I am having a hard time choosing what stats and info to use in order to cap a game and/or what each team will score. Please help a noob out with what stats you use or lead me to a good URL that can help!!!
I use a standard quarter....Get it high in the air to get a true flip. If it's heads I go w/ the fav if it's tails I go dog. You can tweak the model anyway to your liking but just remember the key here is the air you get under the flip. This assures a true random flip & gives you the best chance @ long term success.
I work from my own database and grade every game each team plays, weighted for strength of opponent, the strength of who their opponents have played (putting that team's stats in perspective), road/home, and other factors. Those game grades comprise each team's current power ranking, which I use to set a fair line for the game. If you put in the work to build the database/model and have it all automated, it gives you a lot of perspective. If you're doing it manually from looking at online stats, you need to keep it as simple as possible because it can be very cumbersome to cap one game thoroughly, let alone an entire card.
If you're just starting out, I would say first ask yourself "What are the strengths and weaknesses of each team?", looking at the season stats for each squad, and weighted by strength of opponent.
If you're doing it manually from stats off the internet:
You're trying to pick off where one team has an advantage over the other so the best approach is probably to make a checklist of those in-game matchups and look at them for each game you're capping to see who has the edge, ie:
Team A passing vs Team B pass defense
Team B passing vs Team A pass defense
Team A rushing vs Team B rush defense
Team B rushing vs Team A rush defense
The top 10-15 teams are for the most part fairly good at all of these, but outside of the elite teams, you're going to see more and more imbalance where one team has distinct advantages in one aspect of the game and you can expect them to prioritize that advantage to try to win.
ie: a team with a good secondary but a weak defensive line might completely shut down a team with a pass-heavy offense like Oregon State, but get lit up by a run-heavy team like Georgia Tech.
tons of free pages like these all over the web. gotta find the things that are important to you when capping a game, and that will lead you to 2 or 3 pages most useful to you. also always look at the team pages of each school before betting...you can sometimes find little things out that might help you. people do it different. sk above goes very deep into this, and it is clear he takes a lot of time with it. he most likely makes a pretty consistent gain no matter the sport or the year. i am more free...lol. i just look and see what jumps out at me as being an edge to one team or another. tho i do have a few guidelines that are very important to me that must be met before place anything over a 2 unit bet, i am kind of all over the place. prolly has a lot to do with me hovering just barely above the 50% mark all year and not making a lot of money...lol. just look at stats and read articles...and always look over the threads of the better cappers here. some of these guys take a lot of time and do really good writeups about the games they bet. you can kind of tell by reading each which things they value more. take all that and whatever info you can find and mix it up to your liking.
I guess it depends on how much you know about the sport. In football you need to know which stats mean more than others so whether you use your own stats or data on the web, it's only as useful as you make it. I like to look at TO Margin and 3rd Conversions, among others, and these are widely available.
Since I don't currently have my own database and one of the sites I use that's really solid is CFB Stats I love this site...Also if you don't know SDQL..learn it. This allows you to custom query your own stuff and all you need is a browser and some education. They are currently working on their College football database so it's not as diverse as the NFL, but you can extract some very useful data from it.
I would also suggest using the search feature here or Google because you'll find way more info from reading previous threads since these questions have been asked many times before.
You'll also find that by read articles and/or listening to the radio you can get valuable information that was and so you can even cap some games without even looking at the stats. I listen to ESPN radio all day at work and listen for tidbits of info all the time. I also utilize twitter and follow all sorts of people that post/re-tweet articles as well that's been helpful.
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What info do you use to cap a game?
..to funny ^ ......... no but for reel,what kinda coin do you use ?
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