VolenteHawk

Tuned in for a score check and it’s 9-0...oops.

Going to back Kyle Hendricks coming off a really good opening day start. Cubs +101

Yeah, I’d have went and watched him work out and added him outside the walk on process if you had to. He’s been through actual adversity in life, not “we’re trailing Iowa State with only 8 minutes left” adversity.

Astros are a dog, which I’ll take. Houston +118

Back for another year. Taking Zac Gallen to avoid a sweep, better side of the pitching matchup at plus money. Diamondbacks +114

I’m guessing you didn’t glance at the Twin Peaks parking lot as you drove by...that place looked like a total shitshow when I passed it yesterday. It seems like most places that are busy are the neighborhood B&G type places. You close a couple dive bars and those regulars congregate in whatever joint is close and meets the 51% criteria.

If you need readers you're aren't going to pass the eye test. You probably need to hit the eye doctor for real glasses.

I don't even know how to get on 35 going the wrong direction.

It’s just an online bookstore! This valuation is crazy!

Spanish Oaks and Austin GC are both nice and in really good shape...but they’re both quietly kinda mediocre layouts. I think they’re way too high. I’ve played most of the big names, I’d rate Bluejack and Escondido my favorite two courses in the state.

I read a study (that I can’t immediately find now) that estimated that up to 1/3 of excess deaths could be from people delaying going to the hospital for treatment of serious health issues. They used a couple of papers, one a delay of care to outcomes study, and some death rate compares for other diseases. My impression was that I didn’t know if the study would stand up to peer review rigor, but it also wasn’t crazy.

This one hurts. I had heard Y Mas would be back before that news hit, so that didn’t smash me right in the feels...but this sucks ass.

I started the MLB betting thread last year (and had my best ever season...now that my bets are lower). If you peruse that, it provides some insight to my style...good pitchers at plus money, series prices of +190 for team with two real life aces, fading bad teams in bad spots, etc. https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/topic/9559-mlb-betting-2019/

For an off the shelf college basketball game where I thought I had a regular edge, I was betting $500 per game. For major conference stuff that was no big deal and could be done in one bet at one book (find best number, pull trigger). For smaller conferences most shops would limit you more than that, so you might have to bet it in a couple of spots. You also might wake up to $50 limits on any given morning, depending on your success rate. I'm an an analytics guy, so my process for betting was actually kind of boring. I had a spreadsheet with power ratings, so I'd make numbers for every game before they came out, compare the opener to my number, if two teams I had strong conviction on were playing I'd immediately bet it...I'd dig deeper into the others, sometimes the market is right and I'm wrong, obviously. How the spreadsheet was made is probably more interesting. In the preseason, I'd use the previous years stats to assign a number to each team Big 6 + A10 + Missouri Valley (arbitrary but it took about an hour per team). Anybody can do that, of course, the trick in making the numbers "good" is being able to figure out who was a basket better or worse than they "should" have been the year before. What I was doing was finding outliers in certain numbers that don't actually represent a skill, even though most people think they do. My favorite example (that people still argue about) is 3P% defense. We all grew up with coaches yelling at us to defend harder/contest/whatever, so it's intuitive to think defense has a lot to do with 3s going in or not...but with very few exceptions it's actually random. A team that is otherwise properly rated by the market but has been extremely lucky or unlucky on 3s going in against them was a gold mine...for every team that you find a couple of points of value in vs the market, that's worth thousands of dollars. Sadly, you could use KenPom's data to make better numbers today than I ever had, get every team, and spend less time than it took me to rate Creighton in 2001. If I could pick one way that KP fucked me the most it was teaching people to adjust properly for tempo. We all understand now that having Florida State +5 against Virginia is WAY different than against North Carolina, but not many people were thinking that way 20 years ago. And that rat bastard showed everybody and for free. In the early days he actually adjusted this too much, and systemically overrated ultra slow teams. My NFL style is a little more intuitive to people, once you explain the logic to them. Recovering a fumble is a pretty random event. Some crews call more penalties in the secondary. A team's SOS is better measured by projected win totals than last year's records (ESPN still fucks this one up every year). Third down conversion is dictated far more by how successful you are on 1st and 2nd down than by teams having vastly different ability to convert 3rd and longs. The other area I made money was by not overreacting to injury moves, that's almost universally overrated. If Patrick Mahomes misses a game and whatever warm body starts, I'd move that game about 8 points. People think "8 points isn't much, Patrick Mahomes is the MVP", but NFL teams are so jammed together that it's actually a shitload. Hence my Dolphins love last year. You can quibble with the difference between Josh Rosen and Ryan Fitzpatrick, I didn't even calculate it last year...I just saw the number come down and go back up 6 points different and immediately knew that was wrong. The fact that they beat the Patriots in week 17 to give the Chiefs the 2 seed capped my love affair with that team. Full disclosure: I was successful but never moved worldwide lines. That's some baller shit.

