🏉 College Football Odds Are BACK

It’s Saturday AM and, after cleaning up the wreckage of a baby who loves wasting food, I’m ready to dive into another week of updates and probabilities in your Probly Email!

Things are honestly looking pretty good right now as it relates to getting Probly out to you guys in time for NFL preseason with my full comfort in its functionality. I’ll talk more about that below but it’s been a productive week. And, of course, we’ll hit on some key probabilities (including college football, now that all those early markets have come in). Here’s your Probly email for July 29th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from the MLB, UFC, college football, and whatever else seems interesting!

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — Cleaning Up Any Ambiguity

What’s the one way to combat the absolute dominance of esoteric international leagues in our weekly Most Likely awards? The imminent return of college football!

An Oklahoma win against Arkansas State in their 9/2 opener leads the world with a 97% probability. And it seems like a great way to introduce our first COLLEGE FOOTBALL TOP FIVE MOST LIKELY OF THE SEASON:

🏉 A USC win is second most likely behind OU with their season opener against San Jose State at a 95.8% probability (as a proud alum, I am VERY excited for this season and VERY anxious about how they will find a way to ruin what feels like a surefire National Championship contender). Then we get a Tennessee win at a 94.8% probability, an Ohio State win at a 94.7% probability, and a Baylor win at a 93.4% probability. All of those besides USC are 9/2 games while USC, ever the leader of a program, starts their season on 8/26.

I took a batch of over/unders that were +EV bets according to Probly data — these all look good ifyou can find them at -110 odds: UTEP/Jacksonville St under 51.5, FIU/Louisiana Tech under 59, UMass/New Mexico State under 43, and Navy/Notre Dame under 49.5. The first three are still available as of writing in my preferred book, DraftKings Sportsbook, but Navy/Notre Dame has moved to 51 it looks like.

🥊 The UFC’s top five overall still contains a bunch of different fights from upcoming cards: A Marcus McGhee win on 8/12 leads everything with a 76.9% probability, then a Bobby Green win tonight at a 75.4% probability, that gosh darn Jon Jones win at a 75.4% probability in November, a Gabriel Bonfim win tonight at a 74.5% probability, and an Islam Makhachev win at a 74.4% probability.

The most +EV bet is a Darrius Flowers win at a 32.8% probability but a 6.5 PROBLY Score if you can get +225 odds on DraftKings. MMA can be a tricky beast with sometimes your most +EV bets aligning against some of the heaviest favorites but we’ve had success here embracing the volatility of market-friendly underdogs. The only other passable bet looks like Dustin Poirer and Justin Gaethje over 2.5 rounds at a 56% probability and 1.3 PROBLY Score. The under at plus money looks tasty given how these guys throw bombs but the math is the math.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall contains some more interesting alternate lines than usual that could portend high scoring games: Rangers & Padres under 13.5 runs leads the way at an 81.4% probability followed by Phillies & Pirates under 13.5 runs at an 80.6% probability, Angels & Blue Jays over 5.5 runs at an 80.5% probability, Tigers & Marlins under 12.5 runs at an 80.3% probability, and Red Sox & Giants under 12.5 runs at an 80.3% probability. The games with the high alternate lines with a top of the market probability tend to show there’s a perceived ceiling of explosive scoring around 20% while the lower alternate lines show more of a “floor production” expectation.

The most likely winner overall is an Atlanta win over Milwaukee with a 64.8% probability they pick up the win. Overall: It seems like a volatile day for baseball!

Some +EV bets: I took Rangers +1.5 with a 65% probability and a 2.9 PROBLY Score at DraftKings and a Francisco Alvarez over 0.5 home runs prop with a 19% probability and 2.6 PROBLY Score if you can get +440 odds. Nothing is really screaming out right now besides those two for MLB besides Tigers +1.5 tomorrow vs the Marlins with a 66% probability and a 4.2 PROBLY Score.

🏈 We’ll close it out with some CFL since these look easier to wade through than all of the Women’s World Cup live data (prayers out to anyone who took that DraftKings +100 heavily promoted profit boost for the US women to win only for them to draw in limp and disappointing fashion: TRUST NO PROMO BET). A Toronto Argonauts win looks good on Betway with an 82.9% probability and a 3.7 PROBLY Score at -400 odds (aka very likely to win and cash). Argonauts over 29.5 also looks good on Betway with a 52.3% probability and 4.5 PROBLY Score at their +100 odds. Plus money bet for over 50/50 odds = take it if you can get 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 mentioned above, this is likely the best I’ve felt in our process as it relates to goals and timelines. There’s an ethos with startups and the general release of a Minimum Viable Product (your first version of your product/app) that you just want to get it out, get user feedback and traction in the form of signups or revenue, and then iterate from there.

Probly is unique for two reasons:

1) We can’t put out something half-assed because we refuse to be a part of the process that leads to people losing more money in an industry that already profits almost $10 billion/year off user losses. There’s more at stake from every user interaction than there might be with other MVP releases of products.

2) I also AM the target user. I know the data we have in the backend to generate our top-of-the-market probabilities as well as the accuracy of our live sportsbook feeds from our friends at OddsJam (who have been very gracious with our process getting this out). So a lot of this comes down to me making sure we disambiguate EVERYTHING while also giving people the fastest way possible to transact bets on their phone, no matter where they are.

So right now, our remaining fixes reflect things that I’ve realized after having the product in my hands. Specifically, the goal is to provide more information on our Probly Markets and what makes a bet theoretically a positive expected value so that users aren’t necessarily tethered to go to the sportsbook with the best odds if they just want to get a good bet in on their preferred sportsbook.

In a perfect world, you’d have like $500-$1,000 bucks in an account for every legal sportsbook in your state. You would identify +EV bets — or the best odds for a bet you just want to take because of a personal lean — and then be able to clickthrough and immediately transact that bet on the sportsbook that makes your money go the farthest. We envisioned it being something where you could simply swipe left or right to automatically transact on that bet.

Unfortunately, most sportsbooks don’t provide that simplicity of deeplinking directly to enter a bet and, again, most people don’t want to have $10,000 spread out between 10 sportsbooks.

So we’re doing one big UX change, specifically providing a modal anywhere our probability and PROBLY Scores are that explains “Top markets around the world have this as X probability. The best available bet is on Y sportsbook with Z odds” along with our live PROBLY Score calculation of that bet’s expected value.

This will allow you to quickly decide if your preferred sportsbook is similarly aligned or if the odds are far enough off that it’s basically a different bet. There are a few more similar minor tweaks we have to make that serve the same master: Putting up guardrails designed to prevent users from walking into any bad bets while also giving them flexibility to transact off the key data, even if they don’t want to add the Betway and Tipico accounts of the world to their arsenal.

It’s been a difficult but fulfilling challenge to try to solve the equation for how to bring the power and understanding of great desktop sites like OddsJam or Stokastic to a mobile product. Every time I feel like it’s there, something from being a real user who utilizes the process makes me think “This can be better.” We’re now almost reached the ceiling of what I need and what I’d anticipate a user needs and that hopefully bodes well for us and your experience using Probly VERY soon.

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads all the way down here. It’s candidly been a haul doing these emails for about 10 months without a product to share with you guys but we are SO fucking close. It’s really exciting, terrifying, and all that you’d expect would come with putting out something akin to a life’s work.

Good things are soon to come. Good luck in all your bets and other gambling related activities (I’ve still got at least 150 teams to draft in best ball over the next month to max out the things I want so the sweat is real) and I’ll see you guys next week!