☘️ Bad News For The Likely Embiid-Less Sixers

It's Saturday and you know what that means: A quick jaunt through the world of sports betting probabilities in your weekly Probly email. The NFL Draft is ongoing, unfortunately something where there are not fully credible "true probabilities" (see Will Levis being minus money across multiple books to be drafted at #2 only to go in the second round). We can't bet NFL Draft props in Pennsylvania anyway so hopefully you can survive that lack of Day 3 takes here. But we will take a look through the NBA playoffs, MLB, Spring football, and whatever else jumps out along with a quick progress update at the end. Let's get going with your Probly email for April 29th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from the NBA playoffs, MLB, Spring football, and other items of note!

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates - Why Probly over other betting products?

As is always the case in this email, we have to salute the true Most Likely champion that lies abroad. Today, a CD Valdivia win at home over CD Espanol De Talca comes with a world-best 96.3% probability. These teams play in a Chilean hoops league so, if nothing else, we're getting some variety from our recent run of ladies' Eastern European hoops teams dominating.But of course, you're not likely to get the latest antics of CD Valdivia in your local sportsbook. So we head to the NBA the week's highest Most Likely winner. This week, it's a Boston Celtics win as they kick off their semifinals series on Monday against the Sixers. It seems like slim hopes for Joel Embiid to play based on the Celtics' 72.4% probability to take Game 1.🏀 The top five most probable for the NBA is dominated by the Celtics, in fact. The Celtics moneyline (1st half) is in second with a 67.3% probability, a Celtics moneyline (1st quarter) is right behind with a 63.6% probability, a Knicks +1.5 (1st quarter) line comes with a 63.4% probability as they face off against the Heat fresh off their Bucks upset, and another Celtics +1 (2nd quarter) at a 63.4% probability. In the lone opening round Game 7, Kings +2 (1st quarter) at a 62.3% probability and similar bets dominate the board. The expectation seems to be a close game throughout and I personally would NOT treat the Warriors as a shoo-in.Let's also not sleep on my killer prognostication in last week's email:

❌ It's XFL playoff season and the Houston Roughnecks lead the way in this two-game weekend. A Roughnecks win has a 71.3% probability, a Defenders win has a 59.2% probability, Sea Dragons +3 comes with a 51.2% probability against those aforementioned Defenders, Roughnecks -6.5  comes with a coin flip 50% probability which is a natural tie with the flip side of the bet, Renegades +6.5. So it seems like the Roughnecks may be in for a cakewalk while the Sea Dragons should fight the good fight before yielding to the top-of-the-league Defenders. We've seen some late game heroics from Seattle and some blown games by the Defenders (who previously lost to the basement dwelling Guardians in the biggest upset of the XFL season) so that may be even more of a toss up than it seems.🏉 The USFL also soldiers on to mostly indifference but here's their top five: A Birmingham Stallions win leads the league once again (as they have every week so far) with a 70.3% probability, a Philadelphia Stars win comes with a 69.9% probability, a Houston Gamblers win has a 64.1% probability, a Michigan Panthers win has a 63.5% probability, and Generals-Panthers over 42.5 closes out the top five with a 53.3% probability. By USFL standards, that basically makes that game Chiefs-Rams on MNF a few years ago.⚾️ The MLB top five remains the least productive of the top probabilities but I'll be damned if I don't throw a crumb to our baseball boys: Cards-Dodgers over 4.5 runs is the most likely in MLB at an 85.1% probability, Angels-Brewers over 4.5 runs is #2 with an 83.1% probability, Royals-Twins over 4.5 runs is #3 with an 82.7% probability, Reds-A's over 4.5 runs is #4 with an 81.5% probability, and Game 1 Orioles-Tigers over 4.5 runs has an 81.3% probabilty. One day I will have more fun data for this section to not just give the highest probabilities but, sadly, that day is not today. In terms of highest probability winner, it's a Toronto win at home versus Seattle with a 69.4% probability of a Blue Jays victory with Kevin Gausman on the mound.🥊 UFC's card looks trash but I'm sure someone on our list cares so here you go: A Caio Borralho win leads the way with a 75.8% probability. Then we have a Stefanie Egger win with a 72.8% probability, a Khaos Williams win (SICK NAME!!!!) with a 71.5% probability, a Movsar Evloev win with a 67.7% probability, and a Rodolfo Viera win closes out the top five with a 67.5% probability.

If you've missed the previous weeks of write-ups as we get to our product release home stretch, check our our previous emails on 1) the core functionalities on our Stories page 2) Our Explore page with power users, myself included, in mind 3) How the concept of Mathematical Probability powers everything we do at Probly (and should be how you approach everything in betting and fantasy sports) and 4) What makes our Probly product/aspirational company different than others in the space.Today, I'll keep it brief: We passed a key development milestone this week that will hopefully put us in the final leg of getting the product out. Basically the database constructs we need to calculate everything (our proprietary probabilities, live sportsbook comparisons and even stuff like the GIFs we use with each individual bet in our Stories) are now complete. Our team (aka my co-founder Edgar) will continue to optimize for speed and bandwidth costs by tweaking some of our calculation code while our UX team connects these databases via API to our live product, which I've been using the same screenshots for above while we await some minor revisions on that as well.Those are the last remaining hurdles for us to give you guys our live MVP/Beta product of Probly and then the fun/anxiety begins. Right now — again in the interest of being candid as I always try to be about this journey — we are burning a little over $2k/month of my money between our data partners and Amazon Web Services besides all the development costs so trust me when I say I am behooved to get this in your hands as soon as possible! Daycare for a one-year-old is expensive enough as is.The product has got to be right though so hopefully there will be some positive movement on my final quality checks before next week's email.

There it is, another one in the books. The journey continues to deliver a final product to you guys but, as always, I am grateful for each and every one of you who opens this email and will hopefully one day help me create a product that stops me from hemmoraging a mortgage payment every month to get it out.Enjoy whatever sports may come your way this weekend — let's hope for some quality NFL Draft landing spots for Roschon Johnson and Dewayne McBride for the sake of my early Best Ball teams (Best Ball Mania IV drops this weekend after the NFL Draft concludes! Can't wait). Hope you guys have a great one and I'll see you soon.