Your weekly curated list of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
Baseball strikeout prop – To get a quick estimate of strikeouts, you can do the following:
- Estimate innings pitched by taking total innings divided by starts.
- Take this innings pitched estimate and multiple by a projected strikeouts per inning.
I use the ZiPS projections of Dan Szymborski on FanGraphs. For Cleveland pitcher Tanner Bibee, this gives an estimate of 5.2 strikeouts. A more granular model on the SP K Prediction app considers handedness of the pitcher and opposing lineup and predicts 4.6 strikeouts for Bibee.
Both of these estimates suggest value in Bibee under 6.5 strikeouts against Detroit (+108 on FanDuel).
College football win total – Pro bettor Drew Martin thinks a Vanderbilt win total of 3.5 might be low, as they return their starting QB, five offensive linemen with starting experience and both coordinators. This team will have a short learning curve this upcoming season.
Dissecting the schedule reveals value on the over. Vanderbilt opens the season with Hawaii, Alabama A&M, Wake Forrest and UNLV as their non conference games. It is not out of the question that the Commodores sweep the slate and the over cashes by the middle of September.
Even if Vanderbilt drops one or two games of these games, they can still get to 4 wins with games against Kentucky, Florida, Missouri, South Carolina and Auburn. The Commodores will be an underdog in each of these games, but they did beat Kentucky and Florida straight up in consecutive weeks last season.
Drew likes Vanderbilt over 3.5 wins (-170 at FanDuel). Follow Drew on social media this fall as he hosts the Every Game on the Board podcast which goes through every college football game every week.
NFL preseason bets – While they have built their reputation in college basketball and college football, Right Angle Sports (RAS) now has a full NFL service. Here are some of their preseason bets released earlier this week (current values on FanDuel).
- Dallas at Seattle over 37.5 (current 40.5)
- Las Vegas at Los Angeles Rams over 36.5 (current 39.5)
- Indianapolis -2.5 vs Chicago (current -5.5)
There is no longer value in these bets, as the market has moved. In fact, RAS got closing line value in all seven releases this week.
In an email tomorrow, I’ll explain how RAS has achieved their long term record of success.
Keeping accounts alive – Captain Jack of Unabated has been betting on sports for a long time. In the days in which he ran between books in Las Vegas, he would bet round numbers to save time.
This means Captain Jack would bet $110 to win $100. He didn’t want to bet $100 to win $90.91 and deal with change in coins. To his surprise, he found out that bookmakers use this as a tell for a sharp bettor.
Jack suggests betting non-round numbers to disguise your sharpness. He also talks about four other tells for sharp bettors, including the truth about round robins, in a great article at Unabated.
Football humor – Rob Pizzola almost lost his Bet Bash dinner over this one.
The headline is clickbait, as Seth Walder of ESPN, an analytics guy, writes that “a backup running back should have little impact on our forecast for a team.”
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
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