Could I see a spreadsheet of your picks with dates. I want to cross check MLB ML picks with another model I have. I’ve been tracking the last 5 days and it is 5-0. I’m happy to share what I am looking at if you can provide me this. Thanks.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I notice that when you initially post predictions, you use the opening vegas lines, but by the time you post them, they’ve already moved, usually in the direction you picked. So the lines you post are often unbettable.

Why not post predictions based on current lines?
Or post predictions when lines open so they are bettable?

What am I missing?

Why is it that there is no data on the performance of 4 or 5-star picks historically?

You cover why the Game Winner and ATS picks sometimes conflict, but can you explain why you would have opposing picks for Game Winner and Money Line picks?  

Darren,

  I am using some of your statistical catagories for a project and need to define the catagories used.  Can you tell me what you use to develop the Overall Team Def % and Power rankings?  Thanks.

David,

  Thanks for the help.

PitchBlack — Adding a new sport is a very labor intensive process, so we don’t have any plans to do so at this time. However, if we were to add another team sport, the NHL would be our top candidate.

 IT would be great if you can add hockey.

 Thanks for the feedback, guys. At this point, though, it still doesn’t look like we’ll be able to commit the resources to add another sport any time soon.

Would you guys be able to include CFL and NHL into the site? I would really love that!!!!

great info guys.  regarding the blog post, is there a page with current sweep at home/and away stats?

Why does it show one team on the (ML) MONEY LINE as the dog and the other team on the (RL) RUN LINE -1 1/2 as the favorite? This makes no since to me.

Eazy E — See the answer to “Why do your game winner and ATS picks sometimes conflict?” above. This is the same concept, just with money line and run line picks.

See our answer here: 
http://www.teamrankings.com/blog/mlb/mlb-mid-season-projections-review#comment-612700710

Norm — If you mean the “All Model Picks” button, that just shows all picks we’ve ever made based on whatever model you have selected at the top. I guess the name is a little confusing — it’s basically “All Picks By This Model” (NOT “All Picks By All Models”).

I noticed your 2* MLB picks for Aug-17 went 2-4, but your prediction accuracy page only changed from 35-30 to 36-31 in August (this is a 1-1), I also checked your 3* for August and you have 6-8, but if you check the last 21 days, it should be 6-9. Are these kind of “innacuracies” about the prediction accuracy page common?

So, basically it’s impossible to check the accuracy day to day, since the updating is random?

oiris — PitchBlack has it right. We only update the Prediction Accuracy pages once per day, in the early morning, because those pages take a *long* time to compute. Sometimes games from the previous day will make it into the update the next morning, but sometimes it will take an additional day. It just depends on whether we’ve gotten the final box score info from our data provider in time.

Do you offer the estimates and projections as a (xml) feed, or some other format? It would be a great addition as you could download the data directly to your own prediction tool for further breakdown and analysis.

Likewise it would be great if you could provide historical data in an easily downloadable format for analysis and process.

Thanks for a great service!

Sam — No, at this time we only publish our projections and picks on our site. We’re considering a feed or download service in the future.

Historical data downloads are another service we’d like to offer, but it has kept getting pushed back on the priorities list (plus there have been a few hurdles we still have to clear.

We’re happy you like the service, and thanks for the feedback. It’s always good to hear directly what you guys are interested in!

Do your records take into account when there is a neutral field (or court) game, such is the case tonight with Tennessee and NC State…I nitice you don’t have neutral games listed in your accuracy records…

I can’t find the link to creating an mlb model. Please help

My ATS picks pool seem to have different spreads on a lot of the lines, typically .5-1.5 point difference, but I’m assuming that amount may drastically change which side to pick. I realize it locks at different times etc. but is there any way to figure out what your modeling would do with a different spread besides the obvious situations where the spread difference falls in a way that it only makes the case stronger for the same side pick?

how about adding a discussion forum?
Are the prediction models tweaked/adjusted as the season continues?
How can I get detailed historical data .. i have a angle which seems good based on last 21 days .. but that’s not really a lot of data.

We’ve experimented with a forum in the past, briefly, and the results weren’t great. However, our site is getting much more traffic and interaction now than then, so may be worth another try at some point soon.

What are you looking for exactly when you say “detailed historical data”?

Not a bad idea, although custom queries like that could be very resource intensive, depending on how many people were doing them, etc. It’s a tricky area, because with a lot of historical picks and infinite ways to slice and dice them, things can get complicated real fast in terms of creating a UI to let a user request EXACTLY what he/she wants to see, and then running a the query. Certainly far from impossible, just saying it would be a major project, which is why we’ve held off so far.

My guess would be to justify the investment, we’d probably need to make this a subscription service, and the main question is, how many people would pay for it…

Running in the background from a queue with 1or2 jobs active at any one time would limit the resource issues.

