Historical Lines

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Historical Betting Lines

Hindsight is always 20/20. No matter what the context is, whenever you look back at something that happened, you can always judge what you did well, and what you did not do so well.

While this is obvious and most likely a daily occurrence in our personal lives, it’s also a daily occurrence in sports betting. However, there’s a key difference.

In sports betting, you can track historical odds. You can see what the market closed at, how the odds moved, and you can reverse engineer these situations.

What Historical Lines Can Tell You

No event is going to be an apples-to-apples comparison. You can look up how a team does against a left-handed pitcher, but there is more analysis that needs to go into this process.

For example, you can have a team that had a 25% strikeout rate the last time they faced a lefty. Tonight, they may be facing a lefty. However, do these lefties throw the same pitches? What is their velocity? What is their arm angle?

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Historical lines tell a story, and while you need to dive deeper, they are fundamental for any sports betting expert. It’s a sought-after feature, and understanding why odds move is essential.

The MLB has some of the lowest variance of any sport, so historical odds are critical pieces of context. However, the NFL is one of the highest variance sports. How much does historical odds matter?

The truth is, in the NFL, a season-long sample size is still insignificant. In baseball, if a player is poor against lefties from April to August, he’s not going to start hitting lefties well.

On the other hand, in the NFL, outliers are more common occurrences. A player prop may close at 50 yards one week, and the player could fly under. The following week, the prop can be at 43 yards, and the player flies over.

So, how much should you factor in historical odds? Also, how much impact do trends have in the betting process?

While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, context always matters. A trend may be meaningless, but a situation could be an edge, and having access to historical odds data can help shape this story.

By looking back and understanding how the market moved, the factors that influenced the market, and determining whether results unfolded more due to variance rather than as anticipated, you can start to make better betting decisions moving forward.

Let’s Get This Straight

Every week, we dissect a relevant sports betting topic to determine its validity.

Variance Per Sport

We touched on this earlier in the newsletter, but we want to reiterate this point. Many undereducated bettors believe the MLB is less predictable than the NFL.

Here’s the reality:
Studies show that the MLB is the most predictable sport while the NFL is the least.

Oftentimes, bettors have a hard time differentiating between bad bets with good results and good bets with bad results. Those same bettors tend to believe that because baseball has so many games and at-bats, there is more room for random events to occur.

The opposite is true. Since there are such large sample sizes, there is less variance. Statistics are king, and the more stats there are, the more likely games are priced correctly.

Don’t let recency bias shape your opinion. Trust the data and shop for the best price.

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