Protect Your Unit Week 13 Picks Thread

(DISCLAIMER: This game is for entertainment purposes only. No actual money is being wagered.)

Welcome to Week 13!

In last week’s installment, I promised some number-crunching of parlay success. So let’s dive right into Fig. 1:

This is a summary of all parlay bets made, through last week’s games. The first thing that jumps out at me is: speruche is not our most active parlayer, as many assumed. It’s actually E-Dogg42 (97 parlay bets), followed by jrjs (80), and then speruche (78). From there it’s a long drop to undercoverbull (35 parlay bets).

Next, success rates. Leader speruche is at 29.5% - 23 out of 78. That’s excellent, but jrjs (25%) and E-Dogg42 (18.8%) aren’t far behind. There are even less frequent parlayers (is that a word?) that hit at a good rate: McIntyre2K7 (8 for 27, 27.6%); undercoverbull (8 for 35, 22.9%); Defdans (3 for 14, 21.4%); briank19 (2 for 10, 20%), and LrdNorman (5 for 26, 19.2%).

At a glance, 20% seems to be the break-even point. All the players at that level or above broke even (ignoring briank19’s $4 loss), and everyone at that level or below lost money overall. But that doesn’t take into account 2-bet vs 3-bet parlays, bet amounts and differences, and so forth. Which players are consistently hitting, and which ones landed one or two big fish?

This is the Average, Standard Deviation, Maximum, and Minimum bet amounts that people make on parlays. They tell us how much people wager on parlays, and how much they vary it. Danj725 risks the most on parlays, a whopping $150 on average! But we can also see this ranges from $50 to $200. bullsonparade96 is even wilder, ranging from $15 to $300 with an average of $130 and a standard deviation of about $90. (Standard deviation is a measurement of how much a group of statistics differ. The larger, the more different each number is.)

jrjs places the most parlays, but bets the least. E-Dogg42 bets a wide range, from $5 to $200, so his success rate will be tied up in specific plays. speruche is pretty much in the middle.

This tells us how many parlay bets are over/under bets, vs. pointspreads. Speruche, McIntyre2K7, and Oak1787 specialize in over/unders; overall, most players do point spread bets. Some do so exclusively.

speruche is hitting over-unders at an excellent 56.3% rate. That’s more than enough to be profitable. (Standard rule for single bets: 52.4%, because that’s what you need to overcome house edge at -110.) McIntyre2K7, jrjs, and others are also beating the house. But here’s what’s really amazing:

As a group, our players are correct an amazing 55.9% of the time on point spread bets within parlays. That actually seems too good to be right, but I ran it a couple times and it’s correct. HerdCountry941 (77.8%), speruche (68.6%), danj725 (66.6%), jrjs (63.4%) mcgies852 (56.3%), E-Dogg42 (53.4%) are all well on the positive side of the ledger.

So there you have it. Picks entered as of about 7:30 AM Friday morning:

As always, use this space to discuss your picks, this week’s games, or anything else. If there’s any other statistics you’re interested in, post here I can do a quick query.