Yesterday I bet on 7 Major League Baseball games. One of the bets I always make is that the favored team will win by greater than 1 run. According to my calculations, over the past 20 seasons a home team will win a game by exactly 1 run roughly 15.46% of the time (i.e., given all the games played by all the teams in a season, exactly 15.46% of those will be a home win by 1 run). Away teams will win by exactly one run about 9.8% of the time.
For me, the one thing you don’t want to have happen is for the home (or favored) team to win by exactly one run. Yesterday, that happened in 3 out of the 7 games I bet (thanks a lot, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, and Indians). That’s bogus, as it means I lose on both sides of my bet (I bet the favored team to win by 2 and the underdog to win straight up, thereby hedging a bit). According to the binomial probability function, the chances of this happening are only about 6.61%. This ended up losing me about 42.5% of my total bet–not a good return on “investment”.
Yesterday was not my lucky day.
No one was chomping on Oreos for me yesterday.
April 11, 2007 at 9:38 am
I’m happy the Reds screwed you.
April 11, 2007 at 6:24 pm
As I was taunting my friends over the weekend on Masters’ pool victory, I asked my friend to do his Teddy KGB impression. He was a little gunshy to do it in front of his new girlfriend, but once she left to go to the bathroom, he uttered in a russian accent, “I’m paying you with your own money.” What a great movie.