A Moment of Reflection

Dammit. Some things are just better left unknown.

I decided to crunch some numbers this evening. If you look to your right, you'll see my record gambling so far this year. I'm not doing well. Neither are most contrarians I know. Last week's post got me thinking about my struggles. I've been doing this long enough now that very little in the way of research is needed for me to figure out which side to bet on. Am I good enough at this point to look at lines and Wagerline numbers and pick games? Scarily, the answer very prematurely seems to be yes.

Another motivation for this study was a discussion that was brought up on RMMB during Week 1 of college football. Moneyline put in a few bets on Thursday night thinking that the line movement would go away from him if he waited. It had always been status quo on the RMMB to wait until about an hour or so before game time to put one's bets in. That's the way I'd been doing since I started. For the first two weeks, I ran an informal study and found about 70% of the lines from Tuesday moved away from the contrarian side during the week. That is to say, I would have got better numbers or juice if I had placed my bets on Tuesday.

First off, let me point out that we are one-third of the way through college football season and only one-quarter of the way through pro football season. Therefore, the sample size is not near large enough for me to change strategy... yet.

This brings me to what I did today. I decided to look back at all of my Tuesday leans posts from the season thus far (I knew starting a blog would come in handy at some point) to see if I had placed my wagers on Tuesday instead of Saturday, would I be ahead. I assigned all of my Strong Leans as 4 unit bets and all of my Moderate Leans at 2 unit bets, both at -105 juice, which seems reasonable. Since I've been recording the line at the time along with the leans, it was academic to go back to Yahoo and check the scores. Here is what I found:

College Football:



Pro Football:



So far as I can tell, NFL Week 3 would be the only week for either sport where I would have done worse playing my bets on Tuesday. Does this mean that I am overthinking my bets on Saturday and Sunday? Am I just assigning units incorrectly? Am I trimming too many games off my card? If I had to guess, it would be equal parts a, b, and c. In any case, this is an interesting experiment and I am going to continue updating it periodically.

EDIT: Just for S&Gs, I took a look at just strong leans. I would be up 30.6x in NCF and 15.2x in NFL at 4x/bet. Even if I backed off to 2x per strong leans, I would still be kicking my current ass. Dammit.