🏉 Big Favorite in UFC, Plus NBA Finals, MLB, And ACTUAL +EV Bets!

It’s Saturday morning so it’s time for a weekly Probly email. We’re still in the QAing process with our app so that portion of things will have to wait but things are seemingly looking better as it relates to finally getting our app out.

But before our latest updates, we’ll go around the world of probabilities as well as taking a look for some +EV bets you can ACTUALLY TAKE AT LEGAL SPORTSBOOKS! NBA Finals fans, take note. Here's your Probly email for June 3rd, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from the USFL, UFC, MLB, NBA Playoffs, and whatever else is interesting!

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — Amazon Put the Fear of God into Us

Every week I search for the most probable event in the world and wait for something to top the team name of “Cockburn Cougars” for an Aussie women’s hoops squad. Every week, I am let down. Still: A cool team name as a Bendigo Braves win, another Aussie team in the men’s side of the Australian NBL1, comes with a 95.8% probability. I’d wear Bendigo Braves merch if given it for free but it doesn’t seer itself into my memory like the Cougars.

The Braves are not a team likely to be in your local sportsbook (though I think more likely than we usually have here?). I thought we’d have to head to the USFL with the Birmingham Stallions another top option but the league hasn’t captured my attention this year — though lordy lordy do they run a lot of ads on FOX programming like WWE Smackdown.

So thankfully we have this hero above to avoid another week of USFL dominance in the form of this week’s Most Likely award. A Jamie Mullarkey win on tonight’s UFC card comes with a 79.2% probability. The last time we saw a favorite this heavy in this email, she smoked her opponent in under a round. Here’s hoping this guy…isn’t full of malarkey.

🥊 For the rest of UFC’s top five: An Amanda Nunes win on next week’s card comes with a 72.7% probability then a Miranda Maverick win on that same card at a 71.3% probability. A Jim Miller win looks good tonight with a 70% probability (this was way more +EV earlier in the week where he was getting +160 odds at sportsbooks like PointsBet before his odds swung wildly), and Tim Elliott & Victor Altamirano over 2.5 rounds has a 69.1% probability.

🏉 In the USFL’s top five: A Birmingham Stallions win leads the way with a 67.4% probability followed by a Breakers win at a 60.7% probability. Then you’ll get the Houston Gamblers win at a 59.2% probability, Maulers +3 at a 52.8% probability, and Stars & Stallions over 45.5 points at a 52.8% probability. The highest over-under game last week seemingly ended up as a fun one by USFL standards and that may be the case for this Stars/Stallions one with that total and the Stallions’ favorite status likely opening up the pass game script.

🏀 We’re onto the NBA Finals and the top five markets show a tale of Denver’s dominance as the Heat’s luck perhaps may be running out: A Nuggets win is actually now just behind the Mullarkey win in the UFC with a 75.3% probability. Then we get Nuggets moneyline (1st half) at a 69.1% probability, Nuggers moneyline (1st quarter) at a 64.9% probability, Nuggets +0.5 (2nd quarter) at a 62.3% probability, and Nuggets moneyline (2nd quarter) at a 60.6% probability. You may recall from NFL season that Most Probable boards like this are best seen as a “dominance narrative” bet by the top markets in the world. The Heat may win the 2nd quarter or something but it’s unlikely you see them escape Denver with a win.

There’s also a +EV bet for Game 2 that seems available on a lot of markets out there (I hit it at +132 on FanDuel): Gabe Vincent over 2.5 rebounds has a 44.8% probability to hit but you can find it for +135 at books like BetMGM and Hard Rock with our highest 5.2 PROBLY Score. If you have Betway, Bam Adebayo over 31.5 points + rebounds + assists looks like the safest +EV bet with a 55.2% probability, a 3.3 PROBLY Score, and -115 odds.

I also hit the WNBA’s Seattle Storm to win at a 33.6% probability and a 4.1 PROBLY Score if you can get +205 odds. These bets are less than a coin toss to win but your ability to find plus money on them. Again: The concept of this is by picking off advantageous odds relative to our true probability sources, you’d win 4.1% more than you’d lose for a bet with a 4.1 PROBLY Score.

