To watch or not to watch? Answering sports betting’s critical question
Sun, Mar 18, 2007
By Jeff Mason
How would you feel if everything you thought you knew about sports turned out to be false?
What if sports were actually a science – with future outcomes easily predicted by plugging a bunch of numbers into an equation?
Some handicappers are giving it a shot. More and more of the world’s best sports gamblers are turning off their TVs and turning on their calculators.
Bob Stoll doesn’t watch a lot of sports, but he does look at a lot of numbers. Stoll made noise in the sports betting world during the football season, moving lines under the nickname “Dr. Bob.” A former statistics major at the University of California at Berkley, Stoll takes a numbers-based approach to his handicapping.
Dr. Bob had no problem talking right in the middle of the first day of March Madness. He wasn’t watching sports at the time, but admitted he had just finished watching the last five minutes of the Maryland-Davidson game, where he won his bet on Maryland.
Stoll doesn’t go as far as to totally avoid sports on television. Instead, he has taught himself to watch games in the mindset of a causal fan, rather than that of a professional handicapper. A huge Cal fan, he says he never misses a Golden Bears football or basketball game.
“I don’t go out of my way to watch sports,” he says. “It’s not like I go through the TV Guide everyday to see what’s on that night. I’m a sports fan, I’ll watch a good game if a come across it, but I don’t need to watch sports to do what I do.”
What he does is study the numbers. Stoll spends his day tinkering with his formulas, going though box scores and statistics, and using his experience to identify strong situational spots to find value. Though he has taught himself to watch sports without letting affect his betting, he has words of warning for anyone looking to become serious about their handicapping.
“(Watching sports) can hurt the average fan,” he says. “You can watch a team play great one night and suddenly you have this misconception about how the team actually plays. The eyes can lie. Numbers don’t.”
Covers Expert Bryan Leonard doesn't watch sports at all. For him, in the cutthroat business of professional handicapping, it’s about time management.
“The problem with watching a game is that I have to spend two, sometimes three hours focusing on only two teams,” says Leonard. “I can learn about 50 teams in the same timeframe going through box scores and looking at matchup pages.”
Not to say that biases haven’t affected him in the past – Leonard learned the ills of watching sports the hard way. One year, he taped every NFL football game in an attempt to win the coveted Hilton NFL Handicapping Contest and spent his week watching every play of every game.
“I thought it was a sure-fire way to win the (the NFL) contest, but it was the worst result I ever had,” he says. “I had so many preconceived notions about what was happening I had no idea what was actually going on.”
It’s not fun to think that the people we regard as the sharpest sports bettors in the world do so in such a heartless, scientific way.
Covers Expert David Malinsky admits he is part of a dying breed of professional handicappers that still watch sports. Malinsky watches up to seven TVs at once in hopes of finding an advantage that doesn’t show up on the stats sheet.
His principles of watching are, not surprisingly, the polar opposite of Stoll’s. Malinsky says the key to watching games from a handicapping standpoint is being able to disassociate yourself from watching and rooting. Instead, he looks for angles that will have a tacit effect on future outcomes.
“There was a classic example that we used last year in baseball,” says Malinsky. “Carlos Silva was pitching for Minnesota in Texas (on May 9), and had probably four or five hard-hit balls that died at the warning track. That’s an out for anyone who isn’t watching the game, but they simply weren’t good pitches. We quickly made a note to go against him in his next start.”
Silva pitched six innings in Texas that day and got the ‘W’ in a 15-5 Twins win. He allowed six runs in 3.1 innings in his next start in a 9-7 Minnesota loss and was demoted to the bullpen the next day.
Surprisingly, Malinsky says baseball, with all the sabermetrics and statistics-laden lingo, provides more value by watching then any other sport.
“There are just so many things that happen in a baseball game that the box score can’t track,” he says. “Is a pitcher locating his pitches and getting hit anyway? Are the hits bloopers or line drives? These things matter in the long term. By watching when the oddsmakers aren’t we can use these situations to find advantages.”
But the ‘watch/no watch’ dichotomy isn’t that black and white. Malinsky has statistical power rankings and still spends a large part of his day pouring over numbers.
“We really have to look at the numbers because that is what the market (the oddsmakers) is doing,” he says. “The visual simply enhances the box score.”
So what exactly are the oddsmakers are doing? It depends on who you ask.
Las Vegas Sports Consultants oddsmaker Sean Van Patten sets lines for NFL, NBA and college basketball. He says he loves to watch NFL and college ball, but can’t bring himself to watch an NBA game. He uses his statistical power rankings and some general feel to set lines for the sports he watches and handicaps NBA solely by numbers and situations, but still manages to set equally sharp lines.
“My boss (LVSC's Kenny White) sets his lines totally on power rankings and doesn’t watch a lot of sports,” says Van Patten. “I have power rankings too, but they are not my bible.”
Chances are the first sports bet you ever made was on a televised event. Having money on a game makes watching it that much more intense. The first possession is just as heart wrenching as the last.
Anyone who started betting on sports for any reason was, at one point, a sports fan. The evolution of sports handicapping from a bunch of guys sitting around watching football on a Sunday afternoon to lonely number crunching in front of a dimly lit computer isn’t a pleasant thought – or one that many casual bettors would ever acknowledge as truth.
But like a stockbroker calculating the risk in his portfolio, the world’s most successful sports bettors are moving away from X’s and O’s, and towards ones and zeroes.
