Best Bets - 5/4/2024

Yo!

Happy Saturday! Yesterday was ice cold. No ducking it. I’m never one to run from it. 0-3 isn’t fun for anyone.

2 things before I get into today’s bets:

1) At its peak, the model was winning 68% of its bets. It started the MLB season 8-0. A sharp sports bettor is considered at 55%. I said in the early days to not expect to stay this hot forever. It was fun, but not sustainable. After this week, we have returned to a much more reasonable win percentage. This is normal variance. There will be hot streaks again too. If anyone tells you they don’t have losing days they are lying to you. I will have them. That’s part of betting. The hardest part is that if you just jumped on the email this week, you probably really think I suck. I can tell by the amount of hate mail I’ve received in the past 2 days for a FREE service lol. That’s fine. I wouldn’t love trying something new and getting the results we’ve got the past 2 days either. I also wouldn’t send threatening emails, but that’s just me. If it makes you this angry, please just do us both a favor and unsubscribe.

2) I won’t defend the past 2 days and really the past week’s results, but I will defend the overall accuracy of the model. It won over time last year, and it believe it will do so this year. Let me throw an example to you. I watched Jalen Brunson of the New York Knicks step up and miss 2 free throws in a row during their playoff series against the 76ers. Does that make him a bad free throw shooter? It does if that’s the only set of data and sample size we collect. However, what if we take the whole set of data from the season? Jalen Brunson shot 84.7% from the free throw line. Does that make him a good shooter? I would say so. I say that to say… the model works, but it will have ups and downs as anything that basically is collecting large sets of data to form an average. We can pluck small sections of the data and run with it if we really want to and it creates narratives that aren’t actually true. And the last thing I’ll say before I share today’s picks: the model accurately predicted the right side of the spread in 9 out of 15 games yesterday. That’s 60%. 60% is considered very sharp as a sports bettor. Unfortunately, the 3 I gave you all lost. For perspective, 60% is a VERY GOOD win rate. If you don’t believe me just do a little Google search and see what others say. I think expectations for some aren’t totally aligned with reality. I can’t do anything to fix that aside from stating the facts which is what I’m doing right now.

The solution? Soon I’ll be giving you a massive data dump on every single game and what the analytics say. This way, you can do more of your own decision making based off of what my model says. I’ll still point out my favorites on the day for those not interested in each matchup or combing through much more data. That day won’t be today as I need to get prepared for that a bit more. It’ll be here sometime next week.

Sorry for all the writing. Just doing my best to clearly communicate to everyone what we are trying to accomplish here and set proper expectations for what is reasonable!

Today I’m going light and getting the model ready to push data out to you. I’ve got 2 bets below that I’ll be taking for the day:

Phillies/Giants U7.5 total runs (-130)

CLE Guardians ML (-135)

I am always open to feedback and suggestions!

Thank you all for reading!

-Caleb