Czech hockey pick for the day

Also posted on Betrush. You can see my czech hockey stats there.

Pardubice - Vitkovice

This one promises to be a high quality contest. I am edging with the away team Vitkovice to win it by two or more just because of the bookies irrational approach to pricing it. Namely, the team that’s riding a seven away games wining streak, coming off full 7 days of rest is being priced as the underdog. The win odds are moving around 1.72 for Pardubice and 2.15 for Vitkovice. The least they could do was to price it 50/50.

Pardubice is a typical “hot and cold” type of team. The last 5 matches they changed wins and losses on regular basis, winning the last one played away in Zlin. Before that there was a 4 match losing streak. Before that streak they took points in 5 of the 6 previous matches. Even within a single game they are prone to sudden lapses in concentration. In the penultimate match, played away at Kladno, one of the weakest teams in the league, they took a 3-0 lead, only to lose the match 4-3 in overtime. The last match against Zlin they played with poise and intensity, winning it 4-1 (the 4th goal being an empty-netter) so I am hoping they won’t be able to sustain that intensity level for a second match in three days, with a travel from Zlin (on the south of Czech Republic) to Pardubice (central Bohemia region) in between.

Vitkovice is coming fresh off a 7 day break due to the Davis cup matches being played in their home arena. Having enough time to travel and prepare for the match must give them some sort of edge. If anything, they had a chance to tend to all the minor health issues. Reportedly Michal Hlinka (25 matches, 3 goals, 6 assists, 11:31 average time on ice)and Michael Vandas (38 matches, 7 goals, 8 assists, 10:44 TOI) complained on injuries and their presence is not confirmed yet. Their seven consecutive away wins helped them solidify their position as the best away team in the league with a 14-7 record. Sparta is second with 12-9.

Most likely the winner will be decided by details and when it comes to high pressure no-mistake-allowed matches I trust Vitkovice more than I do Pardubice. If they enter the match with the intensity they’ve shown in their recent away matches there is a fair chance they can blow the contest open early and contain their lead until the end.

Tip: Vitkovice (-1EH) 2 @4.1 on Unibet

A tip for the braver heart

I posted this one on betrush as well.

Jihlava- Ceske Budejovice

A speculative bet based on my opinion that the odds on it are a bit off.

Although they are the favorites, i wouldn't say Jihlava will be dominating this match. They had an average January at best, won 5 lost 5. Of those losses one was to the leaders Mlada Boleslav away, one to a playoff contender Havirov (7-1 loss!) and three bad losses at the hands of Usti nad Labem (9th place) , Beroun (11th place) and Kadan (13th place of 14).

Ceske Budejovice are the negative surprise of the season. Though they were one of the favorites to win the league pre-season they are standing 12 and their playoff hopes are pure sciense fiction at this stage. They are showing signs of improvement lately, winning 3 of their last 4, 2 of those wins coming away from their own arena. The captain Ales Kotalik is an experienced ex-NHL player and their leading scorer with 24 points. They will be missing the forward Skuhravy, who was used by the extraleague team Litvinov in their match yesterday against Plzen. Though he is a productive scorer, he is also the most penalized player on the squad. If they want to take away three points from an away match against Jihlava they must show flawless discipline, so Skuhravy's absence might come as a blessing in disguise. Because of Skuhravy's inclusion in Litvinov, Budejovice got Roman Psurny from Litvinov and he is proving to be an excellent addition to the team scoring 4 times and assisting 3 times in the 6 matches he's played for Budejovice this season. His extraleague record for Litvinov for the season is 32 matches and 1goal and 1 assist only in 10.5 minutes on ice on average.

Tip: 2 (60 minutes) @6.00 (Ladbrokes)

Czech hockey bet for today

One match caught my eye.
Litvinov- Brno 2

Today's hockey picks

Two matches from the Czech Division 1 caught my eye:

Benatky - Trebic 1 2.32
Most- Havlickuv Brod 2 1.61

The explanations are on Betrush, click through to find them.

Back again

Hi guys, its been a long time since I've visited this place. I do not intend to turn into a regular again in the nearby future but since I posted three tips on a different betting site I decided I might as well post them here.
I analysed the matches in the Czech hockey Extraleague for today.

Here are my picks:

Kladno- Sparta 1 (OT included)
Pardubice- Mountfield 2 (60 minutes)
Slavia- Zlin  1 (60 minutes.)- this one starts in 20 minutes so better hurry

The explanations are stored on betrush. Good luck

June summary

June was a good month for our MLB bets if we look at the strike rate and the overall profit. 52-38 win-loss record (57.8%) strike rate is really good. The total profit also looks like I did really good, but this is kind of misleading. When i converted the results into a more reasonable format i came up with minuscule 2.46% ROI and only 2.51 level stakes profit. Given that I was doing this manually there is room for error, even though I doubt that. This is the main reason I will place the test bets onto OLBG as well as covers. I stake 100 units per bet and we will get a much clearer picture next month. Here's how the whole month went:

If we consider all sports the picture is much worse:

I have touched upon this the previous post. I have no idea why there is such a difference in the performance in other sports. I am looking into this, will report with the findings.

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.