In recent weeks, I have become acquainted with 3 people writing blogs and/or sites that add great value to making prediction to NFL games against the spread. I want to take this opportunity to share these sites with you and give you a brief overview of what they do. Notice that they have been added to my recently new section, the Blogroll.
Project Point Spread
President and Co-founder Jeff Wayne and I started conversing at the end of 2008. I first emailed Jeff to tell him that I loved his site. I mentioned to him that "Finally, handicappers are going to be put in the hot seat. Many claim up to 75% ATS record year by year, now your site will show the true good handicappers." He replied saying that "what you mentioned is at the heart of my philosophy and one of the main motivations for the site".
He also believes "There's a lot of predictive power in crowdsourcing but none of the big players have done it right yet so the results haven't been very good." Because Project Point Spread is a
sports pick'em community where you can challenge friends, follow experts, enter contests, and trade picks with other members they track and show you how successful the collective knowledge is. These guys are on to something and as they keep collecting data, they will definitely provide valuable tools for us all.
They've got a contest to win tickets to the NFL to whomever gets the most correct picks against the spread. I will not win since I only enter the picks you see in this site. I did suggest to Jeff to have a "Pick 3" contest next year. You can track my picks at project point spread as well, I'm
StatDawg.
The Prediction Tracker
While Project Point Spread tracks the masses, The Prediction Tracker tracks computer based football prediction. Todd Beck runs the site and I've recently exchanged emails with him. He lives in Chicago so I hope one day to get together for coffee.
The Prediction Tracker is an amazing site. Basically, Todd reads in point spread forecasts from more than 50 sites (plus I think many of his own computer based NFL predictions) and tracks not only ATS record like we do here, but other statistical measures of accuracy like absolute error, mean square error, and bias. This site also puts handicappers (or at least those that want to publicly be held accountable) in the hot seat. Todd has given me the honor to be part of this great site, and starting this week, you can see
how my point spread estimates fare with other computer based NFL prediction methodologies.
Best of Blog.net
Best of Blog is more like this blog. A free site to get NFL picks against the point spread (and over under). My friend Jim and I have been talking about our systems many times this year. He also adds a lot of value to this blog by adding many comments to it. He also has a
page on his site that benchmarks my bankroll, his bankroll, and the S&P 500. Here is a brief description of his system in his own words.
The
Adjusted Cumulative Distribution Function is the key to my system. I use it to identify my bets for each week, to compute the probabilities for each week, and to measure actual
results vs expectation values for the season. As far as gamblers are concerned, I'm a farily conservative fellow. As a result I include over under bets in my weekly picks. This increases the number of bets, narrowing the distribution around the expectation value, which tends to be
around 110% if using a 10% juice book. Those of you have have been through the highs of 2007 & 2009 or the occasional lows of 2008 with Jaime understand the standard deviation. To that end I consider setting realistic expectations for sports betting to be of the utmost importance.
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Thanks a lot to all three of you.
+ $113.64
-$125