⚾️ The Best Ways To Win At MLB Betting

Busy week here at Probly, including our first Demo Day and some meetings with a group of great investors in Miami, but the grind persists! I’ll talk more about that in our company/product updates below but let’s lead off with what’s promised in this email’s subject line: What’s the best way to win at MLB betting?

Let’s set the table with the biggest positive: Much like NBA, MLB has daily games and, as a result, there isn’t an NFL or in-between-March Madness-rounds length of lead time for sportsbooks to accrue data that minimizes your shots at profitability.

There’s a predictability to baseball as well, at least over the larger sample size. Batting averages, strikeout rates, home run rates — they all find their depth over the course of a season because baseball is a 1-on-1 sport disguised as a team sport. The interaction between batter and pitcher drives everything that occurs on a field and is inherently a simple probability calculation of batter longitudinal results versus pitcher longitudinal results versus a batter who hits from their side of the plate.

That can cut both ways. The analytics on baseball being so strong means sportsbooks can be better in the macro while the micro can offer more variance. How many times have you heard of X player’s 0-32 hitting streak or a pitcher’s unlucky streak without a win? Barring some flaw in mechanics that can get a guy sent to the minors or sat for a few days to “shake out the cobwebs,” you are as likely to see that hitter go 16-32 in a stretch as you are to see him go 0-32. With 162-ish games of data for multiple years for most players, the sample size is ample and you are not likely to beat it.

So where is the advantage for you, a savvy bettor who reads emails from betting apps?

#1 Team Bets Have More EV And Volatility Before Lineups Are Out — Daily MLB lineups are one of the most crucial parts of baseball due to how often players can sit for a variety of reasons. Much like NBA, the amount of times there is a player not playing out of left field (no pun intended but now that I’ve written it, pun intended) who materially changes a team’s outlook happens frequently. Worse players swapped in creates less at bats which means less opportunities for the entire lineup.

If you bet after lineups come out — and closer to first pitch in general — you will find lines that sharpen up and deplete closing line values quickly. If you are willing to absorb the inherent risk we all do when placing bets before knowing everyone is active — as you should be — you will find your best shots at exploiting mispriced probabilities earlier in the cycle than later.

If you bet games late, try to place those bets IMMEDIATELY after the team drops their official lineup.

#2 Home Run Bets Are Crucial But You Need Sustainable Bankroll — My pal Greg Ehrenberg recently posted some of his 2023 MLB results from our friends at Stokastic/Oddsshopper and the win-loss record can be jarring at first, despite a very strong monetary result. That’s because, if you aspire to be a profitable MLB bettor, you need to attack things like home run props.

Home run props tend to have extreme pricing, +300 to +500 bets are frequent. That’s because the actual probability of hitting a home run in a game, even for the greatest power hitters, is unlikely to crest past 25% (with the variable of their team creating more at bats for them or less depending upon team success). As a result, you have to be able to withstand losses at an expected 1-in-5 or more rate. I always advocate for it since it’s true of betting writ large but it’s especially true of MLB: Lower your unit size and increase your volume of bets.

Also: I personally wouldn’t waste time on No Home Run bets. At like 80-90% probabilities, you are getting juiced to death and would have to lay a lot of money to feel anything.

#3 No Run First Innings or Yes Run First Innings Are Trendy — This is a very popular bet type for baseball — commonly called NRFI or YRFI (or “Nerfy” or “Yerfy” when said out loud by degenerates like us — and it’s a lot like the first quarter/first half underdog moneylines you often see in our higher PROBLY Score bets, albeit at less favorable pricing. Sample size allows teams to find their depth so, naturally, one inning can be more volatile than a nine-inning result (even though a nine-inning result is still volatile compared to a 162-game result).

This is one bet type I’d really avoid trying to think you have a personal, eyeball driven edge with. I’m okay with these bets as a reflection of market probabilities but my sense from seeing data around these is a lot of people get smoked trying to chase one of the most volatile MLB bets there can be because it’s a trendy bet to place.

#4 Run Line Derivatives, Total Bases, and Strikeout Bets Are Better — Fundamentally, the rules remain the same as any other bet on Probly’s app: Take a bet if it’s got a PROBLY Score over 2 and, ideally, the higher it is relative to probability, the better.

But you’ll find a lot more +EV options amidst derivatives of the run line (i.e. an underdog +1.5, like the White Sox were yesterday at plus-money in one of our hits). There’s more risk on first half or first inning run lines but that can be a positive, particularly for underdogs.

Total Bases bets are also one of my personal favorite MLB props with a little less volatility than a home run prop. Good players get on base and get hits but home runs are never assured.

Same things for strikeouts. Pitcher strikeout rates are obvious and predictive, particularly for guys who also excel at generating swinging strikes (as opposed to getting caught looking). Guys who generate swinging strikes have better stuff and cause batters to chase more.

Point being: Home runs will rack up profitability the most, especially if you run hot. If you want a more sustainable probability to give you a shot at regular wins, these bets are the move.

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Remember — It’s still betting. Probly will never be the company that tells you anything is a lock because nothing is a lock.