Yeah it is a major project. I would probably think around 0.5% of your repeat visitors might be interested, and even then they may subscribe for one or two months and then stop. For now I will more then to just hear that it’s at right at the bottom of the to do list.

bh3ka…if you check about an hour before each event starts you will get 99.99999% of the updates…I used to miss one here and there so I started checking at 55 minutes before each event starts…when events start close together you can get a bunch at one time…since I started checking in this manner haven’t missed one play that matched my filter…and that’s over a year now…

I do think the notifications service is an interesting idea. Set your filters, get notified when things match or when things move from a match to a no-match. Business model is a different question, though. That’s pretty specialized functionality — you need to be a big follower of of picks already, and have set up your own systems around them, and decide that you’re willing to pay for a service like that. If it ends up being a few hundred people at $20 a year, it’s just not worth building.

We’ve run into this challenge when building out some more advanced functionality in the past — we once built a tool that let users create their own predictive models based on stats they chose, and enabled them to backtest their custom models. The hardcore users loved it, but they’re a small minority. So if we can’t get them to see serious value and pony up serious bucks, the overall market to do it is too small.

Real-time odds services, for example, charge bettors $100-$500 a month for their product — at that level, it changes things. But serving a niche audience with a low-priced product isn’t a recipe for a successful business, no matter how cool we think an idea would be…

Thanks for the heads up. We didn’t realize this was happening in some browsers. We’ll add it to our bugs list, and we’ll get it taken care of as soon as we can.

We use odds from Pinnacle Sports right now. It’s certainly the case those lines could differ from the ones you get, especially if the payout odds are different. We’ve got a few things in the works here though that should help address this…don’t want to promise anything now, but stay tuned.

Yeah, we’ve definitely noticed, and we’re not too happy about it, since NCAAB Totals are probably our best pick type. We don’t have any inside info about what’s going on with that, unfortunately.

You’re going to have to be a bit more specific… what sport, for example? If you’re looking for college basketball, here’s a link: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-basketball/ranking/season-sos-by-other?rating_date=2012-01-09

You can always find ratings as of any date in the past by using the calendar button above any ratings table.

How do you determine your upset odds?

Check out the very first answer on this page.

We use the spread as of when we “lock” the pick, which occurs approximately one hour prior to the game start. And, we assume a -110 pricing structure. Based on a recent evaluation, we think this is not ideal, and one of the projects on our to-do list is to update the prediction accuracy pages to use the true juice for every pick. (We are also considering using additional sources besides Pinnacle, but that’s another topic altogether.)

No, it’s not. The predictive ratings are driven by margins of victory and home/away/neutral status of each game. Our New Ratings also factor in a preseason rating for each team whose impact slowly fades away as the season goes on.

There are no explicit adjustments made for injuries, so a case where, for instance, a star player gets injured the day before a game won’t cause any adjustments. That’s why our game prediction models also incorporate data factors like the Vegas odds — if a player gets injured, our ratings won’t pick up on it, but the betting markets should do a pretty good job of valuing the injured player’s absence in terms of expected points lost.

It’s also true, as a result, that cases where, say, a team’s star gets injured for 10 games (during which his team plays a lot worse) and then comes back healthy for the rest of the season, can definitely distort the predictive ratings for that team. That’s always something to watch out for.

Adrian,

First, thanks for the kind words; we’re glad you like the site.

Second, providing a better breakdown of our historical pick data is definitely something on our to-do list. Ideally that would include both more granular summary data like you’ve requested and a record of individual past picks. However, we’ve got our hands full right now with keeping the site running, staying on top of our bowls and NFL playoffs coverage, and preparing our March Madness analytics. So while I’ll add your data-dump idea to our list of possible blog topics, I can’t give you an estimate on when or if we’ll get that done. It could end up being an offseason thing.

Interesting comment about flipping to the dog. I have noticed (over, similarly, a small sample size), that we seem to have a higher ROI on dogs where we predict an outright win, as opposed to dogs where we merely predict a higher-than-Vegas-says chance of winning (even after accounting for our expected edge). This off-season I’ll definitely be checking out a change to our money line logic that puts a much stricter requirement on the win odds being close to or above 50%.

I am really hoping we’ll be able to get some more granular data up next summer (MLB is our “slow season”). If you continue to track, and see anything startling, feel free to leave a comment or email. It might spur us to rank this higher on the priorities list.

I think the main issue here is that one of the inputs to the Decision Tree model is the Vegas spread. When we don’t have a spread for a game (which we don’t for most of the games on the “Next 7 Days” page), we substitute our power ratings prediction as input instead. Our power ratings alone are historically not quite as accurate as the Vegas spread, so that’s going to hinder the accuracy for those far future games. Once we have a spread in the database, most of those will shift to something more plausible.

