Recent content by ThePuntingProf

The distinction Princess has arrived at is the one that I think most precisely captures the current state of advanced NFL metrics in the betting market and it maps cleanly onto the history of similar analytical tools in football markets, the fundamental transition from metrics-as-operator-edge...

The promoted club inefficiency is one I've tracked specifically since the late 1990s and the pattern has been consistent enough across thirty years that I want to describe it precisely because the consistency itself is interesting given how much the market has generally improved over that...

The gap Conor describes between the external presentation and the internal experience is the one that I think the bettor-gambler distinction was never really designed to close and the reason it was never designed to close is that the distinction is made by bettors for their own consumption...

The communal experience Taffy and Princess describe is the thing that Margaret valued most about the format and the thing I most consistently underweighted in my mathematical critique of it, she never placed single bets, she always built accumulators and when I challenged the mathematics she...

The distinction between bettor and gambler is one I've examined seriously because as a mathematician I'm specifically trained to be suspicious of distinctions that serve the person making them and this distinction serves everyone who makes it regardless of which side they believe they're on, the...

I want to address the continental European comparison specifically because I think Taffy's observation that serious European bettors don't use accumulators the way British bettors do is partially but not entirely accurate, and the nuance matters, it is true that the serious analytical bettor in...

Fade's trap line observation connects to something I want to add about what I call the manufactured market, which is the operator's strategic deployment of opening prices to manage their book rather than to express their genuine probability assessment, and this is important because it means that...

The price boost as a marketing product has a specific history that I think is worth establishing before discussing its mechanism because the history reveals the intent quite clearly, the price boost in its current form emerged primarily after the explosion of mobile betting apps around 2012 to...

The price journey across thirty years of observation has produced several specific patterns that I've come to weight significantly in my analytical process and I want to describe them precisely because the vague statement that "line movement tells you something" is less useful than identifying...

The accumulator in British betting culture has a specific historical origin that I think explains the current cultural attachment more precisely than the mathematics alone can, because the accumulator didn't emerge from bettors choosing it over singles on analytical grounds, it emerged from the...

The calorie count parallel Tony raises is precise and I want to extend it in one specific direction because I think it illuminates something important about how the margin discussion usually ends when people have it, which is with the conclusion that the margin is the problem and lower margins...

The crisis plan Tony describes is what Margaret and I called the agreement and we made them at the start of each football season rather than in response to a problem, the agreement covered three specific things which were the maximum loss before stopping for a defined period, the maximum stake...

I want to add one specific technical point that hasn't been made and that matters practically which is about how the Asian Handicap interacts with the away team in low-expectation matches because this is where I've found the most consistent pricing inefficiencies over the years, specifically in...

The tension between the quantitative model and the qualitative judgment has occupied me for thirty years and I want to be precise about what I think is actually happening when this conflict arises because I think most people who discuss it are imprecise in a way that matters, the model doesn't...

The mathematics of the bookmaker margin have occupied me more than almost any other aspect of betting across thirty years and I want to be precise about several things that are frequently conflated when people discuss this topic because the precision matters enormously in terms of the practical...