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FAQ on Jay Edgar NBA
Couple of folks have PMd with questions about what's in these NBA posts. Understandably, they find parts of it confusing. So, for anyone interested, here's my stab at a more complete explanation through FAQ:
The results look pretty good. What exactly are you tracking?
Results from betting one unit on the ML and one unit ATS on every NBA game where the closing Pinny* moneyline gives you a significantly better price on a team than the Edgar Line says you should get.
How much better?
5% better or more
5% of what? I look at the numbers and I don't see 5% anywhere.
Yeah, it's not there on the surface. I mean 5% on the scale of 0% to 100% for each team's chances to win the game. The bookmaker's moneylines estimate this chance, but they use a different language. (They say "+150" or "+100" or "-150" instead of "40%" or "50%" or "60%".) So we translate our percentages into their language. But “5%-ML-OFF,” a term from my language, still seems like the best explanatory name for the method.
Are you playing these plays yourself?
Yes. I’m playing other things, too. And for a while I would still sometimes play the other side of an indicated play if I strongly liked it for other reasons. Although I have pretty much stopped any major variations as it’s become clear that my numbers are consistently delivering a highly profitable slate of plays. Now, at the absolute worst, I may pass on an indicated game if I feel very strongly that the other side has some things going for it that are not indicated in the numbers.
Can you walk through the things you post during the day? What do they mean and where do they come from?
(1) The Edgar Line for the game
(Example: HOU 6.1/222 over CLE)
It means that my power ratings have set Houston at 69.0% to win the game and Cleveland at 31.0% to win the game. This translates into a true, no-vig moneyline of -222 on HOU and +222 on CLE. So that’s the “222” The “6.1” is the true pointspread for that particular moneyline. This pointspread comes from a chart that I developed from research that Ganchrow (and to a lesser extent I) did last October based on the last 15 years of NBA games. Asking the question “Teams favored by X points win the game SU what % of the time?”, I developed a sliding scale – the higher the ML, the higher the point spread. (Home teams favored by 6 points win the game roughly 68% of the time – so from the 69% chance that the Rockets will win, we get HOU by 6.1 points.)
(2) The “Power Ratings Over Last 10 Games”
Just what it sounds like. Every team has a power rating figure. I put that number (rounded) into the daily posts next to the team name and its rank among the 30 teams. Generally the best team has a power rating around 67-73, the average team around 50, and the worst team around 27-33. (These numbers are also, very roughly speaking, the percentage chance that the team would win a game on a neutral court against a league-average opponent. The average of all thirty power ratings will usually be 50.0 within a couple of tenths.) I list the power ratings in descending order so you can easily see how the teams rank against each other. It’s an indicator of who is truly playing well right now and who isn’t – in my opinion, it is a really great way to check reputation against reality.
This #1-30 daily ranking of the teams also matters in my system because, in the formula that I use to calculate what score to award a team for their result in a particular game, the ranking of their opponent as they played them is a significant factor. In other words, if you beat the #30–ranked team by 10 points, it is not worth nearly as much as beating the #1-ranked team by 10 points (or even by 1 point).
(3) The "5%-OFF Marker" or “Strike Price”
I’ve been trying different ways to state this, looking for the most useful and the easiest to understand. Basically, for each team, there is a certain offered Pinny ML at which Pinny's number and the Edgar number would be far enough apart so that, if you put everything back on the 0% to 100% scale, there would be a difference of 5% or more in what they are saying about a team’s chances to win. So the "strike price" is the ML you need to see at Pinny in order for that 5% gap to exist.
Anyone could figure this themselves based on the Edgar Line, but it would take some calculating (or an Excel sheet set up for it.) Unfortunately, given how the language used by the books to state the oneyline, I know of no simpler way to calculate or state when a moneyline is far enough off to move in. You can’t say you need a “50-point gap” or something like that, because while the gap between -100 and -150 is a 10% gap (50% and 60%), the gap between -400 and -450 is less than 2% (80% and 81.8%).
Could I do all of this myself?
Yes and no. How I get the score that I give each team for their effort in each game is complicated and I haven’t shared it – so the exact numbers could not be duplicated. But it doesn't much matter, because what I do post are the actual results from farther along in the process.
Anybody could use the same approach. Which I think is the main thing. You could probably improve on it, in fact. I began the year uncertain about how sharp my numbers are -- we're finding out together that they are actually pretty good already. Nevertheless, more generally, I have always been confident that I am on the right track with the basic method, which can be summed up in about four sentences: Look critically at what each team did in each game, consider all the factors, and assign that effort a score (and it’s easier if all the scores you ever assign average out at 50.) Figure out a power rating for each team before each game that’s based on the most recent scores you have given them. Compare the power ratings of the two teams and develop a way to translate them into each team’s chance to win – is it 50%-50%, 56%-44%, 89%-11%, or what? And adjust that ratio (let's say it's 53%-47%) based on home/road, rest/fatigue, and any other factors for the upcoming game that you think matter (let's say those adjustments change it to 41%-59%.) From that, you have a moneyline on the game (at 41%-59% it would be +144/-144) that you can compare against what the books offer.
Any questions I’ve missed, just fire away.
GL
* Even though the Pinny ML now reflects only non-US opinion, and is unplayable to many of us, I continue to use it as the measuring stick. The book you use doesn't matter as a practical matter -- for qualifying plays, the obvious goal is to get the best moneyline and the best pointspread available.
Note that I am also continuing the year-long practice of grading the pointspread plays at Pinny's closing pointspread and -105 juice. Pinny's actual juice at closing may be more or less than -105, and of course many be unable to play there. But it is still a fair approximation in my view, as anyone lineshopping over any reasonable portion of the day should easily be able to get a better number and/or equal or better juice (hello Matchbook), on most of the indicated plays.
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Originally Posted by Dark Horse
