I’m very excited to announce the release of my third book “The Hockey Economist’s Betting Prospectus”, which is now available in the Amazon store. This was the culmination of a 3-year journey to chart the profitability of NHL betting lines and explore my own ability to wager on every single game, albeit with imaginary money in a spreadsheet. One year into that mission, a global pandemic rocked the sports world. Throughout the entire ordeal, I never stopped logging all my picks every day, along with recording the betting lines for every outcome (at least moneyline and puckline).
This began as a curiosity and spiraled into an obsession. I am about as addicted as anyone can be to gambling without having real money on the line. This book not only provides a detailed commentary of my own successes and failures, but also highlights what I should have been doing, and how different strategies performed across all 3 seasons, charted on top of each other by day of the schedule. There are some very pronounced differences from year-to-year, especially considering that the middle campaign was only 56 games with teams playing entirely within their own division.
We saw circumstances and parameters that were completely unique, but from that chaos, some fascinating observations were uncovered. I have mused that the alternate title could be “how the pandemic affected hockey betting”, as freak circumstances had interesting effects year-to-year. The shortened 2021 season was the biggest anomaly. The data is pretty much useless for model building, but there weas still some compelling conclusions to be reached.
The book is available in ebook or paperback, but the ebook has a much cheaper price tag. It was my desire to have a paperback option for those who are so inclined, but the minimum price was expensive due to length. That’s despite 10 chapters and 60,000 words getting cut to reduce the length. There was nearly enough to publish a second book using only the material cut from this book. Instead, I’m taking the best cuts and packaging them into blog posts that will be given away for free in the coming weeks.
There is a chapter dedicated to each of the NHL’s 32 teams with a focus on my own trial and error. There are also chapters dedicated to the different betting categories and strategies; moneylines, pucklines, favorites, underdogs, back-to-backs, over/under, and an investigation into line movement. Half the book is a commentary on my own output, while the rest discusses what I should have been betting through the lens of big picture market trends. It’s been a volatile marketplace, with seismic shifts from year-to-year, month-to-month, even week-to-week.
A few possible book titles were put to a Twitter poll and a lot of you liked “The Analytics of Hockey Betting” and that could very well be a title used in my future published works. Unfortunately, the chapters involving advanced mathematics had to be removed for length. I did take a deep dive down the variable modelling rabbit hole, but few of the 30ish attempted models were consistently good each season. This can likely be explained by distinct scheduling differences in the pandemic world, which coincidently made some of my trend analysis more interesting.
My next betting book may very well delve deeper into “analytics”, but there’s a much higher degree of difficulty churning advanced mathematics into entertaining writing. That’s partially why those chapters were cut in favor of performance commentary. That’s what the book actually is. There are thousands of words lamenting everything I did wrong. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. There were some hard lessons that needed to be learned to grow into a better bettor. The journey still isn’t complete. There are new lessons to be learned every week as oddsmakers evolve and adapt to nerf winning angles.
Some people might say, my betting experiment lacks validity because I’m not laying down real money. That discourse has been directed at me before. The advantage to my method of placing a wager on every single game is that it produces a massive volume of lessons learned, which I can then write about and share with you. If I were using all this information to bet on games and line my own pockets, I’d be reluctant to share the information on a large scale. I want everyone to read my reports. Yet doing so would influence people to bet on the same outcomes. The more people who bet an angle, the more the books compensate.
My audience might currently be too small to swing the market and affect prices, but it is growing and my ambition is for wider distribution. Greed might not be my driving force, but pride certainly is. If I make a recommendation and other people lose their hard-earned money, that will keep me awake at night. I have fully admitted dozens of times on my betting reports (and throughout my book) that there were decisions made that I would have never laid real money on. There was a point where I could not pick the correct outcome of LA Kings games and started flipping a coin to make the decisions, but it was highlighted and discussed in my betting reports.
The overall rate of return would have been much higher had my betting selections been more discrete with the consequence of losing money. But forcing myself to bet on every game provided much more data, and the lessons learned from my losses are every bit as important as those born from my victories. A prospectus is defined as a document that provides details about an investment to help investors make more informed decisions. This might be longer than your typical prospectus, but the objective is to provide you with information to help you make educated choices.
My weekly betting reports will help keep you informed about league wide trends, while this book provides background context. Remember, what works one year may not necessarily work the next. Oddsmakers employ some really smart people to set their lines, and they really want your money. It’s becoming an increasingly competitive industry. Help me help you by buying this book.
To buy a copy, click here.
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