Today was Selection Sunday. I have not been able to watch much college basketball this year – in fact, I couldn’t cite a single game that I’ve watched this year. But, I have been reading Vegas Watch pretty much every day for quite some time. It’s written by my friend Jacob from Emory, and he spends more time than is probably healthy working on this, but he’s getting a lot of impressive recognition from sportswriters in the business. ( Here )
Therefore, I am basing all of my picks on one other person’s research. I’ve found I can’t bank on dumb luck like I could when I was a kid. For those who don’t know the family anecdotes, I won a pool at my father’s office when I was eight for a significant amount of money by betting on 4 Seed Arizona to win it all, and they did. I might as well have thrown a dart at the page, but there you go.
I’ll let you guys know how this works out. Oh, and check out Jacob’s site if you like sports at all.
Nick wasn’t just throwing darts when he was 8. He had been studying the teams all season on Sportcenter.
By: phil schaefer on 17 March, 2008
at 11:56 am
I appreciate the support on this one. I will say I’m rather proud of my ability to understand expected values before I even knew what they were. A few years later I picked UConn to beat Duke in the finals of the tournament in which people were saying, “We hope UConn can keep it interesting for the first half.”
I wound up in third place overall and getting a cut of the winnings simply because everybody had picked Duke to win. That would mean if you picked Duke to win, and were correct, to beat the other opponents you had to get almost all of the other games right.
I screwed up on tons of the other games, but I gained a huge advantage by picking UConn. I picked Syracuse to win it the year they did as well, but that was just spotting Carmelo Anthony. Sadly, after Dad’s retirement I could no longer enter in his office pools.
By: nschaef on 17 March, 2008
at 12:47 pm