Strictly for entertainment purposes only...

Interesting exercise. I wonder how it would work with a team that didn’t win so many games.

If anyone is contemplating actually trying this, it’s all fun and games until you’re betting $2,450 on the Caps to beat the Sharks seven games into the regular season (if I’m reading that right)

Check your “spam” box in your email. I bet you if you actually looked through the whole thing you’d find an email outlining this strategy and telling you “not to tell anyone! ok, maybe just your best friends. and use LOLcasino.com, because it has the coolest site!”

Here’s how to disprove this age-old gambling “strategy”:

In theory, with infinite money to wager, this actually works. The key word here is infinite. But no one has infinite money (infinite is not something that exists in the world as we know it when describing objects) and here is where is breaks down. All you are doing is making a series of UNCONNECTED wagers. Despite your strategy, each wager’s outcome is completely causally unrelated to each other wager’s outcome. And each you place a bet, you have a negative expected value on that bet. IE

Caps play Pens in Pitt. In the real world there is a 50% chance we win, and a 50% chance they win. In the gambling world, if you bet 100 bucks, you aren’t going to win 100 bucks… you’ll only win 90. This is how the house make money.

The moral of the story is, every time you bet on sports, (assuming the line is correct!), you have a negative expected value. If you play this strategy with a non-infinite amount of money, you are guaranteed to have a negative EV over all of your possible outcomes. Sure, you are likely to win a very small amount a lot of the time, but you are also likely to lose your entire bankroll (which for this game is usually extremely large compared to the amount you’re hoping to win) a small amount of the time.

In short, dear god, please don’t do this!

What is interesting (and awesome!) about the Caps and the games listed above, and why the bottom line was so juicy… was that the Caps were undervalued for much of last season, and often outperformed the lines on the games. This is a totally awesome reason to gamble (reasonable amounts :D).

A much better idea would be to take X dollars you know you want to gamble throughout the season, then bet no more than X/10 on any single game. But pick the ones where you think there are some factors that the line isn’t considering. IE we’ve looked really focused on this road trip, you think their goalie is overrated, etc etc.

This will be a much more fun, and in the end, a more profitable way (considering every possible outcome) to gamble on the Caps.

A fan for the Pittsburgh Pirates bet $20 against his team on the money line for all 162 games and netted a 10% return.

http://www.businessinsider.com/pirates-fan-discovers-cure-for-rooting-for-crappy-team-bet-against-them-a-lot-2010-10

So, using the data from JSchon, I did the opposite and bet $20 on the Caps to win.

Over 82 games, the Caps won 54 times and lost 38. Betting $20 a game, the theoretical bettor had at stake a total of $1640 and netted $270.70, for a return of 16.5%. That’s not bad at all.

i love how you say “you are cooked.”

so very sports junkies. :)

Are hockey middles. You would need two betting sites that have hockey over/unders. Occasionally you’ll find the two sites having a 1 goal difference in the O/U in a particular game, for example, 6.5 and 5.5. These are the only games in which you could bet on. In these cases you would bet under 6.5 and over 5.5 the same amounts, hoping the actually scores lands at 6, thus winning you both bets. The worst case scenario in that you would owe the juice on one of the bets.

I usually would just put up $5 and try to parlay four or five games. If I lost, it’s only $5 and if I won, it’s like $70-$120 depending on which teams were involved.

By the shootout. Now the only way to survive is finding dogs as favorites are pretty jacked up since there is no longer a point to laying a half goal.

Another possibility is laying the puck line at -1.5 but that has long stretches of being extremely painful – i.e. favorites either losing or winning by 1 or in OT.

Caps are as good a team as any to lay the puck line. They’d only be 1-2 this season but they have been + odds every game.

One request. Please put a jump in the top of our FanPost, for those of us who browse on the mobile device; the whole fanpost shows up and it takes forever and a day to scroll past.

THIS IS CONFUSING