Tuesday, May 7, 2013

A Tutorial on Sports Handicapping

By Margaret L. Czarkowski


I promised many of the readers this past season that I would get into my personal strategy, and then try to do my best to teach other people the right way to handicap college football games. This can be a multi-part handicapping tutorial series which will go into all the tiny particulars that you need to consider to be on the right side constantly. Don't hesitate to use the comment portion in the process if you've any queries. Make sure to check us out everyday for professional sports handicappers picks and evaluation.

Tools

Most of the evaluation I do starts with the statistics of particular teams. To put simply, you need to be able to examine stats on a common level. To achieve that, unless you have a calculator

Microsoft Excel

With no excel, 80% of my capping would be non-existent. On top of that, I would spend a terrible length of time on analysis. Excel is an incredible tool and I can't summarize that enough. In excel, there are various tools and also formulas that can be used to make your own analysis better, and easier. If you don't know the simple basics, the more advanced steps to adhere to will be much more difficult.

TRIM: Excel is a very frustrating program also. In many cases, your vlookup will not work since the lookup value contains an unnoticeable difference, when compared to table you're referencing. The trim function will certainly delete all unneeded spaces from a cell, making the Vlookup very likely to work.

RANK: This could take a list of values and also give them a rank order. This is very important when making power rankings, or using the correlation matrix.

CORRELATION: As we get deeper in the weeds in later post, we shall start to speak about correlations. There are specific stats that matter, and also certain statistics that don't. We can study the relativity of statistics with the correlation formula.

STANDARD DEVIATION: When you have several methods to anticipate a score, the standard deviation becomes a really useful tool to assess variability. This will give you a window of variability to the mean, as well as measure confidence of any data set.

The Most Important

WEB QUERIES: Initially when I first started utilizing excel at an advanced level to produce my handicapping system, I'd manually enter in the stats I wanted into a cell. This could fill other cells that contained formulas. It took me at least 15 minutes to get in the stats of Two teams, before I even began to examine the game and figure out if I wished to cap it further or not.

Exactly what a web query essentially does is download files from an excel friendly web site, and set it in an area in excel. What is great about this, is it will do it on command. Once I have the files downloaded once, it will download it on your own command. College football is nice because there are several sites that you can utilize. So long as the website does not change their format, you won't have to customize the format of one's system either.

I cannot start to describe exactly how much utilizing web queries have helped save me time.




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