Originally Posted by
Cutler'sThumb
I'll freely admit that I'm nowhere near the expert level of many of the guys on this thread with regards to constructing my own queries. As JMon correctly states, it takes years of hard work to really be good at that, and I only discovered SDQL 3 months ago. The concept of trends and SDQL appealed greatly to the way I approach this game, and I'm sure I'll pick up the whole package in due time. In the meantime, however, I joined the group just as there was a massive amount of info being uploaded, and I've spent a lot of time trying to work out the best possible way to use all that info. JMon, you obviously have a successful system down, so feel free to ignore my efforts. If I crash and burn trying it my way, it'll just be an expensive lesson.
It may well be a waste of time to back test all the trends, but doing it has allowed me to familiarize myself with the language and see how individual trends behave over time, and which ones have flat lined recently and should be put on the bench. The NBA is still a work in progress (still over 1/2 of the trends to work thru), but I've completed this process in the NHL, and have seen great results (thanks Oilers!). I don't play every trend, but rather the trends that fit my filter and are not opposed by a valid trend on the other side. I'm sure this could get even better if I knew each trend inside and out and took the time to cap each trend for each game, but I just don't have the skill (or the time) to do that at this point.
JMon, your smaller trends are absolutely golden, but imho this simply isn't the case with some of the other smallish trends that have really been massaged. I look at it from a statistical standpoint (it was a many years ago, but I lived and breathed the scientific method for a long time, and I did take statistics along the way): the smaller the sample size, the more volatility there is likely to be. This is statistics 101, doesn't matter if we're talking about what % of dogs like to eat their own poop or if the Nuggets are going crap the bed (again). That doesn't mean small trends should be shunned, it just means they should probably be looked at with a little more caution. I actually won the largest bet I've ever made last month based on a trend with a sample size less than 40, but the situation was perfect. I knew about it from before I found SDQL and had actually PMed you asking about a start time filter, as I was trying to come up with the correct query for it. Anyway, sorry if I got your dander up with my posts.