SPSS Betting

**yak merchant** · 04-15-14, 02:19 PM

Originally posted by BrickShotShawn

Does anyone have any experience using SPSS to bet on sports, specifically MLB?

The program is extremely powerful, though the learning curve is very steep.

Right now, I am simply looking for a place where I can all sorts of data on all sports. Then I plan to plug it into SPSS and see what I can find. I am by no means an expert on this software, but I am learning it right now.

I mainly have time to work on it during the weekends. I management to scape together some MLB data and I plan to incorporate some of mlb.com gameday data.

Just wondering whether if anyone here has experience or can point me in a direction on where I can find data.

Thanks in advance.

I am sort of in the same process, but I am learning R. I looked at other packages including SSPS and matlab. All have strengths and weaknesses. The amount of stuff on http://cran.us.r-project.org and the community made the decision for me to choose R.

**chachi** · 04-15-14, 05:49 PM

R (or S or S-Plus as various articles may refer to it as given that is/was the base language and retail/pay version of the language originally until R came along) had always seemed the most powerful stat language to me, and was what I did most of my work in over the years

**mminkovski** · 04-16-14, 12:17 AM

SPSS is the best for large databases. I use it daily at work for the last 4 years but never actually tried a sports betting model (didn't bother to look for free databases). I could help you building up a prediction model (you'll need at least 5 years of data plugged into it).

**HeeeHAWWWW** · 04-16-14, 03:40 AM

I'm more familiar with matlab, but have also thought SPSS might be very useful for this.

**chachi** · 04-16-14, 11:44 AM

Mea culpa then ... R/S/S+ always seems the best overall for time-series data to me, but maybe I've missed recent developments

**BrickShotShawn** · 04-17-14, 08:45 AM

Thanks for the offer to help mminkovski.

That's part of the problem I am having at the moment. It's difficult for me to find that data. I did find Sean Lahman baseball data. It goes back a long time. I plan to use only 2009-2013. Also hoping to add the gameday data from mlb.com as I found another website that had a tutorial on how to do so.

Right now I am stuck and getting frustration. I do appreciate all the offers to help.

**mminkovski** · 04-18-14, 12:18 AM

I've done a small research. All the good databases are paid.

**BrickShotShawn** · 04-18-14, 10:18 AM

Yeah, I'm not interested in paying for database access. MLB.com has access for free, as does retrosheet so I will likely stick with them. Though, which databases would you recommend?

**yak merchant** · 04-18-14, 03:04 PM

I don't use this as I already built something to parse the game day XML but if I was starting today I would use this to build a database.

Introduction to pitchRx package

http://cpsievert.github.io/pitchRx/

**nash13** · 05-03-14, 06:58 PM

i am a programmer for spss on my daily job, so if you have any questions just message me.