When the total's 7 or 11.5...

[Masu485]

in baseball, and 5 ( i think is the lowest i've seen) or 7.5 in hockey, is it profitable to always play the unders on the extreme low totals and overs on the extreme high totals?

i'm sure it's been backtested somewhere, but im only looking for the unders and overs on the lowest and highest regular totals that a book would put out (ie 5 for hockey, 7 for mlb)

my theory is that with baseball and hockey, the books' computers/sharps may once in a while come out with a result abnormally high or abnormally low for certain games. (ie total of 3 in mlb)

since the books cannot put out a total of 3 on the game, the lowest they can do is the 7 or the least, the 7.5.

same applies to the over. if they know it's going to be a HUGE scoring game, they still can't put the over above 11.5 or very rarely over 12 (which i have never even seen).

so could this make sense in the end, to play all high totals on the over, and all low totals on the under, as they predict a very high or very low scoring game but can't really put the over and unders so extreme on mlb and nhl?

[ClickityClank]

So I just went through baseball since 8/1 and here are some stats.

8/1 - 8/28
When the line is 7.5: 19 games went under and 20 games went over
When the line is 7.0: 6 games went under and 7 games went over
When the line is 6.5: 1 games went under and 2 game went over
In total when the line is 7.5 or less: 26 games went under and 29 games went over

9/1 - 10/2
When the line is 7.5: 23 games went under and 14 games went over
When the line is 7.0: 3 games went under and 7 games went over
When the line is 6.5: 0 games went under and 1 game went over
In total when the line is 7.5 or less: 26 games went under and 22 games went over

8/1 - 8/28
When the line is 10.5: 11 games when over and 8 games went under
When the line is 11.0: 0 games when over and 1 game went under
When the line is 11.5: None

9/1 - 10/2
When the line is 10.5: 5 games when over and 3 games went under
When the line is 11.0: None
When the line is 11.5: 1 game went over and 0 games went under

[Masu485]

thanks a lot, seems like since august my theory is absolutely wrong haha.

[RabidDog]

to small of a sample?? not profitable anyways...

[skrtelfan]

Per Statfox's data since the NHL went to the current rules format, in the order of O-U-P

4.5 13-5-0
5 349-290-24
7 23-44-21
7.5 1-1

Most of the 4.5 are from the playoffs and most of the 7s and 7.5s are from the first season they adopted the new rules. Unfortunately, Statfox doesn't list the juice with the totals, they only list whether it's shaded over or under, so it's possible the totals of 5 had enough juice on the over that they weren't terribly profitable.

[Arilou]

The best part about this type of question is that half the time the question is "Can I win by always going under the low numbers and over the high numbers" and half the time it's "Can I win by going under the high numbers and over the low numbers?"

In general, the extremes are by their nature too rare for there to be robust data on the subject, as it's never going to be too far out of whack in any case. In general taking the juicy number (under a high number, over a low one) is what sharps tend to do as far as I've seen. Doesn't make them right, of course.