Sun, Mar 18, 2007
By Jeff Mason
How would you feel if everything you thought you knew about sports turned out to be false?
What if sports were actually a science – with future outcomes easily predicted by plugging a bunch of numbers into an equation?
Some handicappers are giving it a shot. More and more of the world’s best sports gamblers are turning off their TVs and turning on their calculators.
Bob Stoll doesn’t watch a lot of sports, but he does look at a lot of numbers. Stoll made noise in the sports betting world during the football season, moving lines under the nickname “Dr. Bob.” A former statistics major at the University of California at Berkley, Stoll takes a numbers-based approach to his handicapping.
Dr. Bob had no problem talking right in the middle of the first day of March Madness. He wasn’t watching sports at the time, but admitted he had just finished watching the last five minutes of the Maryland-Davidson game, where he won his bet on Maryland.
Stoll doesn’t go as far as to totally avoid sports on television. Instead, he has taught himself to watch games in the mindset of a causal fan, rather than that of a professional handicapper. A huge Cal fan, he says he never misses a Golden Bears football or basketball game.
“I don’t go out of my way to watch sports,” he says. “It’s not like I go through the TV Guide everyday to see what’s on that night. I’m a sports fan, I’ll watch a good game if a come across it, but I don’t need to watch sports to do what I do.”
What he does is study the numbers. Stoll spends his day tinkering with his formulas, going though box scores and statistics, and using his experience to identify strong situational spots to find value. Though he has taught himself to watch sports without letting affect his betting, he has words of warning for anyone looking to become serious about their handicapping.
“(Watching sports) can hurt the average fan,” he says. “You can watch a team play great one night and suddenly you have this misconception about how the team actually plays. The eyes can lie. Numbers don’t.”
Covers Expert Bryan Leonard doesn't watch sports at all. For him, in the cutthroat business of professional handicapping, it’s about time management.
“The problem with watching a game is that I have to spend two, sometimes three hours focusing on only two teams,” says Leonard. “I can learn about 50 teams in the same timeframe going through box scores and looking at matchup pages.”
Not to say that biases haven’t affected him in the past – Leonard learned the ills of watching sports the hard way. One year, he taped every NFL football game in an attempt to win the coveted Hilton NFL Handicapping Contest and spent his week watching every play of every game.
“I thought it was a sure-fire way to win the (the NFL) contest, but it was the worst result I ever had,” he says. “I had so many preconceived notions about what was happening I had no idea what was actually going on.”
It’s not fun to think that the people we regard as the sharpest sports bettors in the world do so in such a heartless, scientific way.
Covers Expert David Malinsky admits he is part of a dying breed of professional handicappers that still watch sports. Malinsky watches up to seven TVs at once in hopes of finding an advantage that doesn’t show up on the stats sheet.
His principles of watching are, not surprisingly, the polar opposite of Stoll’s. Malinsky says the key to watching games from a handicapping standpoint is being able to disassociate yourself from watching and rooting. Instead, he looks for angles that will have a tacit effect on future outcomes.
“There was a classic example that we used last year in baseball,” says Malinsky. “Carlos Silva was pitching for Minnesota in Texas (on May 9), and had probably four or five hard-hit balls that died at the warning track. That’s an out for anyone who isn’t watching the game, but they simply weren’t good pitches. We quickly made a note to go against him in his next start.”
Silva pitched six innings in Texas that day and got the ‘W’ in a 15-5 Twins win. He allowed six runs in 3.1 innings in his next start in a 9-7 Minnesota loss and was demoted to the bullpen the next day.
Surprisingly, Malinsky says baseball, with all the sabermetrics and statistics-laden lingo, provides more value by watching then any other sport.
“There are just so many things that happen in a baseball game that the box score can’t track,” he says. “Is a pitcher locating his pitches and getting hit anyway? Are the hits bloopers or line drives? These things matter in the long term. By watching when the oddsmakers aren’t we can use these situations to find advantages.”
But the ‘watch/no watch’ dichotomy isn’t that black and white. Malinsky has statistical power rankings and still spends a large part of his day pouring over numbers.
“We really have to look at the numbers because that is what the market (the oddsmakers) is doing,” he says. “The visual simply enhances the box score.”
So what exactly are the oddsmakers are doing? It depends on who you ask.
Las Vegas Sports Consultants oddsmaker Sean Van Patten sets lines for NFL, NBA and college basketball. He says he loves to watch NFL and college ball, but can’t bring himself to watch an NBA game. He uses his statistical power rankings and some general feel to set lines for the sports he watches and handicaps NBA solely by numbers and situations, but still manages to set equally sharp lines.
“My boss (LVSC's Kenny White) sets his lines totally on power rankings and doesn’t watch a lot of sports,” says Van Patten. “I have power rankings too, but they are not my bible.”
Chances are the first sports bet you ever made was on a televised event. Having money on a game makes watching it that much more intense. The first possession is just as heart wrenching as the last.
Anyone who started betting on sports for any reason was, at one point, a sports fan. The evolution of sports handicapping from a bunch of guys sitting around watching football on a Sunday afternoon to lonely number crunching in front of a dimly lit computer isn’t a pleasant thought – or one that many casual bettors would ever acknowledge as truth.
But like a stockbroker calculating the risk in his portfolio, the world’s most successful sports bettors are moving away from X’s and O’s, and towards ones and zeroes.
