sportyatl said:
I think the even better question is "Which of your handicappers has the highest net profit in baseball over ALL seasons"
It is natural for customers to doubt a handicapper's success. On these pages, many customers complain if the handicapper keeps quoting results from a couple of seasons ago when they are having a terrible year this season and if the handicapper is having a good season, the customers say, well, what about last season? Fair enough.
In general, I would agree that the best question is, "Which handicapper is best over ALL seasons."
However, there are exceptions. It is similar to using team trends from the 2000-01 Rams in an effort to predict what the Rams will do this season. If the team has changed and evolved, trends from the past are not that useful. If a handicapper has adopted new tactics, performance in the past is not a good predictor of future results.
We were not having a good year in baseball last season so we stopped releasing plays and invested our time trying to figure out what was going wrong. We went back to the drawing board and found that virtually all of our league-wide, multi-season systems were STILL winning, but the variability came with the short-term team-based and starter-based trends. As a result, we announced on pregame before the 2014 season started, we were going to strongly emphasize league-wide systems that have made a profit season after season over shorter-term team and starter based trends.
We also announced that we would not be writing up games this season because we do not want to give away valuable systems.
So, this season, a league-wide system in which road teams are 1617-1592 (+183 net games) since 2004 will take precedent over a recently evolved team trend that is, say, 12-0.
These league-wide systems have ROIs of better than 10% and hundreds of games (some well over 1000 games). The system plays were going to be culled with team and starter-based performance indicators.
A second point that is worth mentioning is that handicapping strategies that worked in the past simply do not work anymore. There are MANY teams of math and computer geeks interrogating the MLB data in order to squeeze out line value. These guys are in Malaysia, China, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Australia and many other places. The days of beating the oddsmakers by simply "betting the better starting pitcher" are over.
So, if a handicapper produced good results in the past and is not winning any more, there may be an assignable cause.
At the beginning of the season, we forecast a net profit of between 60-90 dimes in 2014 baseball. We are +45 dimes at the All-Star break and oozing confidence. It is very hard to argue that 45 dimes of profit is the result of a random fluctuation.
Dr M.