2008/2009 Program and Pick Results

Since we still have a week to go until the Super Bowl, I thought this would be a good week to share some more detailed, in depth results with you. Obviously we still have one more game to go, so I'll be sure to update this after the Super Bowl to have all records reflected accurately at the end of the season.

To begin with, lets recap what we've learned this year. First and foremost, I believe that it can be said with fairly high certainty that the program I have is a successful, meaningful one. Since I started using it to aid in my picks, I have hit at a high percentage and been able to profit quite a bit from it, as I hope you have been able to as well. However, despite the success, I feel like a shortcoming I had was the consistency of the picks. As you have seen, although I finished with a respectable record, I had my ups and downs from week to week. I believe I had three or four weeks where my posted plays finished below .500, which of course nobody wants to see. When I took a minute to wonder why this was, I realized the bad habit I had slipped into.

As you all know, my program is based on statistics that go pretty in depth. My biggest mistake this year was rather than using the statistics to back up my plays, I was using the statistics to make my plays. Once I saw that my program spat out a certain team to win, I immediately became biased towards that being a play, which probably affected my reasoning. I rarely found myself making a play that went against my program, which is something I should have found myself doing from time to time. I believe in the future I can weed out a greater number of the incorrect program plays simply by reversing this process. As long cap the games myself and THEN look to the program, I can most likely greatly improve my success.

Now let's examine our records for the year. To begin with, here are the records of my personal plays that I have posted since I launched the program (excluding ties):

• ATS Plays: 29-20 (59.2%)
• Totals Plays: 22-15 (59.5%)
• Overall: 51-35 (59.3%)
  

If you were to include plays I posted in a contest thread the week before I started this site (Here), my records become:

• ATS Plays: 33-21 (61.1 %)
• Totals Plays: 24-15 (61.5%)
• Overall: 57-36 (61.3%)

I challenge all of you to go out and find a handicapper who posted over 90 plays and hit over 61%, you likely won't find many. In fact, I doubt you'll find any who offer their picks for free.

Moving on to my program records itself, I analyzed these in depth recently because I wanted to get a better idea of just how reliable they were. I looked at the results of the program based off of how many points it suggested the team would beat the spread by (for example if the program says Arizona beats the spread by 3.54 points I give it a strength of 3). Here are the results of my program, broken down by the strength of the play (Excluding ties again). These are only plays on sides, I have yet to analyze the totals plays:

All Plays: 83-61 ATS (57.6%)
1 or more: 71-52 ATS (57.7%)
2 or more: 61-44 ATS (58.1%)
3 or more: 51-36 ATS (58.6%)
4 or more: 43-22 ATS (66.2%)
5 or more: 30-15 ATS (66.7%)
6 or more: 22-9 ATS (71.0%)
7 or more: 12-3 ATS (80.0%)
8 or more: 9-2 ATS (81.8%)

As you can see, as the play got stronger, the winning percentage went up as well. Of those two losses when the value was over 8, one was when an uninterested Arizona team played in the snow against the Patriots, the other was the slumping Jets in the snow against the Seahawks. If I'm correct, both of these were plays I recommended, and great examples of plays I would have avoided had I capped the game myself before I looked at the program.

So what does this mean going forward? Well, for one, it is highly encouraging to see something that has the record consistently increase as the value goes up. It makes me believe that these are not just "Lucky guesses", but rather significant mismatches that the program picks up on. The bigger the room for error, the higher the success rate. Of course, as I have stated before, these past results do not guarantee any results for next year. However, to have a sample size of 144 games hitting at 57% is very encouraging, and I look forward to seeing if the results continue to be consistent in the future.

So, I hope you've all found this information interesting as we wait another week for the Super Bowl to get here. If any of you have feedback on things I could improve on, I'd love to hear it, I'm always looking for ways to improve. As for next week, early on I'm really liking a totals play, yet I am still undecided on whether or not to play a side. After the Super Bowl I will make one more post about records including totals, and over the off season possibly occasionally update with any information I find important. At the moment, I am working on a new website that is a bit more sophisticated than this blog, I'll be sure to keep you all up to date. Going into next season I will continue to offer all of my plays for free, as usual guaranteeing nothing. My plays should simply be used as a tool towards you determining what you want to bet on that week. One final note, for those of you with friends interested in football betting, I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd point them in my direction. The more followers I have, the more rewarding my work is! I put in a great deal of time week to week figuring out my plays and updating my program, so to have larger numbers of people following me makes motivation much easier! Thanks to all of you who have stuck with me through the ups and downs this year, and I hope to have ten times as many of you following along with me next year!