The Mdawg "challenge"

[redietz]

Redietz avoided answering this question I put to him specifically. So I will ask it of everyone. Here's the scenario.

It's the NFL. If someone propositioned you to FLAT BETTING (same wager every game) every game every week for the entire season. All bets made in the same book. And they offered you a 2 point discount on the closing line of every game. By 2 point discount I mean if the line closes at -7 you get the game at -5.

Would you take the bet?

And conversely, if they offered you 2 more points than the closing line would you take it? By 2 more points I mean if the line closes at +7 you get +9.

Remember you have to bet every game every week for the entire year.

What the fuck, I'll take a shot even though I am not a sports bettor.
Assume that fair value for half a point is 10 cents on the dollar. The vig is 10 cents on the dollar (-110) so the free 2 points would cost 40 cents on the dollar if we were paying for them instead of getting them for free. Since 40>10 we are good to go with the bet as we are getting the 40 for free.

I won't bother with the underdog explanation since it uses the same logic.

What is the point of the question?

The question itself is silly and horribly flawed for multiple reasons. I'll mention a few of the more obvious ones.

1) Mickey didn't attach a seasonal year to the question. He asked a blanket question as if all years are identical or close to identical.
2) Mickey phrased the question without mentioning totals. How can you ask the question without delineating between sides and totals?

Less than 5% of my wagering is on the NFL, and the majority of that is totals, both of which I have stated before, so I am clearly not an NFL sides bettor and would have no interest or expertise to apply to this particular question.

By asking the question in the tense mickey did, in a garbled present tense, I assume he's asking if I would accept the wagers in 2022. By not pinning down dates and tenses, mickey makes the incorrect assumption that all NFL seasons are the same and should yield the same conclusive answers. By not delineating between sides and totals, mickey makes a similar error in lumping very different things in a single category for the sake of what? Being imprecise?

This is a relatively common problem with math specialists trying to apply what they know to sports. Sports isn't rolling dice. Sports isn't hitting a slot button. Sports is fluid. Mickey asked a crystalline question. Sports isn't crystalline. If you answer this particular question by quoting data mined stats from 2017-2020, for example, whatever conclusion you draw or lesson you try to teach may not only be dated and useless, things may have changed in such a way as to render that lesson completely wrong going forward.

I don't know what point mickey was trying to make with the NFL question. If he was trying to emphasize that point shopping for the NFL is overrated and line moves are often wrong, thus rendering something like a parlay calculator possibly more useful, well, here's a shocker -- everybody knows this.