Re: Hey Dirty and MO: top 25 getting killed again.
Cannon, congrats on all the winners so far this year. :cheers
l've played the unranked favorites segment in the past, but not the others you have listed. In particular I am amazed out how well the simple unranked dogs segment seems to have been fairing. Do you by any chance have the numbers on their performance from last season? I'm sure they were pretty good since they seem to comprise the bulk of the units, even at the smaller units wagered per play.
One restriction I think could possibly help out even more is that of removing large (double digit most likely) home dogs. I have heard Alan Boston (very well respected college hoops bettor from the book "The Odds") and some other very sharp players talk about how double digit home dogs have pretty much been a money burner. I think they were talking about the last few seasons at a minimum, and the beginning of this one is when the conversation came up. Boston said it was costing him so much money that he had to come up with a logical explanation. He said that teams that are at a huge talent disadvantage will still get up for a home game against a top team and will have a lot of emotion on their side, which can keep them in the game at least for awhile. Often times get a small lead or hang very close for awhile. With such a large talent mismatch, as is the case when a team is laying 10+ on the road, the better team is usually going to wake up at some point and overcome the emotional charge of the home dog. When things start to go wrong and the home dog realizes they are overmatched it can very deflating and things can snowball letting the score get out of hand. The favorite then has to overcome a much smaller price than he would if he were at home. When our large dog is on the road (to the top 25 team for our use), he will of course be getting a better price, but also will not deal with the possible emotional roller coaster of the home dog role. In this spot, the home team expects to coast, and the visitor probably doesn't expect much either. We can probably get a generous amount of points and a less than 100% effort from the home team and maybe evena back door cover.
I haven't done the research on this subset, but these guys were talking very seriously about it, and I would be pretty surprised if the large home dogs were a decent winner over the period of time they were talking about. If someone has the numbers on large home dogs (double digit or maybe even 7+ or something to get a bigger subset) vs. top 25 teams that would be great. If not, I think we can keep an eye on it going forward and see if it wasn't a way to even better refine the system. If the unranked dogs are performing very well, it might be hard for this subset to be doing too poorly. But if that were to actually be the case, it could be a little boost to weed them out. Good luck.
