🏉 Big Favorites in USFL, MLB, And Some ACTUAL +EV Bets!

It’s a holiday weekend but the fun of betting and content creation doesn’t stop here at Probly! We’ve got some good news on the product development front so I’ll give you an update on where that stands at the end of the email.

And, of course, we'll dig into the world of probabilities across all the major sports with our Most Likely winner and even some +EV bets you can ACTUALLY TAKE AT LEGAL SPORTSBOOKS since I now have access to our APIs! Here's your Probly email for May 27th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

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

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — Prayers Up for Next Week

Once again, the true "Most Likely" winner lies abroad, unfortunately not with the Cockburn Cougars after they dominated following our last email. Today, the global Most Likely winner lies in semipro Colombian ball as a Bucaros de Bucaramanga win tops the world at a 95.8% probability. Our email provider won’t allow me to easily put an accent on the U in Bucaros so I hope they don’t take offense.

But of course, those valliant Bucaros are not likely to be in your local sportsbook. So instead we head to the pop culture sensation that is the USFL where former NFL journeyman Kyle Lauletta is expected to lead a New Jersey Generals win over the not-so-good Michigan Panthers. The Generals have also been struggling but their 72.3% probability is good enough to lead the way for this week.

🏉 In the rest of the USFL’s top five: A Houston Gamblers win at a 58.6% probability, a Birmingham Stallions win at a 55.4% probability, a Pittsburgh Maulers win at a 51.3% probability, and Stallions/Breakers over 46 points at a 51.1% probability. By Spring football standards, that Stallions-Breakers game may legitimately be fun. I don’t plan on watching it or anything but, you know, it could be fun.

🏀 The Celtics and Heat will go to Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals tonight and the markets are not as in favor of the Celtics as they have been the last two games. But it does seem like the expectation is the Celtics to be within range early. Celtics +2 (1st quarter) is the most probable at a 63.7% probability followed by Celtics +1.5 (1st quarter) at a 61.2% probability, Celtics +1.5 (1st half) at a 61% probability, Celtics +1.5 (1st quarter) at a 60.7% probability, and Heat +3 (2nd quarter) at a 60.5% probability. Based on these markets, I’d favor a Celtics first half moneyline but a Heat win. It wouldn’t be shocking to see a Game 7 though and, at that point, all bets are off for the Heat’s potential to blow a 3-0 lead.

Thanks to our API, I can also tell you that if you can find Bam Adebayo over 8.5 rebounds on your local sportsbook, that looks to be the most positive expected value bet around at a 59.4% probability and an 8.1 PROBLY Score (which means it will win you 8.1% more money than you’d lose over the course of time). The markets also seem to love Al Horford over 2.5 assists with a 53.7% probability and a 4.9 PROBLY Score, which seems to be readily available on PointsBet. I hit both while writing this email at slightly less advantageous but still +EV odds on FanDuel. Because of the delay here between when I send this and when you’ll read it, make sure the lines haven’t moved if you take them.

⚾️ The MLB top five: Astros +1.5 at an 85.4% probability, Astros +1 at an 84.2% probability, Astros +1 (1st half) at an 83.3% probability, Cardinals & Guardians over 4.5 runs at an 83.3% probability, and Astros & Athletics over 4.5 runs at an 83.3% probability. Point being: The Astros face a very low likelihood of a random dusting by the As and there is a decent likelihood that they drive most of the scoring.

The Astros also saw their moneyline increase throughout the course of writing this email and would now technically be your Most Likely winner for this week. An Astros win now comes in at a 73.7% probability that actually may also be the highest MLB moneyline we’ve covered in the weekly Probly emails so far this year. You love to see a storied team of good guys like the Astros come through like this, I’m sure.

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.

Last week, I had a big time venting session after some issues with our external development firm led to us missing our deadline, something I really don’t love with anything as a lifetime content creator and someone who many moons ago majored in Journalism. But, thankfully, after I had to put on my big boy pants and crack the whip to ensure things get moving, we seem to be on a decent trajectory to have our MVP in my hands next week and (hopefully) yours soon thereafter.

What you’re seeing in that screenshot above is a key part of our Probly ecosystem that I now can use for creating content (as well as data testing for complicated programming issues, like multiway bets that throw a curveball to our market comparison calculations). That’s our API, which combines our datafeed from our friends at OddsJam with our proprietary true probabilities that drive our expected value calculations. It may not mean much to an average consumer in terms of the end output (it probably just looks like The Matrix to someone without any programming background), but we are VERY happy with how the API performs currently.

We expect this to be faster than almost anything in the industry thanks to a shift from the easier-to-code but more sluggish Python to the innovative and slightly more knowledge-intensive Go programming language from Google. As a result, we can now pull probabilities within seconds and grade out our market comparisons near immediately in the hopes of being able to provide live, actionable sportsbook opportunities around the clock. We’ll have updates pretty much every minute and feel confident about how that’ll work for us and for our users.

We’ll continue to fine tune while we pray that our external team connects everything backend and frontend in time for the new deadline they gave us next week. But we continue to make strides, continue to test and re-test everything while our CTO optimizes things to levels I didn’t even know were possible.

There’s going to be some fixes we’ll need to make after release to ensure the best possible experience for you guys, some things that didn’t make it into our V1 MVP but that I consider crucial to create this user-friendly information exchange. But we finally can see some blue sky in terms of getting this out, getting feedback, and hoping people will pay for it and get more than a fair value out of it. That’s all I could have asked for on a holiday weekend where we continue to work and pray that the work pays off for something good for us, good for you, and good for the people out there spending billions on bets in the US each year.

Another one in the books here and I’m glad I was able to keep some positive vibes in this email after we had to air it out last week. This is the process as I promised it would be in this email. I will always be honest, talk to you about the highs and the lows, and we will always do our best to give you the best actionable data we can (as well as data that I myself will use to make sure I am right in the same boat with you).

It’s a team effort and, hopefully, a community we will build here over time. Strap in, good things are coming. I hope you all enjoy your Memorial Day weekends, touch some grass, and I’ll see you guys again soon!