Bodog has their odds out for Heisman trophy winner (by the way Gouda, Knowshon isn’t an 8-1 favorite, Tebow is the 7-2 favorite, Knowshon just has 8-1 odds).
Anyone who bets on these is a certifiable idiot. Allow me to explain. The book makes money by paying out less than it takes in; this is pretty obvious so I’ll assume you follow. Whether you want to call it the vig, the overlay, or some other crazy degenerate term, it basically describes the built in odds that make the book rich and you poor.
A very easy example is an over/under line where both options are -110. What this means is that you have to risk $110 to win $100 (or some multiple in that same ratio). If both sides of the line get bet equally the book makes 9% just by letting people do what they do. Easy money.
Now, let’s say both options were -120, now the book makes about 17% profit. If it’s -120 and -110 the book stands to make about 13% on average. If it’s -175, +275, +225 (W/L/T for a soccer game, for instance) it’s about 11%. Basically all you do is find the breakeven percentage for each potential wager and add them up. However much over 100% is the vig.
Guess what it is for the Heisman props. Go ahead, guess. Nope, higher.
Higher.
Higher.
The final percentage for the Heisman props is….212.21%
This is the best run I’ve had in a long, long time. Now, that might be mostly due to me waiting until it got down to 75 degrees after the rain, or it might be due to me starting slowly thanks to being so sore from playing golf on Sunday that it hurt every time I took a step for the first half mile. Whatever the cause, I like it.
Plus, I got to run past our new favorite bar Twain’s. It’s a pretty awesome combination sport’s bar/hangout with tabletop shuffleboard, awesome food, and beer that’s home-brewed in the back room (try the Wit & Humor, it’s awesome). And it’s not expensive at all. Basically the perfect place.
I’m doing some things that even I realize are terribly lame right now, but it might be interesting. Well, it might be interesting to about two dozen people, 17 of whom will almost immediately shout it down as being illogical/incomplete/just plain wrong.
However, if you’ve ever wondered how a chess rating system would translate over to the world of club soccer, get ready for some kind of answer to that in the next month or so. I’ve got the data all put together, and I’ve got a strong basis for the assumptions. I need to hopefully talk to a couple people and get a few other things figure out, but then I’ll write up how everything fits together and put the results up.
And yes, the MLS page, while still technically in existence, is no longer linked here as it’s updates got held up by me doing this and trying to make it automated enough. It’s extremely likely I will push that back until the offseason where I may work on a template that I can update easily. Constantly updating the structures along with the information was too much to do when I wasn’t happy with the output.
There has been a good bit of hype in the last 24 hours or so about a new search engine named Cuil (pronounced “cool” apparently). It supposedly indexes 3 times as many pages as google does and 10 times as many as Microsoft. So it must be amazing, right?
No. It’s not. It actually kinda sucks. Searching for f2f2s gave me a handful of random posts, but not the main page. Searching for “georgia tech 2009 basketball recruiting class” gave me no results on Cuil, but this result was the top entry on google followed shortly by links to Scout, Rivals and other recruiting sites.
Yes, Cuil looks nicer than google (well, at least more like the current popular style) both in main page and results, but it doesn’t index the columned results so I don’t know which result is #1, #2, etc. I just now that it made the first page. The company is made up of ex-google employees so maybe they’ll turn it around, but I wouldn’t go investing my money in it and I’m not going to sacrifice my search results to help them figure out what does and does not index correctly.
I don’t see why people keep trying to make new search engines. Well, I mean, I do. Other companies (Microsoft) are so desperate to improve their terrible search that they’ll pay out the ass for other slightly less terrible search companies in the hopes of creating a google competitor. Not happening, at least not that way.
Can Mike Hampton actually throw a major league pitch today? If he does it will be his first in 35 months.
He tried this once already this season and managed to hurt himself in the bullpen throwing warm ups. On his last pitch no less. Not that that stopped him from going to Peachtree Tavern the following Monday to hit on 18 year old girls.
The AJC has a write-up (yes, a write-up simply on the possibilty that a player starts) in today’s edition, so if you haven’t heard enough about everything I guess you can read some there.
I’m not holding out hope, but it will be interesting to see what happens at 3:55pm. My money is on the Braves blowing up in the top half of the first inning, Hampton coming up to bat, and then him taking a ball right off the eye-socket to sideline him for another DL stint.
I’ve finally been able to run consistently again as we’ve gotten settled in the townhome. I am still having to get used to the surrounding areas though.
I’m finding that it seems to be a lot harder to run in new places. Now, I’m sure this is all mental since I don’t quite no where I am and therefore have no idea when it will be over, but it’s still bothersome. 2.5 to 3 miles used to be a nice easy jog from the apartment, now it seems to legitimately tire me. Of course, it’s a lot hillier here too, but I’m getting used to it all.
Anyway, here’s the run I’m liking a lot right now: it’s pretty much 2.25 miles of slight uphill with a quarter-mile of very steep downhill in 2 parts.
This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately as I try to figure out what, if anything, I’m really trying to do here. I write about pretty much anything I feel like, but the downside of that is that people come away thinking it’s too much soccer, too much about people they have never heard of, too much about books they’ll never read, blah blah blah.
There are definitely other options. I could just start writing strictly about soccer. Make up some rankings, post in the comments on SBI, WVHooligan, USASoccerSpot to build traffic pretty quickly, throw up a few ads and make a couple dollars (probably about $5.14 total).
I could write more about business stuff. Give book reviews on whatever books are solving the markets this week, post cool graphs of stock prices, theorize about Microsoft taking over Yahoo and the expansion of Google into China. Basically target a supersaturated niche audience who happens to be one of the most active on the web, and maybe have people read me.
But man, HAVING to write about something sucks. I just want to write about whatever I feel like. Hopefully I’ll get a little better at the whole writing thing and entertain the dozen friends and eight strangers who read this.
Computer on its way back. No idea if it’s actually fixed though.
My vaccination records don’t exist in my doctor’s records or any statewide vaccination database, which I find odd. Should make getting my health forms completed for school quite interesting.
I’m 10 days behind turning in a project I didn’t realize I had to do.
There’s a new proxy at work which unblocks YouTube and gmail, but blocks f2f2s. I’m so scandalous.
Just read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. Really really good book.
