Yesterday's Results

Maybe I'm taking this a little to hard, but I couldn't sleep after last night. I'm feeling a mixture of shock, disappointment, anger, and disbelief. Enough to make me hesitate before opening my Excel spreadsheet. If you use the prior accuracy of 67% for ***** picks, the odds of losing a game were 33%. The odds of losing 6 games were 0.13%. The average daily accuracy for ***** picks, not weighted by number of games, is 67% with standard deviation of 32%. Events that occur at 2 standard deviations from the mean i.e. 0% accuracy, have a probability of 2.5%. That may not be a complete valid way of looking at it from a statistics point of view, but you get the idea - it was very unlikely. After last night, using my historical z-score to find the probability that my results to this point are not random; in other words, I do have some sort tangible advantage, is 16%. I don't know what a typical handicapper's z-score is - if anyone's got a point of reference, I'd like to hear it.

A better way to measure handicapper success ... a great article explaining how to measure handicapper success, including information about z-score. Written by Ganchrow as the SBRForum.

I'll address the flurry of yesterday's comments:
I will start using Pinnacle's lines when they are available.
I appreciate Anon's post about DEN and ATL. Thanks for tracking that metric, I'd be interested in seeing more of that if you've got it.
I hope this isn't the beginning of regression to the mean.

One thing to keep in mind: the NBA season is a long one, it's a marathon, not a sprint. An abomination like yesterday was just a trip. If you've been using the ***** picks all along, you're still up 25% on the season, in just 2 months.


>>>As of 8:20 AM, Pinnacle has 5 lines up. Sports Interaction has 7 up. The 5 posted lines are exactly the same, except P has DEN -3 and SI has DEN -2. Actually, DEN -2 *****, DEN -3, NO +4 *****