But with this approach, you give yourself the best shot to have positive Expected Value and maximize the opportunity that the only league with 162 games can provide.

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Today, we’ll share our tracked NBA Top 10 bets along with our Most Profitable challenge for the week and a few MLB bets plus our usual run through products and business. Here’s your Probly Email for March 29th, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• 🏀 An MLB Most Profitable Challenge

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Probly’s First Demo Day

The Most Profitable challenge moved to 3-0 on the back of Indiana State last week. Do you want to take us on today?

If you tail this bet I’m about to show you, send me a screenshot at Probly.com before the game starts [email protected]. If the bet loses, I will comp you a free month of Probly+. If the bet wins, I expect you to pay for a month of Probly+ at whichever tier you deem appropriate. That’s the bet between gentlemen (or gentleman and lady, gentleman and talking dog, whatever).

The current best bet in this week’s Most Profitable challenge is:

Marlins-Pirates over 8 runs — 55% probability and 5.5 PROBLY Score — -110 odds

Send your screenshots to me if you tail it BEFORE THE GAME [email protected]. It tips off tonight at 7ish.

Otherwise, here’s the rest of the Top 10 NBA bets for today, from a video done this morning:

And here’s five bonus ones for MLB that I saw and just hit right before sending this email:

May the variance gods be on our side!

Of course our best bets, probabilities, and PROBLY Scores are always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store.

^Here’s our video tutorial on optimal settings, which is also live as an interstitial for new users on Probly. Read our previous post on optimal settings before you dive in to betting with Probly’s data.

This week was an up and down one, including a brief outage we had for 45 minutes on Monday because of Amazon Web Services dicking us around. I’m going to spare venting about that one but I would say for any other startup founders out there — Be aware that they, as a company, do not exist to help startups other than the richest of the rich.

Thankfully, we solved it quickly with no timely help from them but the fact they messed with our services the day before a Demo Day presentation that we had emailed them about multiple times was really an awful customer experience.

Besides that, our trip to Miami to present for a group of investors was the big item of the week. Since I always share things earnestly here, we’re currently looking to raise a decent amount in an angel/pre-seed round to continue to build this product while giving us runway for a year and a half or more for hires, development, and our AWS and OddsJam costs.

This was the first time I’ve had to give a presentation in person, not over Zoom, for Probly. So the stress and anxiety levels were high.

We were in a group with two other companies presenting to these investors and, of course, went third. It ended up being something of an advantage, allowing me to adapt our pitch a little to focus on our strengths — in particular, our track records as founders, our grit, and, yes, our likability overall as two lifelong best friends building a product that wants to help people not get eviscerated by a potential epidemic of a sports betting industry.

Thankfully, the feedback was good and it even led to a followup meeting that could have massive ramifications for what we do at Probly moving forward if we opted to go a somewhat different route than our fairly humble current goals.

We’ll know more at the end of next week — which coincides with my having to do ANOTHER Demo Day here in Philly at the same time — so there are some pins and needles as we wait around. But the signs seem good and, at this point, any breathing room as we do the work daily would be a huge win.

Miami itself was fun, even though the schedule and quick in-and-out nature of the trip made it not the debaucherous kind of South Beach-infused trip I’ve had before. I saw our CTO and aforementioned best friend Edgar (my son Luka’s godfather) in person for the first time in a while. We got to talk work and, after a day of business, finally got to eat at 12am at this sick local Cuban food place that was the only thing open (Manolo and Rene if you’re in downtown Miami at some point, worth it).

It was bustling there despite being midnight on a Tuesday, which is the kind of energy I enjoy from my NYC and LA roots. If we had investors there and a reason to go back with some amount of frequency, I’d be stoked — even though the humidity WRECKED me as we were the only founders presenting who wore suits. I weep for the dry cleaning I still need to do.

Product-wise, we had to fix a few things and address some data feeds for MLB that we wanted to ensure functioned as expected so there were no major new features shipped.

We’re going to be focused on some cleanup items in the next week or so, particularly database cleanup to figure out what we need to do moving forward when/if we do have capital. We anticipate that can have a positive effect on surfacing bets more efficiently (and possibly speeding up the app’s data pulls) but we have to code some things to do that first.

It’s a lot but we feel good right now. We push forward in the name of providing the best product possible for you guys while hopefully finding a way to build ourselves some ability to, you know, get paid a salary and not have to pay every bill out of pocket while we wait for revenue to get there. Dare to dream!

Get a 7-day free trial through the App Store OR save 50% with promo code FIRST on any monthly OR yearly package at Probly.com/subscribe.

If you guys encounter any issues not covered here or want to provide feedback, you can email me [email protected].

As always, thanks to all of you who read all the way down here. I’m stoked the Most Profitable challenge has gone to 3-0 though, at some point, I need more of you sweet boys and girls to take me up on the challenge if we’re gonna keep it going. So do that!

You know I have to do one more plug: It’s a great time to get your free seven-day trial of Probly+ on the App Store or use promo code FIRST to get 50% off at Probly.com/subscribe (under $100 for a first year or under $10 for a first month). Change your life in betting! I’ll see you guys next week!