Geez, I expected a lot more action on this thread by this time...we've gotta get this joint rockin'!
One interesting thing that I notice, katts, on your post, is a mention of disparity on your two handicapping systems. A couple of recent events in my life have indirectly related to handicapping sporting events.
I recently warned that, after my school year ends, I would start handicap-philosophizing more at this site, so what a perfect opporunity to ramble on (not the Zeppelin tune)...
One course that I took this past semester was Philosophy XXXX (forgot the # already, thank Maddux), or "Critical Reasoning." We spent a few weeks on inductive reasoning, and I found myself perking up, paying more attention than I was in the other (mostly boring) lectures. As any (patient) readers may or may not know, inductive reasoning is exactly what we do when we handicap these events.
Digression 1.0
An easy, and perhaps too simple, way to think of the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning is as follows:
DEDUCTIVE: going from the general to the particular, or specific. e.g. if Patrick Roy is a man then we can deduce that Patrick Roy is mortal from the fact that all men are mortal. The famous example of
Roy is a man
All men are mortal
therefore, Roy is mortal.
INDUCTIVE: going from the particular (or, hopefully, particulars) to the general. e.g. if Roy plays great in game 1, game 2, and perhaps every game that we see him play (I know, I know, but this is hypothetical, right?) then we can induce from these particulars to the general conclusion that every future game that Roy plays he will play great.
Immediately, I'm sure you can see how deductive reasoning is supposed to be logically infallible (if done properly) while inductive reasoning is never certain.
A famous (I think) example is the one where the first swan that I see is white, and so is the second, third, fourth, etc., then I can induce that every swan is white (which actually isn't true). Trying to form a general law, or at least probablities, from previous empirical evidence is a tricky business.
Anyways, I paid close attention in these lectures on induction, and I found myself trying to relate them back to sports handicapping (obsession? what obsession?) Thing is, this was quite the Mickey-Mouse course (2nd year, I dunno, maybee uss schtudentz are geetttin schtupider, sho dey hafta mayk everyting reel ez furus)
Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that I'm certainly into investigating this inductive reasoning thing further.
The second thing, I just starting reading (for fun, believe it or not) Michael Shermer's book "Denying History." He researches Holocaust deniers and other forms of pseudo-history in an attempt to discuss what practical, scientific ways there are to do actual historical research. He mentions a nineteenth-century philosopher of science (William Whewall) who wrote about the consilience of inductions which is supposed to mean that any research relying on empirical evidence (just real, objective evidence or, for our purposes, what's actually happened previously or sure to take place) must not rely on just a single thread of evidence but can only be trusted if several converging lines of evidence point to a certain conclusion. Shermer uses the term convergence of evidence to mean the same thing.
Often I have to make my picks based on just the "peripheral" knowledge that I have from following the sports on a day-to-day basis, due to time constraints, but when I do take the time to do in-depth handicapping, I try to look at every possible conceivable angle (at least for baseball). In this sense I can relate to this convergence of evidence theory. For virtually every game (that I bet) I can find some negative piece of evidence, if you will, that may suggest team X will lose the game, even on the picks that I feel strongest about. I suppose that this is a good sign, meaning that I never find any of those golden, five-million star super-locks of the millennium, but sometimes I find it difficult (as we probably all do) to decide how much weight to give to each piece of evidence.
(short) Digression 2.0
I know that in my examples above, with the "history" book at least, it's dealing with trying to determine what happened in the past, but the inductive reasoning thing still holds, greatly, in sports handicapping.
Relating back to what katts said, if there are any survivers up to this point, I noticed that you said that your two different systems gave different results (I get this all the time with the NFL, as I always use two seperate, though similar systems). It seems to me that the results that you got--was it 60% and 66%?--are not that far off, so taking the lower, or some kind of average (which I often do with my NFL systems) is reasonable. Of course, at 60% you have only a negligible "value" at -140. Nothing wrong with that, and you might be right to lay off because of it. I actually scooped the -1.5, +250 in the first games in Colorado because I couldn't resist the bonus coin--today I'm just on the -140 because I figure that the Blues will be desperate and that might keep it to a one-goal game (don't feel like pushing my luck too much here, either).
Anyway, I guess the whole point of this rambleodeon was just to discuss that I'm currently looking for any methods, systems, etc., that might give me that extra bit of "converging evidence" with which to base my picks on. I'm constantly checking this site to see if someone has posted some data, or even opinion, that I may have missed or not considered. The posting of picks, without any reasoning or argument, doesn't really do too much for me, although I can appreciate that several people either coat-tail or use the same just to see if others agree of disagree with them. Myself, I'm not into the consensus thing; if I have a play, and everyone else on the site is posting the same play, without any reasons, then I'm not swayed either way.
In fact, for some strange reason I'd rather not look at others picks until after I've done my own research. This especially holds for the newspaper picks, in Toronto's dailies; you wouldn't believe these guys...they pick worst than the editors of Platinum Sheet!
Alright, that's enough for me until I have something of value to add.
Avalanche probably end it tonight.
I think a 65% chance, minimum, is where I place it. That's somewhere around a -190, so I can't resist the -140.
Careful on the Blues!
Extrapolater
P.S. other ramblings on this sort of topic are encouraged. I'm way into this shit right now, seeing as my (head) exams are finally over. Thank Roy for that!
[This message has been edited by EXTRAPOLATER (edited 05-21-2001).]
