Northbet College Football ATS Contest

Well, it took me all season, but I cracked the leaderboard of the Northbet College Football Contest. The contest is a forced-choice contest where Northbet picks 12 games each week and you must make a selection on each. I finished tied for sixth last season. Currently I am tied for 15th with a couple of weeks left.

In years past, Northbet had a couple thousand people in the contest, but they have instituted deposit and play rules, so the number of entrants is under a thousand.

I have made horrible last minute decisions this year on lineup changes. I've changed six games at the last second due to line moves or me just changing my mind, and four of them have lost. That cost me a lot in the standings.

November is not my strong suit in college football, so this may be my high water mark for the year. But it takes some skill to handicap a high volume of games not of your choosing and consistently do well. That's why they pay me the big money, or at least some danishes and coffee at Caesars Palace.

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Originally Posted by redietz

Well, it took me all season, but I cracked the leaderboard of the Northbet College Football Contest. The contest is a forced-choice contest where Northbet picks 12 games each week and you must make a selection on each. I finished tied for sixth last season. Currently I am tied for 15th with a couple of weeks left.

In years past, Northbet had a couple thousand people in the contest, but they have instituted deposit and play rules, so the number of entrants is under a thousand.

I have made horrible last minute decisions this year on lineup changes. I've changed six games at the last second due to line moves or me just changing my mind, and four of them have lost. That cost me a lot in the standings.

November is not my strong suit in college football, so this may be my high water mark for the year. But it takes some skill to handicap a high volume of games not of your choosing and consistently do well. That's why they pay me the big money, or at least some danishes and coffee at Caesars Palace.

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A contest where the games are chosen for you isn’t ideal but great job regardless. I know college is your specialty but my question would be on average how many of the 12 games would you have bet on an average week? Not sure how many contests you are in this year, but do you spend extra time on the games in contests or just do it as an extension of games you are looking at anyways?

What I am trying to see is if you have history and records that you use to look at almost every game on the NCAA schedule each week. Without providing your methods just wondering what you feel has helped you succeed in a contest where you have no input on the games you have to pick.

Thanks.

This is the only college ATS contest I know of, so it's the only one I'm in, and it's free as long as deposit and play qualifiers are met. If the Westgate or Circa had college only contests, I'd be in them. But they don't. Basically, what I would look for is, the higher the price for the contest entry, the less likely I am to accept a forced-choice format. I'd rather access the whole board.

Bally's had one college football way back when -- you had to pick 10 games each week from a menu of 20. I was in that the two years they had it and finished tied for second or third one of the years. That was an interesting story and a lesson in knowing what you do not know. Maybe I'll tell that story after the weekend clears.

I handicap each and every game no matter if I'm in contests. So that actually gives me an ability to play the contests pretty well. Some games I just know I have little interest in, so it's a five-minute analysis. A contest drawback, however, is that I actually bet the high profile, top-20 type of games significantly less often than I bet something like East Carolina versus Tulane. And most forced-choice contests feature the high profile games. Northbet is all top 20 games, so I have sit there and debate Alabama laying 51 1/2 to New Mexico State, for example. That kind of analysis is just a pain in the ass, because I'm almost never betting something like that.

In a usual season, I might actually bet an average of six or seven games a week, with the peak volume usually coming in mid to late October. Sometimes I've fired on a dozen games those weeks. It's also not unheard of for me to just say "no thanks" a particular week and take nothing, so that does happen once every couple of years.

After an 8-4 ATS week, I moved into a tie for fifth in the Northbet college football contest. So with one week left, I'm tied for fifth. Last season, I finished tied for sixth. That's an unusual bit of consistency.

The last week, I went 6-6 ATS and dropped into a tie for 11th. People did very, very well the last week, even though some of the contest lines would have suggested taking the losing side. For example, the PSU/MSU contest line was PSU -1 1/2. At kickoff, PSU was -5. I had PSU in the contest, a loser. The game that I spent the most time on was also a loser, as I had to choose between Georgia -35 1/2 or GTech. With 'Bama on deck for Georgia, I took GTech, even though I figured it was just 50/50 they get in the end zone.

That's a wrap. Tied for sixth last season. Tied for 11th this season in a 12-games-per-week ATS forced choice contest.

Postscript: the final ATS record was 85-71, which is difficult to pull off when you don't get to choose the games. My record last year in Northbet was significantly better, resulting in the tie for sixth.

As with Todd posting his plays on this forum, this is the stuff of verifiable reality, just like the Wise Guys Contest, winning Heritage's Race to the Super Bowl a few years back, and the years of results printed in "Tipsters or Gypsters?" including five-year summary tallies documented by a former Seattle Times reporter.

The fact that some of us have reality records is what makes the tales of stop loss systems, and win/win/win baccarat narratives, and unverifiable double-up bug yarns so nauseating. Winning in the realm of reality is tough. Winning by posting stories on forums, not so tough. I think this is why kewlJ and I have some priorities and attitudes in common.

I have difficulty finding 3 games to bet let alone 12. Forces you to bet games that you don't like or have little or no opinion on.

Means nothing but MSU was my only play yesterday---played the money line +180

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Originally Posted by regnis

I have difficulty finding 3 games to bet let alone 12. Forces you to bet games that you don't like or have little or no opinion on.

Means nothing but MSU was my only play yesterday---played the money line +180

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I certainly thought where that line finished was out of whack. I tend to avoid the snowstorm games, but it seemed to me that the line move (pro PSU) was a little bit silly.

Congrats on that, as the moneyline was probably the thing to do once that line moved so much. Well done.

In the contest, I was stuck. You can change your pick up until 10 minutes before kickoff of each game, but the contest lines are Tuesday's. Well, PSU was -5 by an hour to kickoff, and I figured if I took Mich State, I was screwing myself on a game I had no opinion.