🏉 A New Most Probable Winner In College Football's Opening Weekend!

It’s Saturday AM and, now that I’ve awoken from a Benadryl-infused Sleeping Beauty sleep to overcome the tax of our 17-month old’s sleep regressions, it’s time to comb the world of probability and +EV bets here in Probly!

We’ve got some market probabilities, a variety of sports, and an official announcement about our Probly release that will not shock you but will feel good for me to officially write out! Here’s your Probly email for August 26th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from College Football, NFL Preseason, MLB, and whatever else seems interesting! (No UFC this week due to the timing of their card this week in Singapore but somehow we shall overcome!)

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — The Final Push Towards The Date

To quote my favorite many-time returning animated show Futurama: “Good news everyone!”

For whatever reason, Oklahoma’s season opener next week is no longer the most probable bet in sports across the top performing markets around the world. It is, in fact, MY USC TROJANS so we get to run a Caleb Williams Most Likely featured image! A USC win tonight at home versus the juggernaut San Jose State is now the most probable event in sports with a 96.4% probability!

I’ve certainly got big hopes for Lincoln Riley’s boys with another year to get things aligned, especially defensively, and it genuinely warms my heart filled with Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, Carson Palmer, Mike Williams, and all the title-competing teams I saw in college at SC to see them on top.

🏉 The rest of the CFB top five are teams that play next week. An Ohio State win is #2 with a 95% probability followed by a Tennessee Win at a 94.7% porbability, a Baylor win at a 93.6% probability, and a Kentucky win at a 93.5% probability.

Some potential +EV bets ranging in likelihoods:
-New Mexico St vs UMass under 44.5 points looks decent at a 54% probability and 2.9 PROBLY Score if you can find -110 odds. It looks like you can even get Under 45 on DraftKings, which is even better due to that extra half-point.
-A fun longshot since, again I’m a USC alum here, would be to bet against a HUGE favorite in Notre Dame with a Navy win at a LOW 12% probability but a 5.1 PROBLY Score if you get +800 odds or better. Maybe the trip to Ireland for this game somehow gives Navy, whom you have to assume is more accustomed to long travel, a bit of an edge? Probably not but wouldn’t it be fun! (You can also hedge with a ND cover which, with the profit boost for this specific game on DraftKings, gives you a +178 payout)
-The Hawaii moneyline (1st half) also interests me as a longshot with a 19% probability with a 1.7 PROBLY Score on +440 odds. They’re a 17.5 point underdog so, much like tha Navy bet, I don’t expect the world but I do love these kind of bets as ones that can afford you five more shots at other bets you like when they win.

🏈 For the NFL preseason, the top five most likely events: A Jaguars win has a 69.3% probability, a Jets win has a 68.5% probability, a Broncos win has a 66.5% probability, a Raiders win has a 64.8% probability, and a Browns win has a 62.5% probability.

Some +EV bets on paper:
-Buccaneers vs Ravens over 44 points has a 54% probability and an ungodly 76 PROBLY Score at +227 odds if you have William Hill (which is one of few books to offer alternate spreads on preseason games, one of the best ways to target sportsbook bets across every sport).
-In that same game, a Ravens win is slightly +EV at a 48% probability and a 1.1 PROBLY Score at the +110 odds you can get on most books.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall: Yankees & Rays over 3.5 runs at an 84.7% probability; Nationals & Marlins over 4.5 runs at an 82.3% probability; Orioles +1 (1st half) at an 81.9% probability; Rangers & Twins over 4.5 runs at an 81.5% probability; and Orioles +1.5 at an 80.4% probability.

It makes sense with those two Orioles lines that an Orioles win at home against Colorado is at a 72.9% probability. The slight potential of them losing by more than a run is very unlikely.

Some currently +EV MLB bets that are still live include a mix of market lines and some alternate spreads:

-Giants +1.5 has a 67% probability to win and a 25.5 PROBLY Score if you can get -115 odds or better
-Yankees +1.5 has a 68% probability with a 13.8 PROBLY Score at -146 odds
-Guardians +1.5 has a 66% probability as well and an 8 PROBLY Score at -155 odds
-Pirates +1.5 has a 65% probability and a 12.7 PROBLY Score at -135 odds
-Royals -1.5 is the fun longshot with a 32% probability but a 39.4 PROBLY Score if you can get +330 odds

My disclaimer: I select a few bets to include here with favorable expected value data that still seem to have live opportunities, usually ones I’ve taken amidst my smattering of bet slips I hit over the course of a day. The options you get with all of our live markets on the app is a much better experience to give you the best shot at positive results, much to my consternation whenever we don’t emerge from this email with flawless results.

We’re still working through some tech items, specifically related to our Amazon DynamoDB infrastructure’s ability to adequately sort markets. Because of the volume of items being written and re-written as the odds update, it sometimes isn’t fully sorting EVERYTHING and is instead sorting a recent selection of items. The net result doesn’t affect user experience (since you are getting odds shifts “hot off the presses”, so to speak) but it does affect our overall accuracy on the sorting filters in some use cases.

Similalrly, the limitations of DynamoDB have made our search functionalities for bets (i.e. searching “moneyline” and getting every single moneyline bet we have in our databases) less accurate than it should be. It’ll pull all the recently updated ones but not some written to the database recently. For the nerds out there, this plus the above may make us consider a pivot to SQL through Amazon’s RDS shortly after launch to ensure full accuracy but it’s not an item that should affect most users.

We are still working through our Stripe implementation (to ensure everything works correctly for all membership levels with $9.99 giving all data for a single sport, $19.99 giving all data for all sports, and $49.99 giving all data including in-play events).

Lastly, we’re tweaking a few things that were part of previous feature sets, including the swipe right or left to try to redirect users to sporsbooks. Because of the lack of deeplinks for most apps, we’ve found that to be not as functional as it was as an initial concept so we are now working to make that user experience more logical and less obtrusive.

With that in mind, I can now say that we have two key milestones for release coming up:

We expect to have the “as good as it can be” Probly MVP ready to go by end of next week, so hopefully by the time I write up this email next week I’ll be giving our waitlist access to whatever we have.

We also expect that Probly will go live for everyone RIGHT BEFORE NFL KICKOFF ON SEPTEMBER 7TH.

I would like to be able to get a week of user feedback going so that first deadline is one that would be a plus for us to hit. But either way, we plan to push the release to the people on this list and then start to promote publicly shortly thereafter.

We will also provide a quick and dirty usage guide in this email, including bugs we’re aware of and things to be mindful of. From there, we’ll try to quickly patch things that need to be patched.

The core functionality of swiping through markets and being able to find transactable bets with correct data has been functional and fun for a while now so these are more things that we’re banging out to try to ensure a seamless experience rather than “must-haves”. You only get one chance to make a first impression so we’re going to try to tighten all of this up the best we can over the next week. And whatever we have by the time that NFL season opens is what we’ll roll with and quickly try to iterate on.

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads all the way down here. I see a finishline for the haul that this development process has been and, now that the date is out there, we’re pot committed. I hope we can get on day one support from you guys but, no matter what, we will continue to push the limits of what Probly can do as the only mobile-forward product of its kind.

It’s stressful! But fun things are en route and good things come to those who wait, right? RIGHT? I sure hope so. Either way, enjoy your weekends, good luck, and I’ll see you guys again soon!