🏉 A Most Likely Winner in UFC And +EV Bets

It’s Saturday AM and that means it’s time for your weekly check-in to the world of Probly, the Internet’s most long-awaited betting product (I have to imagine based upon the number of you on this waitlist and the length we’ve made you wait).

We’ve made some nice progress on a feature I discussed last week that I consider key now that we’re in the weeds of thinking through how users will actually need this app to work, which is great news. But we’ll talk about that in a bit after we wade through some probabilities and top EV bets. Here’s your Probly email for August 5th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

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

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — Adapting for Real Life Use Cases aka People on the Toilet Who Don’t Want 100 Different Sportsbook Accounts

Last week, we ran through some of the newly released college football odds that reveal Oklahoma is likely to be our true Most Likely award winner until their 9/2 game against Arkansas State goes off. Catch up on all those college football odds and +EV bets here.

But I can’t keep running an OU thumbnail the next month. So we turn to tonight’s UFC ard where a Tatiana Suarez win currently looks like the Most Likely in all the world of bettable sports at a 75.7% probability. The undefeated Suarez faces a vet in Jessica Andrade and MMA is a remarkably fragile sport for favorites — as one might guess from the fact that any one punch, kick, or grapple could lead to a finish — but if you’re going to bet your life on anything tonight, it should be that.

🥊 The UFC’s top five overall contains that Suarez win, a Corey Sandhagen win in the main event at a 75.5% probability, that gosh darn Jon Jones win against Stipe in November at a 75.1% probability, an Islam Makachev win on the 10/21 card (my birthday weekend!) at a 75.1% probability, and a Marcus McGhee win next week at a slightly lower 75.1% probability.

The most +EV bet is an Ode Osbourne win at a 42.5% probability and a 10.5 PROBLY Score if you can get +160 odds (which should be available on DraftKings). A Gavin Tucker win also looks solid with a 48.1% probability and a 3.4 PROBLY Score if you can get at least +115 odds or better. Looks like he’s actually down to +135 odds on some books.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall is the usual mess: Rays & Tigers over 4.5 runs leads the way with an 82.3% probability followed by Giants & Athletics over 4.5 runs at an 81.9% probability, Royals & Phillies over 5.5 runs at an 81.5% probability, Brewers +1 (1st half) at an 80.7% probability, and Pirates & Brewers under 12.5 runs at an 80.5% probability. So it feels like production could be closer to floor level for those top three games while Pirates and Brewers has a shot to be an outlier run-fest.

The most likely winner overall is a St. Louis win over Colorado with a 68.2% probability they pick up the win. The fertile airs of Coors Field won’t save you in this one, Rockies.

Some +EV bets I took: White Sox-Guardians under 7.5 runs at a a 44% probability and +135 odds and a few whose EV calculation just changed but still look viable, including Tigers +1 at -105 odds and Yankees -1.5 at +240 odds.

🏈 There’s nothing passable CFL-wise besides a Montreal Alouettes win at a 52.8% probability and a 2.1 PROBLY Score if you can get -107 odds or better. Sasketchewan Roughriders +1.5 tomorrow also looks okay at a 53.3% probability and a 1.8 PROBLY Score at -110 odds.

🏀 WNBA seems severely lacking in +EV bets as I write this as well and the top five is a lot of Phoenix Mercury dominance narrative since there’s only one game tonight: Mercury moneyline (1st half) leads the way at a 58.5% probability followed by a Mercury win at a slightly lower 58.5% probability, Mercury -1.5 at a 56.9% probability, Mercury -0.5 (1st half) at a 55.8% probability, and Seattle Storm +4.5 at a 55.2% probability. It seems like some lower tier books out there have Under 158 for that game as a profitable bet with a 5.8 PROBLY Score if you can get +135 odds; I took under 159.5 at -110 odds on DraftKings as a proxy bet to that.

Last week, I talked about us making what I hope is a last round of revisions to ensure that our Probly MVP has no blind spots in terms of UX.

In particular with an ideal sportsbook deeplinking situation not available to make our swipe right or left solution perfect, we need to provides guardrails to ensure users can transact bets with the full breadth of information needed, including our proprietary true probabilities, the best available bet and sportsbook it’s at, and the live odds that we are calculating a PROBLY Score expected value calculation off of so that you can transact it on any sportsbook if you get odds in the same range.

This modal experience above, which you can open by clicking our true probability on any page of the Probly app, provides that full disambiguation and explainer of how we land upon these numbers. I keep my sportsbook apps logged in and open and, when I see a bet with a solid PROBLY Score, I check the bet on DraftKings Sportsbook or FanDuel and, if the odds are the same or within range, I’ll hit that bet since even I don’t have accounts on every Betway or Tipico-tier sportsbook in the world.

Is it as simple as the swipe right or left that adds a bet to your cart? Not exactly. But this option gives us a little more functionality from the jump in the way I believe users will approach this, which is just saying “What’s the bet I should take for this and can I get that bet on the sportsbook app I currently have money in?”

We still have to tighten up some functionalities with league filtering and improvements on our Search/Explore page but this was a key step, along with some API/database tweaks, to make the overall experience as portable as possible.

You can get in mathematically sound bets with odds that are actually still available to transact on while you are on the toilet barely paying attention. That’s always been the goal, as silly as that may sound as a business mission statement, and it’s been working well for me so far as a guy who’s currently funding a ton of DraftKings best ball entries (and way more awful Hall of Fame game NFL DFS Showdown entries than I should have put in) off of bets won on the back of this process.

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads all the way down here. Writing this email was a bit of a challenge as our CTO tweaks things on the backend on our production server literally while I’m working on this but I hope there’s some actionable things within all the same.

We’re on track to have this where it needs to be in time for the golden goose of NFL season and the process is processing (you’ve never seen anyone as excited as me over a functional modal pop-up, I can promise you that). We even got our trademark application published this week, growing closer to being a real business by the day!

We appreciate you guys coming on this ride with us and here’s hoping the wheel stops spinning on a functional, joy-inducing Probly MVP landing in your inbox soon. Enjoy your weekends and I’ll see you guys again next week!