⚾️ Braves Top MLB Odds And A Tasty UFC Underdog

It’s Saturday morning and we’re back with a weekly Probly email after a week off for vacation with the wife’s family to my and my son’s fractional motherland in Puerto Rico! I hoped to return to a whole new world with our app ready to go and some positive movement with my day job’s strife and struggles with making payroll that would allow us to begin to get ready for football season, refreshed and ready to tackle the challenges ahead with a renewed vigor.

Alas, we live in an imperfect world. After a week of chasing around a tiny little daredevil in an unenclosed backyard in humid 90 degree heat and a return to a still-accruing 2.5 months of owed pay, I’m as stressed as ever. But all we can do is push forward and keep it as real as possible here so you know every bit of sweat equity that goes into this process. So here’s another batch of fresh probabilities and +EV bets along with some updates on what the f*ck is taking us so long to get this out. Here’s your Probly email for July 15th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from the MLB, UFC, NBA Summer League, soccer and whatever else seems interesting!

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — Murphy’s Law in Product Development

As is always the case, our true Most Likely winner lies abroad as a Bulgaria win in international hoops leads the way with a 91.8% probability to beat Kosovo. Will Kosovian hoops ever recover? We can only hope.

But the comings and goings of Bulgaria in esoteric FIBA qualifiers is not necessarily most relevant to your local sportsbook. So instead we head to MLB where a Braves win over the White Sox tops the major sports with a 71.1% probability. The Braves have moved ahead safely to the top of World Series winner odds at around +360 so we may see a lot of them in here down the home stretch with their bats heating up even more in the Atlanta humidity.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall contains the usual weird alternate lines: White Sox & Braves over 4.5 runs at an 84% probability, Twins & Athletics over 4.5 runs at an 82.9% probability, Rays (Game 1) +1.5 at an 82.5% probability, Braves +1 (1st half) at a slightly lower 82.5% probability, and Astros & Angels over 4.5 runs at an 82.4% probability. As is usually the case with these lines, over 4.5 tends to portend a higher scoring game overall and these alternate lines for the Rays and Braves are more of an indication in the market’s confidence that it would take an outlier outcome for them to lose (and if they do lose, it’s likely by one run max).

Despite all the teams back in action, it does seem like there aren’t a ton of +EV bets currently. The best option appears to be the Angels’ first half moneyline with a 3.4 PROBLY Score if you can find +123 odds at a BetRivers or SugarHouse.

🏀 NBA Summer League is popping off so let’s do a top five most probable: A Celtics win leads the way at a 61.9% probability, then Bulls +3.5 at a 59.9% probability, Kings +3 at a 59.7% probability, a Timberwolves win at a 59.6% probability, and Grizzlies +1 at a 59.5% probability.

There are also a few good bets if you can get them on Barstool in particular; Raptors -1.5 has a 47.5% probability and a 2.1 PROBLY Score if you can get +115 odds. The math is exactly the same for Nuggets -1.5 as well with a 47.5% probability and 2.1 PROBLY Score at +115 odds. These lines are the inverse of some more credible books and, as I’ve mentioned in here before, any time you’re getting a bet that’s around a 50/50 with plus-money odds, you’re likely to find a +EV bet. I believe Barstool just moved off Kambi to their own oddsmaking platform so they may find themselves out of line with other markets in the coming weeks/months/forever (the Barstool difference).

🥊 The UFC’s top five is currently a hodge podge of a bunch of different cards but includes two top probabilities from tonight: A Jack Della Maddalena win is tops at an 82.8% probability (though the inverse is the most +EV bet tonight, as I’ll explain below) followed by an Azat Maksum win at a 79.9% probability. Then we get a Tom Aspinall win on next week’s card at a 78.5% probability, a Jon Jones win in his NOVEMBER fight against Stipe Miocic at a 75.2% probability, and a Bobby Green win at the end of July at a 74.1% probability.

We had a massive win in our Probly emails before my vacation with an underdog Benoit Saint Denis (one that funded a LOT of NFL best ball entries for me on DraftKings this week) and the markets indicate there’s value in the heavy underdog against Jack Della Maddalena; a Bassil Hafez win has only a 20.1% probability but an 8.8 PROBLY Score thanks to advantageous +440 odds on books like DraftKings, Hard Rock, and FanDuel. As we’ve talked about in here, it can sometimes be hard to post such a low probability outcome here since I know people just want winners. But the quest to mathematical profitability means picking off fights like this one as well over the course of time, even if Hafez ends up picking up his teeth by the end of the night.

