Pre-end-of-June thoughts

With the end of the month nearing I decided to try and see where I really stand, excluding the whole american odds/ 500 units bets nonsense on covers.

For some apparent reason, even though the tipsters I chose were not chosen based on the sport they are good at, they seem to be good at baseball and suck at the rest of the sports. I could say "go figure" and carry on with it, but that's just not me. I'll dig this one out, I just need a strategy.

Main suspicion:
Sample size. Given that baseball is pretty much the only sport worth betting that's in full swing, most of the bets are on baseball. The rest is on weird sports like WNBA, CFL, NHL,  NBA (before it ended) etc. Also, don't kill me for putting NHL and NBA in the weird sports league, but the playoff games in those sports tend to produce weird results. Regarding the rest, there is hardly anyone following those sports semi seriously. I mean, come on, WNBA :)??? 76 of the month's bets so far were on MLB, 41 on the rest of the sports. If the discrepancy doesn't level out any time soon I might have to go through all the bets made by my "selected few" and see whether this bias is real.

 Second, whats with the odds Covers? If the spread is given you invest 550 to get 500, making the odds 1.91. What is this, the 80s? Pinnacle offer 1.952 in situations like that. There is no long term winner making money using these odds. If the bets were for real money it would have been called robbery. Also, calculating ROI using american odds is ridiculously hard work.
Luckily there is a solution to that. Starting 1.7.2013 I will start using another service to calculate the bets. i will still draw them from covers, but won't place them there.There are a few sites looking for the best odds on the net, so that kills both problems I have this month.

The most important one (MLB/ non MLB success rate) still remains, I will monitor that situation closely.

Looking forward to the final figures for the month. Will post them right after month's end.

June update

Since the move to Covers I've dramatically reduced the number of bets. Its still a strong month with the baseball, but other sports are going incredibly bad. Here are the MLB and overall summaries for June so far.

All sports:

MLB only:

Update on the Covers experiment

So far so good. Here's the table for all sports for the month so far:

And here's the one for MLB tips only:

Here's the link if you want to follow me as I go. You will have to register though.

The way overdue May update

As can be seen May sucked terribly. A strike rate of 38% over 192 matches isn't going to cut it. The system as it stands, after more than 330 bets is nearing -2% ROI. Given how spectacular the preseason was it couldn't have gone any wronger in the first two months. Several possible reasons for that:

-The data input is a tedious mind-numbing process. This caused discipline lapses and whole days/ weeks of scheduled games were not calculated. Manually calculating the odds AND updating the results in a spreadsheet AND updating the blog WHILE holding a full time job is a hard-core hustle. No time for anything else whatsoever.

-The tediousness of point nr.1 prevented me from any further enhancements/ improvements to the formulas. Basically i kept on using the exact same formula while a lot of factors changed.

-The system did not create major favorites pre-match, which lead to many placed bets on the Marlins/ Astros, two terrible teams that lost even more than what they were priced in for. This might be the biggest issue in the logic of the system. This might have to do with the fact that my system assumed both starting pitchers will last equally deep into the match, which is obviously wrong. I wonder how i let that one slip past me from the very beginning. If, by some miracle, I stumble into a lot of time i will try and incorporate that into the system and run another try.

I can find other errors ranging from subjective assumptions incorporated into the system to plain stupidity on my behalf, but that would require further in depth analysis, which  I wont do, at least now.

The silver lining: As Mr.Edison said a long time ago, I haven't failed a 100 times, I found a 100 approaches that don't work. We just have to keep at it until we strike gold or die, whatever comes first:).

The plan for the foreseeable future: I may be a late bloomer, but i finally discovered the beauty of covers.com. There is a tone of gold to be found out there, you just have to dig deep enough. The beauty of it is: ITS ABSOLUTELY FREE! I am not talking about buying tips from the paid services there. There is a wealth of free tips given out by some very knowledgeable guys. I am in the process of going through the gutter in order to find the diamonds in the rough. To follow my progress you can check out my space over there. My username is Sukloski. I'll report the ups and downs of that venture as I go along.