Though now that I think about, how are you defining “big underdogs” in the Game Winners future picks, if there is no line yet? Just by record, or your personal guess, or is there some sportsbook releasing very early lines?

Yes, well, that’s why our official TR Pick for those future games ignores the Decision Tree model. When we don’t have a spread, we base the official prediction on our power ratings.

I may be wrong about how the DT model treats games with no spread. It may be using a fake spread of “0″, which would explain the strange odds. Generally, if that game *really* had a spread of 0, it would be because something terribly weird was going on (Charlotte trades for LeBron James or something like that), so the optimistic values could be justified.

Anyway, as always, our TR Pick is what we believe to be the best prediction we can make at the time, with the given info. SOrry about the confusion!

Oh, I am definitely curious, and have access to the model. The problem is that there is no quick/easy way to drill down and determine the reason. The “Decision Tree” label is a bit of a misnomer — the model is actually a random forest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest) which combines results from hundreds of individual trees. So it’s tough to put into words why a specific change in the data would have a specific effect.

It would be possible to look at every individual tree and determine how the prediction changes when a line is changed from something reasonable to 0, and what other tree nodes become more or less important. But it would be difficult and time consuming, as the tree logic is stored in a format that is optimized for machine processing, not for human understanding. I would love to take a day or two to investigate, but when the only real positive to come out of it is to satisfy my/your curiosity, it’s tough to justify the time.

twjd, I have no idea what exactly you’re checking, but obviously we have winning and losing streaks. All we care about is long term track record. We’ve made over 10,000 playable betting picks in the last 4+ years across all sports, and been profitable against the Vegas lines. Of course, in some sports, we’ve done better than others in recent years, which isn’t really a surprise to us. Users can decide for themselves how to apply our data, and it’s been fun to see all the different ways they use it and find value in it.

If you’re looking for a guaranteed profit for every sport, every season, and every betting pick type, there are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there willing to sell that illusion to you.

Plus if you played every pick (10,000 across all sports)…you would not have made a profit…52.38% is the number you have to beat…

stockjockey…I guess it depends on what you consider playable…I took it to mean all there plays that they have selected, which if you add it up, does not show a profit…also If you read my comment you would see that I was not complaining about paying a fee, but rather having to put up with the change in attitude, and the errors that have been occurring lately…many times I go to make my selections and it says no picks available…also NBA columns in the NBA section are only accounting for the last twp seasons and this season when it clearly states since 08-09 in the prediction accuracy section…plus if you go to NCAAF in the prediction accuracy section and try to see the plays since 2009, there is nothing there…

Dan,

What are the rules? Do you have to pick a game on Tuesday? If so, I’d just go with whatever our top ATS pick is the first couple of days:

http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-tournament/ats-picks/

I’m guessing, though, that you don’t start til Thursday. Do you make a pick every DAY or every ROUND?

At any rate, the general strategy is:

1) Try to avoid picking teams that are popular with your opponents. We don’t have public data on who is popular against the spread, but you can find some at a site like Covers: http://contests.covers.com/Handicapping/consensusPick/daily-consensus-picks.aspx?sport=7 … Or you could assume that the same teams might be overvalued n both bracket picking and spread picking, which would mean our public data is helpful: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-tournament/upset-picks/round-of-64/ (see the Difference column)

2) Try to avoid picking teams that have high odds to advance deep into the tournament. This can probably help you with that aspect: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-tournament/bracket-odds/

3) Obviously you’d like to pick teams with high cover odds, but really, even a very good pick is close enough to a coin flip that the rules above are more important. However, her is our ATS picks page: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-tournament/ats-picks/

4) Diversify your picks. With 5 teams, spreading your picks out will decrease the chance that ALL your entries get eliminated. It’ll decrease the odds of ALL surviving, but that’s a trade off you’ll probably want to take in the early rounds.

Baldydog,

Check out this forum post: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-tournament/forum/#/discussion/68/round-x-seed-scoring

Basically for every team stat you can find on our stat pages (examples: http://www.teamrankings.com/ncb/stats/ ), we use full season stats, rolling averages over a the last X games, last season stats,and other splits. The same goes for our power ratings. Plus we use contextual information like distance traveled to the game, and the spread.

Most prediction changes are due to line changes. But they can also change due to power ratings changes (since every team is interconnected, results early in the day could theoretically affect games later in the day) or stats changes (our data provider occasionally updates a box score either to fix a small error, or because the leagues sometimes change the official stats the next day). Finally, if a starting pitcher for an MLB game is scratched, that can result in a change.

Variance? We had our first losing season in six years with our playable NCAAB ATS and totals picks. Playable NCAAB totals picks still up an average of more than +30 units a year.

As for MLB, we’re one month into the season. Guess I’m not sure what your point is here.