Part 2 in Our Series Covering The Mystery of NFL Prop Betting
Last week’s Pinnacle Pulse, introduced some ideas about how to gain an advantage from the increasingly popular “Which team will score first” prop. This week, we’re sticking with the theme and providing further hints on how to successfully price other common props available at PinnacleSports.com.
One of my personal favorites is the proposition: “Will the first score be a Touchdown or FG/Safety”. As a starting point for weighing this bet, you should look at how many TDs, FGs and Safeties have been scored by all teams in the season to date. Before this week’s Monday night game, the frequencies of each scoring play were as follows:
Fig 1
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First, the last two possessions of the half are more likely to result in a field goal than at any other time in a football game (except overtime). This bias isn’t simply due to time running out – in many cases, teams will use conservative play-calling to ensure a field goal attempt. As a result, 50% of the time the last score of a half is a field-goal.
Since close to 40% of all scores are FGs or Safeties (fig 1), and it’s been established that the final score of each half is a FG 50% of the time, we’re in a position to work out how likely the first score is to be a FG by using simple algebra and the average number of scores by game.
We can work out an “average” score value using the %’s from fig 1.
(60% * 7 points/TD + 40% * 3 points/FG = 5.4 points/possession).
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What are players betting at Pinnacle Sports this week?
The opening number of Cleveland at +9 (-112) is equivalent to +8 (-105) using Pinnacle’s point-selling option. While the betting public strongly favors Cleveland by a 15:1 margin, some of the early sharps are playing Pittsburgh.
by: Staci Richards – theSpread.com – Email Us
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