meet up. In this case, Cisco bets the favorite on the moneyline, the underdog on the runline and hopes for a one-run win for the favored club.
The system is 10-1 after the first month of the regular season with seven of the wins coming in the Game 1 of the chase. No system, as Cisco says, is foolproof. The Oakland Athletics’ hot play at the end of April produced his first loss of the season. The chase ends after four kicks at the can. And that’s the downfall of the chase system; when you lose, you lose big.
Cisco says his system went 76-1 last season with 32.15 unit won. He has all the current season information available on a shared Google sheet and several other Covers community members check in from time to time.
He started coming to Covers at the beginning of the 2000s and there he found a community of bettors who used different strategies than just eyeballing the board. Cisco started developing his strategies with encouragement from other Covers users around 2005.
On the Google sheet you’ll see strategies on other sports like NBA and NFL as well as another MLB chase system involving home favorites. They’ve all been developed over the years by a guy who loves betting on sports but who can’t pick a game to save his life.
“I made my first bet on the White Sox in 1987,” Cisco says. “They won and I was hooked.”