I did it professionally for almost 15 years. Getting busy with kids at the same time that analytics on the internet drastically tightened up lines eventually made my edges small and rare enough that it was just too much work for too little return. I'll still handicap season win totals and bet some of those, and I'll still grab bad numbers when I see them (ironically MLB seems to have the most these days even though it was the first market to be heavily influenced by analytics). I also still do the NFL Super Contest, but those are static lines so it's different. I was mostly a pro football and college basketball guy, but with 2 or 3 internet accounts and about $50...you can have nearly every statistical advantage I enjoyed for the 2000s across both sports, so in practice everybody now has that info for essentially free. The two sports that were my wheelhouse are now too efficient for me to reliably beat because of it. I'm not sure the NFL is beatable at all if you're betting the pre-flop spreads...it's bordering on perfectly efficient unless you figure something out before the market. As one example, last year the market reaction from the Rosen -> Fitzpatrick move was insane, so for several weeks I was on the Dolphins at huge plus numbers until they figured it out. The Dolphins were 40% of my season long individual game bets last season, which shows you how little conviction I had in every non Dolphins game.

I’m a member at Great Hills, but if you ran the numbers for Balcones and couldn’t make it work, GH is worse than that. The advantages of being at a club are you can walk 9 (or 7 at GH) after work by yourself for “free” and range balls/practice areas are “free”...so you very quickly don’t need to find 5 hours to play. Great Hills also has, by far, the best playing membership in town. There have been years I’ve been a 2 during the club championship and not even been in the championship flight. But from a strict financial perspective, you have to play so much to make it work that it pretty much never will. That’s pretty much universally true of private courses.

Uh huh. Blink three times if you need help.

Yeah, there is nowhere in the world that demonstrated it possible to do this. My bad.

I’m not talking about school closings and big gatherings, those were positive. I’m talking about shelter in place without making the lockdown drastic enough to actually choke the virus out...that policy was just kicking the can down the road. And whatever numbers are in your head for what the first wave would have been like, hang on...we ain’t peaked yet.

Texas certainly moved too quickly through reopening phases, but I don’t know how much that has to do with the current numbers...if that is the primary reason it makes California pretty hard to explain, for example. I think dcar is right. While we shut down places that didn’t have much of an outbreak (like Texas and California) for good reasons, it was too early. So we took 8-10 weeks of good compliance to SIP (compliance that we’ll never get again) and, while building up supplies and learning, we created pent up demand to do something, anything social. Mask usage and social distancing compliance has been extremely high in my observation for several weeks now, but it took the outbreak to get there. Without a significantly harsher lockdown March to May, Texas was always going to have a pretty harsh first wave, we just waited until now to get there.

If they didn’t adequately pilfer the whole state, the Sooner name needs to go. Offensive to proper criminals.

In Austin, National Instruments does it this way...there is an accrual limit, but it's a lot (several years worth). Vacation used to roll over similarly with a generous cap, then a less generous one, and as of a couple years ago doesn't at all.

We did that for longer when there were fewer infections, and it didn’t do much other than delay our first wave. They’re gonna need the essential business list to be far shorter, which I don’t think anyone will have the stomach to do.

We couldn’t squash it with a 6 week SIP when there were a fraction of the cases. We’ve had all the good compliance to lockdowns that we’re getting out of young, healthy people. Buckle up.