Welcome to the debut of the 2019 PiRate Ratings Picks. During the football season, we will issue our pretend financial advice for you to read as entertainment purposes only and not to wager real money on games.
We pretend to make $100 wagers on whatever it is we select. In the past, we have done this with money line parlays, teasers, straight wagers, and regular spread parlays. Through the years, we have discovered our most successful style of wagering has been playing money line parlays. At one time, we were successful teasing the totals lines. 13-point, 4-game parlays of teaser totals gave us an incredible hot streak one season when the standard deviation of scores was much lower than normal.
In this decade, there has been higher standard deviation in NFL scores, because the new rule moving extra points back 15 yards has created instability in game scores.
Many years ago, we had a rather impressive result playing the middle in games, but that was when we had permission to release the “outlaw” line before the official opening line. Without the ability to see the Outlaw line and then the opening line, it was impossible to try to guess which games would see a large enough swing to go with both sides.
Since there are only two games this week, both college games, there is no real play that can be issued with our strategy. If you take both favorites this week, Florida over Miami and Arizona over Hawaii, the best money line parlay odds you can get today is .6941, which means you would win $169.41 if you bet $100 and the two favorites won. That means you would get your $100 investment back with $69.41 in profits. Our philosophy is to only play parlays with odds of +120 or better, meaning you would receive $220 or more on a $100 wager.
In order to play a parlay with better than +120 odds this week, we would have to pick Hawaii or Miami to win outright. If we selected Florida to beat Miami and Hawaii to upset Arizona, the parlay odds would be around +500 at this very moment. That means, we would win $600 on a $100 wager if Florida and Hawaii won.
Alas, we are only confident this week of one outcome, that Florida will indeed beat Miami. The actual point spread is right where we believe it should be, so playing the line is out of the question.
The best Money Line spread available to us at midday Thursday is -290, which means if we wager $100 on this game, if Florida won, we’d get a tiny $34.48 profit. The reward is too small for the risk.
The totals for these two games do not give us a chance to come up with a playable parlay either, so for Week 0, we are not issuing any official picks. We prefer to pick our spots and play only games that we are confident in occasionally winning. If we play Money Line parlays with odds of +120 or better, we can win a smaller percentage of games and still turn a profit.
Let’s say we play 50 games this year with an average parlay odd of +180 Let’s say we get lucky and win 20. Here’s how that would affect our imaginary bank account.
50 wagers of $100 each = $5,000 investment
20 Wins at +180 = $3,600 in winnings
30 Losses at +180 = $3,000 in losses
$600 profit at the end of the 50 wagers
12% Return on Investment
This 12% would take place in roughly 4 months, so the annualized Return on Investment would be 36%. Not many investments return 36% in one year.
Ah, but here’s the rub: how likely is it that we can win 40% of our Money Line wagers at +180 odds? The answer at the present time is one year in four, or to re-phrase it, four years ago. The only solace is that the most recent three years brought imaginary profits as well, just nothing close to an annualized return of 36%. Our 2018 season profit was so small it is not worth mentioning. It was better in 2017 and much better in 2016, so the four year trend has been going in the wrong direction.
Ah, but here’s the other rub: We invested imaginary funds in all the years we have issued our selections. Being 100% accurate and being 0% accurate brings the same outcome on zero real dollars invested.
Last year, we welcomed five of our long time friends to participate in a contest selecting winners against the spread. It was a close contest all year, and as a group the five turned a small profit. This year, we are going to have a guest computer program try to pick winners. We decided to call this program “Davey 19.” Davey is named for a former quarterback at TCU and for a short time with the Philadelphia Eagles. Davey was only 5 foot 7 inches tall, but he had the heart of a giant and the fundamentals of a robot, so that’s why we are calling our guest computer program Davey 19 this year.
We will give Davey an identical rule–to make investments in imaginary $100 wagers. Davey can make any type of selection in college and the NFL. Davey does have one selection this week.
PiRate Picks For August 24, 2019
None (not enough games for a playable parlay)
Davey 19 Selection For August 24, 2019
Hawaii +11 vs. Arizona
We do feel like Florida has a better than 60% chance to beat Miami, but the Money Line odd is too low to make enough profit to limit risk.
The Pi-Rate Ratings 