Handicapping Philosophy

 I’ve been betting on sports since the 1980’s, before internet and cellphones. I got my data from the “Sporting News” which was printed once per week and had the box scores for all the games played during the previous week. I started developing my math model during these years by scaling all significant data categories to zero for the average team. Then determining how much better or worse a team was from the average team. I could then see the real difference between teams in each category. Next step was combining the scaled categories to compute a true line. This took years of work. My math skills improved while in college and I picked the brain of every math professor and graduate student.

My models were very successful in the 1990’s. In October 2000, I moved to Las Vegas. Today my models have come a long way since then as I’m constantly updating and improving them. I have models for basketball, baseball, football, hockey, and soccer (EPL and some Champions League). In some cases, I have multiple models for the same sport, but focus on different statistics.  There are advanced stats I use today that didn't even exist decades ago.  But it’s much easier these days with information at my fingertips on the internet, and Excel spreadsheets to sort and track data in seconds.

While math is the foundation of handicapping, there are things math can’t quantify. One such thing is human motivation. If one team is extremely motivated and their opponent is not, well you can throw the math out the window. This motivation can be from perceived factors that aren’t even real. But if a coach can make his players believe they are somehow hated or disrespected or slighted by their opponent, those players can exceed any quantified level. These are dangerous (very good) teams. Rest is another thing math struggles to identify. A bad but rested team against a good but tired team can defy data sets. Combining math, motivation, and rest is what I believe makes me successful.