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SportsInsights.com Article -- Betting Against
the Public and College Hoops:
Conference
Playoffs and March Madness (March 2008)
March is here
and that means it is time for March Madness! In this
article, we highlight some of the sports marketplace statistics
that we study -- and come up with a simple-to-use system that
has been profitable over the past few years of March
Madness. Note that the system we highlight below may also be used during Conference Playoffs
(as the system
is based on all games during March and April). There is
increased public attention as we near the NCAA Tournament -- so
that Betting Against the Public works particularly well at this time of the
college basketball season.
Betting Against the Public
and Public Games
Betting Against
the Public has proven to work across all of the major
sports. Its consistency is remarkable; we have seen that
Betting Against the Public and SportsInsights'
Square Plays have consistently won in the 54%-57% range, on
average. We have also seen that this approach of Betting
Against the Public works particularly well in "big
games" or "games
of national focus." The rationale is that with
more of the public watching a game, more public biases occur in
the sports betting marketplace (such as betting on
"favorites" and "overs"). This leads
to an increase in the edge for "sharp bettors."
Number of Bets
SportsInsights collects and displays numerous sports marketplace
indicators, with Betting Percentages
being its most popular. Betting Percentages are very useful at helping to uncover value in the
sports marketplace. We also feel, however, that other
indicators - such as the Number of Bets are
important as well.
Using a simple system that typically takes College Hoops
underdogs, we overlaid a filter that played only the top 1/3 of
games in terms of number of bets. The winning percentage
increased by more than 2%! This makes sense,
because games with public interest will lead to overpriced
favorites. The moral of the story: if you
are Betting Against the Public, focus on the games where there
is a lot of Public interest.
March
Madness: Putting things Together
The great thing about March Madness is that many of these
factors come together to help make SportsInsights' tools even
more effective for our Members. We have the whole
country watching the tournament due to all of the office
pools. The increased attention leads to an increased
number of bets -- and an increase in public biases. The
team at SportsInsights decided to see how our basic sports
marketplace indicators performed during this time of
"national focus" on "March Madness."
Using our College Basketball database, that goes back over the
past four seasons (and over 12,000 games) -- we looked at a
simple system.
During March and April, betting on a team that has a:
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Betting
Percentage less than 40%
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and
is more than a 10-point Underdog
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Has
yielded a winning percentage of 60%
over the past four seasons (Just under +30
units over the past four seasons or +7 units per season each
March/April).
For
example:
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Say Duke is
a 10.5 point favorite over Team "Big Underdog."
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Also,
"Joe Public" is all over Duke, with Duke
collecting 75% of the bets and "Big Underdog"
collecting 25%.
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SportsInsights'
March Madness system would "Bet Against the
Public" and select "Big Underdog" (more than
10-point dog with less than 40% of the bets) to beat
"the spread."
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Over the
past four seasons, using this kind of approach during March
and April (of selecting undervalued and unwanted
underdogs) would have won 60% of the games against the
spread.
Smart Money Techniques
An even stronger use of "betting percentages" is to
combine it with "line movement."
SportsInsights.com's members will recognize this as
Smart Money Techniques. We won't go over Smart Money
methods since SportsInsights has several
good articles
(including this one on College Hoops) on that topic. Suffice it to say that
using line moves in combination with betting percentages are a
very powerful method of finding out where the Smart Money is
going.
Summary
College basketball offers sports investors many investment
opportunities -- and at the same time, many challenges. We
have reviewed some tools that sports investors can use for college hoops. This
includes SportsInsights.com's bread-and-butter sports tools such as
Betting Percentages and Line Moves. In addition, we
highlighted the Number of Bets -- which is often overlooked as
an indicator. Now, let the Madness begin -- and let the
"sports investing profits" roll in! Good luck!
Disclaimer
We do not guarantee that the trends and biases we’ve found will
continue to exist. It is impossible to predict the future. Any
serious academic research in the field of “market efficiencies”
recognizes that inefficiencies may disappear over time. Once
inefficiencies are discovered, it is only a matter of time
before the market corrects itself. We do not guarantee our data
is error-free. However, we’ve tried our best to make sure every
score and percentage is correct.
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