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I am going to try a strategy for picking ATS plays based oh how did the teams perform against the spread in their last 5 games.
My theory is based on 2 assumptions:
1. The bookies are much better then bettors when it comes to setting a spread. It's normal to be that way, they have much more information than most of the bettors do and that's their job. So I think it's useless for me to struggle to compute what spread should team A cover when playing against team B, losing hours to read sports articles searching for trends and trying to establish what trends are more important and so on when the bookie does that job and is doing it bettre than I do. I should take the spread the bookies set and try to figure out how good are they when setting the spread for a specific team. The "ennemy" here is the bookie so I should focus on how is he doing when setting spreads and not on how are teams performing one against each other.
2. The way the teams performed against the spread (exactly by how much points did they cover or did they not cover the spread) in their last 5 games (they are more relevant to the actual matchup) should predict pretty good the ATS results.
So I am going to do this:
For every matchup I will compute by how many points did the teams cover or not cover the spread in their last 5 games.
Example: DET-ATL tonight
DET covered by: 5.5+17.5+18.5+2+6.5 = 50
ATL covered by: 2.5+3+4-5-4 = 0.5
So my pick will be DET.
I'll do the same for all games and hope I will win 57% of them.
This a theory. I don't have data to prove it's a good one, but in a week or two we'll know for sure.
I started last night with it and it did something like that:
CHAR
MIA
BOS
DET
CHI
HOU
WAS
LAL
For nj-orl and den-uta I didn't make the analysis before the games started so I don't know how would've been.
6-2 for the games above could be pure luck. I find it hard to believe I can pick 75% winners.
I'll post later what are the picks for tonight and start the record from 0-0.
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