[DeucesUp]

[ QUOTE ]
I personally don't adhere to the bet "to win" 1-unit philosophy. I feel this would greatly increase my variance and have me betting way above my bankroll when I take a favorite every now and then.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's fine, but reweighting your picks would still be an interesting exercise because it will give a truer representation of how you're doing on all your picks. Note that you wouldn't be overbetting your bankroll to bet favorites to win 1-unit=1% but you ARE way overbetting your bankroll when you risk 1-unit=1% on big longshots, see below.

[ QUOTE ]
This would be stunning to me. As everything I have read, and seen through my history has shown me it would be virtually impossible for me to go broke betting 1%. I'm sure it is possible, but it would require some major statistical imporobabilities to occur.

[/ QUOTE ]

This again comes back to overweighting your dog picks. These calculations, if done properly, assume betting to win 1-unit. If you're just betting spreads it doesn't make any difference and as long as you're only betting ML's of +200 to +300 they're probably close enough, but if you bet +500 or +1000 or higher, your risk-of-ruin is very high.

A simple example:

Let's look at games where 1 team is a 10-1 favorite. Now you find 200 of these games where you like the favorite and 200 other games where you like the dog, let's see what happens:



Fav If the odds are set correctly, the fav will win 180 of these 200 games, this is what you need to break even. Even after the big vig charged, you still think you have a small edge and you expect to be able to pick "the right side" 183 times but it would not be unusual for variance to be 10 or more games over this 200 games sample, so betting 1% you're looking a loss of 7-units(7%) to a win of 13 units(13%). Not much profit, but very little risk.

Dog Now look at the other side, everything is the same. You need to pick 20 of 200 to break even, you expect to pick 23, and a variance of 10 games would not be unusual. Now you're looking at a range of +130units(130% gain) to -70units(70% loss).





Does this make sense? I hope this illustrates why when you risk the same on all bets, your overall results as well as your risk-of-ruin are dominated by how you do on the longshot bets. Now to be fair, I don't advocate a pure "to win 1-unit" scheme at extreme odds, you do have to scale it a bit. At 10-1 odds, I would wager 5 units to win 0.5 on a favorite and 0.2 units to win 2 on a dog.

Now you don't have to bet this way, a lot of serious bettors do just flat bet. I'm just saying it is difficult to access your success if you are flat betting over a wide range of odds, the longshots will always dominate.