Originally <a href='http://www.sportsbookreview.com/forum/showthread.php?p=23004199'>posted</a> on 11/16/2014:

Hey guys,

This is DFL, just came across this thread for the first time. (I have this login from a few years back asking questions about finding a proxy for the contest or something)

First things first, I love doing this as a hobby but that's all it is; frankly my picks are not "professional quality" given the level of effort I am putting into them. I've had a phenomenal run over 3.5 years of contest playing and have hit near 60% over time, but given what I know about my own methodology, 52-53% is probably the best we can expect from my top picks. You can probably bump this up by a point or two vs stale contest lines of course. Chalk the rest of it up to random fluctuation.

How to project how anyone (me, you, whoever) will do handicapping NFL games going forward? I'd suggest this: consider that most people betting randomly will be right around 50%, the really top groups can expect maybe 56% on their top plays, most "sharps" who know a little about stats are somewhere in between (but closer to 50% without factoring in line shopping) and take your best guess about where you fall in that spectrum. Much more reliable IMO than looking at recent (even last few years) record, as records can fluctuate for no reason.

As far as how I handicap games, I think I've developed a pretty good system for getting as much info as I can out of boxscores, and then I adjust these numbers some based on a team's preseason expectations, based on what I've seen in the games I watch and injuries. But the reality is that there are other groups going to the additional steps of analyzing play-by-play data and watching every single play of every game and taking notes. Some of them are really good at what they do and their opinions get baked into the lines, and it isn't realistic to expect my methods to identify value that these other groups don't see. That's why I say 53% as the high end for what I actually think I could hit vs widely available lines over the long run.

Of course, anything can happen over a sample of games, and if you look at a contest with 1000+ handicappers, there's always going to be some people catching a couple standard deviations of good luck and right now, that's me.

If that doesn't scare you off betting my picks enough, how about this: although it's been going well, I do remain 4 games out of first place. If my goal is to maximize my (very low) chances of winning the contest it becomes worth picking games I don't actually like, if I think the leaders will take the other side, just because I need variance to catch up.