KBO Model Day 4

Yesterday I refined the my KBO home field advantage constant for my KBO model. I also tried to see how important starting pitchers are, as I’m still not factoring them directly into the picks. Turns out, it looks like starting pitchers surrender 60% of runs scored in KBO games. I’ve started to explore Fangraphs KBO data, and while it seems like it important, it will take some time to figure out how to automate its use in the model.

In the meantime, I wanted to check the performance of the model to date. First, here’s today’s results. Best day so far!

  • 5 bets (one on each game)
  • Took all 5 favorites
  • Went against the model in 3 of the games based on pitching matchups
  • 4 home teams, 1 road
  • 2 wins, no losses, and 3 no action (games were rained out)
  • 1 win was the model’s pick, 1 was betting against the model

I haven’t been religiously sticking to the recommendations, so here’s the performance I’ve what I’ve actually done to date:

  • 12 bets
  • 6 home, 6 road
  • 6 favs, 6 dogs
  • 4 wins, 5 losses, 3 no action
  • Win percentage: 44% (not great, Bob.gif)
  • -14.57% ROI (cool cool cool.gif)

To recap:

  • Went 1-4 on day 1
  • I took the second day off after the first day was a bloodbath
  • Placed only 2 bets out of 5 on day 3, but bet AGAINST the model on one of the games after looking at the starting pitchers. I won the model play and lost the one I went against the model.
  • Day 4 (today): won 2, 3 rained out

So, all around bad start to my KBO experience. Now let’s look at just the model’s performance:

  • 20 players
  • 13 home, 7 road
  • 3 favs, 17 dogs (!)
  • 8 wins, 9 losses, 3 no action
  • Win percentage: 47%
  • 8.25% ROI

So, if I had just stuck to the model I’d be in better shape. However:

  • Both sets are EXTREMELY low sample size
  • A model like this, if at all accurate, benefits from higher volumes of play
  • The model only plays are profitable, even though it’s won less than half of it’s plays. Why? Because we bet on moneylines in baseball, and the model has found value on dogs, you win more than you risk when underdogs win.

I’m still not ready to blindly bet the model, but will likely take a blended approach of looking at starting pitchers until manually until I can factor directly into the model.

Sports are starting to come to life again. Tonight is a big UFC slate, NASCAR is coming back in the next couple weeks, as well as the Bundesliga. Since I know nothing about any of those, I’ll probably keep focusing on KBO. I have a friend who’s pretty knowledgable about UFC, so I may kick the tires in exploring how those markets work.

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