⚾️ The MLB top five: Athletics and Marlins over 4.5 runs at a 83.1% probability, Blue Jays +3 at an 81.2% probability, Orioles and Giants over 4.5 runs at an 81.2% probability, Cubs and Padres over 4.5 runs at an 80.5% probability, and Cardinals & Pirates over 5.5 runs at an 80% probability. With a market line over/under of 9 in that Cardinals/Pirates game, it could be a fun one to target for home run bets.

The Braves also come in with the most likely win of the day with an Atlanta win at Arizona coming in with a 64.4% probability. The most +EV bet looks like Rafael Devers over 1.5 bases with a 49.4% probability and a 6.2 PROBLY Scorei f you get it at +125 on BetMGM. A lot of other books, including BetRivers, Wynn, Barstool, Hard Rock, and Caesars, have it at a slightly less advantageous +117.

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.

Honestly, there’s nothing too exciting to report this week on the progress front. Our external team had to extend their deadline again due to some issues that were seemingly fully resolved on Friday. They’re now QAing things before we merge the development branches on Monday or Tuesday and then we’ll have to tidy some things up before getting it out to you guys. So, once again, we’re closer than we’ve ever been, the APIs are running well, but we just need to get the full confidence signoff on both our front-end developers’ code and my views on usability.

The big challenge this week was a surprise $9,000 bill from Amazon Web Services, the provider for all of our backend processes. We had unexpected spikes on May 22nd and 23rd that had no correlation to any code pushes or anything (we assume it was an error resulting in repetition of rewrites or just a misreporting) but were charged between $3-4,000 each of those days before our costs went back to a normal range.

I love Amazon, at least as a vessel of convenience for my life. Prime has been on my menu for probably a decade. I buy a lot, trust them to generally not screw up the transaction, I pay for Prime Video even though I never watch anything on there besides The Boys it’s a delight.

It’s a little bit different for how it’s been dealing with them as a business consumer. AWS is awesome with the amount of tools it has, from databases to cron jobs that run at certain time sequences to make this product work in real-time. But they also make it very hard to get a product off the ground with any ambition unless you’re in one of their favored states programs. They have one where, if you’re a founder affiliated with a Venture Capital firm, you can get $100,000 in credits to properly build and test your development efforts (generally called “sandboxing”).

If you’re a bootstrapped startup, you can apply to get $1,000 in AWS credits…and that’s it. They have some third party sites that also offer credits (for example, Stripe if you use them to legally set up your business — unfortunately not just if they’re your payment processor) but you have to hunt around for them, some of them no longer have the credits they used to have, and it’s all a very tough ecosystem. We’ve had to pay roughly $2,500 the last few months after our credits ran out, all without a public facing product to generate any revenue or ability to add value to the business.

It’s a sacrifice obviously but, combined with some emails that don’t get replies and meetings that took up valuable time and didn’t get follow-up, I’d felt a little disappointed in what you’d hope would be some actual support for startups who are in position to spend a lot of money with them over the course of years.

It looks like they’ll correct the bill since it’s seemingly impossible to have a 1000x spike like that — after they’ve already tried to charge my credit card for it after I asked our account rep to perhaps avoid autopaying this one, their only option for payment — but man it’s been more of a stressor and a haul than I would have ever thought possible, particularly with the ol’ day job now behind literally a month and a half on payroll.

Needless to say: If you sign up for one of our $49.99/month packages (or our $499/year option, even better deal for all!) for access to all the sports and all the live data when we finally have this out to you guys, it’ll be appreciated! Trust no service provider (except us, pls pls for the love of God trust us).

Another one in the books here and once again I appreciate you guys who read every one or, at the very least, read this one! I hope the bets work out (I’m FRANTICALLY writing this email to get these numbers out to you guys in time before the odds shift, as they do). Let me know if you tail anything or if you have any questions or concerns!

Otherwise, let’s strap in here for the home stretch and hopefully I’ll have some good news for you guys (and me, the guy bleeding money in hopes of chasing a dream!) in the form of our app finally being availabler to users. Pray for Mojo. See you guys soon!