Monday, August 14, 2006

Bet with your head, not your fantasy team

It was a tough day on the gambling front for me yesterday. Prompted by my emotions of running a close 2nd place in both my fantasy baseball leagues I decided to put my money where my optimism was. With Maddux and Schmidt on the mound (and neither on either of my teams) I took the over for a couple lots. It took them ten innings to get one run in. The other big news of the day is that the Tigers got swept by apparent pitch stealing White Sox (I have the Tigers to win the division).

So why should you care about my fantasy team, or my portfolio? It got me thinking about the different types of bets out there. What is the optimal type of bet? In the SF contract I lost my entire investment. In the Tigers contract I only lost a small portion (if you want to think of it as “lost” considering I bought it at around 20). Assuming we do not like a high variance with our investments (maybe not the best assumption considering we are talking about sports gambling here, but one I still think holds true) then it would appear that the latter has an added positive characteristic to it. Maybe the traders have experience with this type of decision making going on. It’s a dynamic that’s relatively new to the gamblers since we can actually go short on some of these contracts for the first time.

In NFL news, after losing Portis in a run happy Gibbs offense I would have thought the Washington futures would fall. If it is long lasting then they are in trouble.

In closing, always go with the home team that is opening up a new stadium in pre season games. They are the only ones with an incentive to win.

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