A Genaro Valdez win also looks solid on PointsBet with a 29% probability and a 3 PROBLY Score at their +255 odds.

⚽️ MLS has a few favorable odds, including an Asian handicap on New York City FC -0.25 at a 39.1% probability but a 52.4 PROBLY Score if you can find the +290 odds on bet365 (there are slightly worse odds at +285 on BetRivers and Unibet as well). Earlier in the week, I hit Nashville SC +0.5 at -120 odds on DraftKings but it looks like it now has better odds with a 61.6% probability and a 35.5 PROBLY Score if you can get +110 odds on bet365 as well. There are slightly less favorable +108 odds on Unibet and BetRivers here too.

I also just took the New York City FC +0.25 on DraftKings with that having a lower 32.4 PROBLY Score but a higher 67.6% probability with +115 odds. The math on these bets can be a little confusing due to the Asian handicap but, basically, because you win the bet if NYCFC wins and you get half the win amount if they draw, there ends up being a higher mathematical probability threshold due to the potential for a slight profit as well as the full win.

🏈 No more USFL so the CFL is our only football betting option in town. Unfortunately, there’s only one decent looking bet and it’s on Betway: Winnipeg Blue Bombers over 27.5 points has a 49.8% probability and a 4.5 PROBLY Score with +110 odds. Plus money on a virtual 50/50 bet? Almost worth signing up for Betway for it.

If you've missed the previous core 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.

As I intimated above, we’ve run into some hurdles after the handoff of code from our external development team in South America which will be above most people reading this’s paygrade (and mine as the one writing it). But basically, they QA’d the code off of non-live APIs, handed it off to our CTO, and he’s now been in hell for the last few weeks figuring out why certain things have broken on the live version.

The good news? He’s been able to figure out the fundamental issues (for the nerds out there, CORS issues and then having to manually uninstall every implementation of an optimzation package for our AWS Lambda calls that broke many components, despite our CTO warning them about such things) and is now in the process of painstakingly rewriting all 30+ of our APIs that drive the core functionalities over the last few days. I just pulled up our dev server and here’s our Probly Story on that Jack Della Maddalena bet we discussed with UFC:

The bad news is this required an entire review of the previous code which has now put us behind on the other key fixes I’ve mentioned that we need done for me to have the full sign off of confidence on user experience (basically, there are things I can see on our APIs which are not adequately presented on the app to ensure people go to the right sportsbook and get the correct odds). And we now have to wait on those fixes until our CTO can finish rewriting our remaining APIs that drive our Explore page and search functionalities.

As you might be able to tell from the borderline social experiment that has been me writing these emails weekly while we wait for a live public Probly product, I desperately want to get this out to people so we can start the processes we need to make this a real business. Specifically, we need to generate revenue AND/OR find investors and, in parallel, need to promote and market the product with content, social, and affiliates. I had a very specific timeline for this that has not been hit to start to make these various dominoes fall. And now I’m feeling this pressure tenfold with being owed the ungodly amount of back pay that I’m owed by my day job at Football Outsiders as well as the mounting costs that have come with this process.

But, as I’ve said throughout, Probly has to be a product beyond reproach with the basic parts of finding +EV bets and being able to transact on them with as little friction as possible. That’s how we not only win as a company long-term but also ensure our ability to add and retain users from the jump (as well as to give me the confidence to go out there and shill this with impunity).

So we continue the waiting game with a focus on getting this all beautiful and functional with enough ramp up time heading into the NFL season. It sucks because quite literally every time I write this email, we are closer than we’ve ever been to getting this product out to the world. But I remain waiting with bated breath for this to be exactly where it needs to be to get the results we want from it — as well as the ones I feel you guys and other potential users deserve.

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads to this point in the email. One of these days, I’m going to write this Probly email and it’s going to conclude with “Here’s the Probly beta! Check it out!” With the 15 months of work that have gone into this, it is going to be one of the happiest (and most stressful) days of my life.

For now though, we will continue to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of the Probability Gods to try to get this out to you with ample time to figure out whatever else we need to before the madness of NFL season. It’s going to be worth it for users and, ultimately, that’s all I can care about. Here’s hoping we can all recognize the fruits of our effort here soon.