William Entriken

Is there an opportunity to systematically win in the NFL betting market?

If there is, possible sources of this opportunity, "market inefficiency", or "pricing error" may include:
Aggregate bettor biasObservable effects of the game being fixedOver compensation of the above by professional bettorsOf course, this analysis isn't going to do itself, so I needed to step up to the plate. I found some research on the topic, mostly focusing on simple betting strategies and all of them severely limited in timeframe (citations at link below). My analysis includes all regular season game data from 1978 to 2009. So let's get to the fun part!
Bet on the visitor3603 wins203 ties3600 lossesAnd then the obvious:
Bet on the underdog3735 wins203 ties3468 lossesOk... what about betting on a team when that team just lost to the opponent it is about to play within the past 21 days?
Payback in 21 days (after losing previous game)30 wins1 ties30 lossesPayback in 21 days (after losing …

Here's the argument, I'm sure you heard it before:
There are untold millions who are subsisting on the government tit and we would all be better served by employing these individuals. Tax revenues will rise and entitlements will fall. The argument that these jobs pay too little will diminish when we open up the opportunity to Americans after taking away those opportunities to those who are here illegally.But the fact is: jobs exist in America if you want to work for them. You can support yourself easily and comfortably with the opportunities that are available.


First, the jobs exist. Here are five jobs in the Philadelphia area for unskilled labor:

http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/lab/1935583290.html
http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/lab/1928817616.html
http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/lab/1922547233.html
http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/lab/1951960047.html
http://allentown.craigslist.org/lab/1967112281.html

All of these pay at least $12 per hour and include health benefits.

…

Posting this for reference, for Chris, and for anyone else who manages LARGE sets of media files. I've been using this script for 10 years, here is the latest version:

=========


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Fcntl qw(:DEFAULT :flock);
use File::Compare;
use File::Temp;

# Copyright (C) 2002-2010 Zygo Blaxell

# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.

# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  …