The predictions posted on this site are designed to project the outcome of future games. This should be fairly obvious as that is the definition of “prediction”. We put a lot of time and effort into developing our projection systems and will do our best to explain these in the text that follows. It’s also true that not all of our projection systems are equal. Some systems are very complex and others are very simple. We now show the level of complexity of each projection system on the sport’s projection page and assign it a “Projection Level”, which will also be explained in more detail below.
Benefits of our Projections
- Works well with a lot of data: This is great for something like the NBA, NHL, and college basketball. There are so many games played that eventually the data can see a lot of important trends that may give a slight advantage over the human eye. After around ten games into the season, the projections ends up converging very closely with the Vegas Line.
- Zero Bias: There is absolutely no human massaging that goes into these predictions. Human Bias has a very interesting way of creeping its way into everyone’s thoughts and feelings about particular teams and games. The media, in particular, will drive up hype on players and teams to build ratings and this will sway public opinion. The computers, fortunately, don’t listen to Lee Corso.
Drawbacks of our Projections
- Early season predictions are based on previous years’ results: As one can imagine, this makes early season predictions quite unreliable. A great quarterback graduating, NCAA sanctions, a coaching change, etc. can have a huge impact on year-over-year performance.
- Predictions are not strong across leagues: Computer predictions work very well in leagues where there is a lot of games played and with a lot of inter-connectivity between teams. Where the methods sometime fail is when there isn’t that inter-connectivity (i.e. AL vs. NL in baseball, FBS vs. FCS in college football, an EPL team vs. a La Liga team). This will occasionally produce skewed results and should be viewed with caution.
Projection Levels
Our projection levels are something relatively new that we wanted to mention here. Unfortunately, we have not spent an equal amount of time on every sport. In some sports, we simply run the numbers every few months or so and hope for good results. In other sports, like NHL Hockey, we’ve covered every minute detail that we can think of. Below are how the levels work.
Level 1
This is our most basic level that currently consists of most of our sports. At this level of projection, we simply predict the games based on two ratings systems for each team. The ratings are based of our of proprietary algorithm which is based of the data from previous games played. While these ratings are predictive, there are many factors that are not used in the projections and should thus be viewed with caution.
Extra Factors Included:
- Home Field Advantage
- Back-to-Back game lethargy
- Starting pitchers/goalies
Current Sports at this Level:
- All Soccer
Level 2
Includes everything in Level 1, but we add for a few more factors to take the predictions to the next step. Our Level 2 predictions add 2% to 10% to the accuracy of our projections depending the sport.
Extra Factors Included:
- Additional rating system used to value teams
- Injuries
- Advanced player breakdown
Current Sports at this Level:
- None
Level 3
Includes everything in Level 2 and a heck of a lot more! These predictions add another 3% to 8% to the accuracy over our Level 2 projections and our data shows us outperforming Vegas sportsbooks for these projections. In a nutshell, we take everything into account in Level 3. With these projections, we add a “Bet Value” to each game analysis which compares our projection to the Vegas line. These are the ONLY systems that we are comfortable to use for true betting analysis.
Extra Factors Included:
- End of season tanking factor
- Betting metrics
- Weather (if applicable)
- Advanced injury analysis – offense/defense impact
- Advanced money line/spread betting analysis
- Advanced over/under betting metrics
Current Sports at this Level:
Conclusion
In short, these predictions are a great base line to use when looking at games to bet, but should only be used as one piece of the puzzle. As stated above, there are many other factors that go into final outcome of a game, so research the games carefully.