🥊 A Top Probability (And +EV Bet) in UFC TONIGHT

It’s Saturday AM and that means it’s time to wade through some data and the maddening world of product development in our latest Probly email!

If you missed the catchup email last week, you can get a read on the status of our Probly release here and what’s holding us up. I’m awaiting more updates as of writing this so I’ve unfortunately got nothing new to report there but I will talk about our affiliate goals (which I consider a key part of what we hope to accomplish immediately after launch) today in addition to our usual run through probabilities and plus-EV bets. Here’s your Probly email for July 22nd, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

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

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — My Affiliate Utopia

As is almost always the case, our true Most Likely winner lies abroad. This time, a Lithuania win in a friendly match against Jordan is the most likely event in the world with a 95.9% probability. Doesn’t seem so friendly for the Jordanese but you’ve got to assume it’s just an honor to be invited, even if it is solely to get your dick kicked in.

You actually can find this one in sportsbooks (the moneyline was down on DK Sportsbook as of my writing this but it’s a silly -27 spread with equally silly -115 odds, so not the best math to take this one). Either way: Go fighting Lithuanians!

The more accessible Most Likely winner for the week belongs to the UFC where a Tom Aspinall win over Marcin Tybura tops them all at a 79.9% probability. He’s not the most +EV bet though on that card, as we’ll get to…right now:

🥊 The UFC’s top five overall remains a hodge podge of different upcoming cards but includes a few top probabilities from tonight: That Tom Aspinall win is the top probability followed by a Makhmud Muradov win at a 75.9% probability and that Jon Jones win in his November scheduled fight against Stipe Miocic, up slightly to a 75.4% probability (which means we’re going to have a hard time getting this out of the overall top five until it happens). We then get Ketlen Viera & Pannie Kianzad over 2.5 rounds at a 74.6% probability tonight, and a Bobby Green win on next week’s card at a 74.4% probability.

The most +EV bet? That belongs to a Shauna Bannon win at a 45.4% probability but an 8.9 PROBLY Score if you can get +140 odds at WynnBET or Betfred (I took +130 on DraftKings for a slightly lesser 4.4 PROBLY Score). A Julija Stoliarenko win also looks good on PointsBet where you can get +275 odds, good for a 4.1 PROBLY Score at its 27.8% probability.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall contains the usual alternate lines topping everything: Astros & A’s over 4.5 runs at an 82.6% probability, Royals & Yankees over 4.5 runs at an 82.3% probability, White Sox & Twins over 4.5 runs at an 82% probability, Orilios & Rays over 4.5 runs at an 81.6% probability, and Yankees +1 (1st half) closes us out at an 81.5% probability.

The most likely winner overall is in New York with a Yankees win topping all MLB win odds at a 69.6% probability. It’s a day of a lot of games with decent over/unders and competitive lines so it’ll be a chaotic one if you’re one of the diehards grinding away in MLB DFS.

There don’t seem to be a lot of +EV bets for MLB available right now and the KBO ones have dried up while I wrote this; I’d take Blue Jays & Mariners over 9 runs at +195 odds with a 4.2 PROBLY Score but it seems like you can only get odds that flavorable on the lightly used Fliff app.

🏀 WNBA is still one of my preferred sports to pick a few +EV lines off of whenever I check our data. Today’s no exception with the low probability of a Minnesota Lynx win looking good on books where you can find +1000 odds or better (which includes Caesars and Wynn, DraftKings just knocked it down to +900). The Lynx have a low 10.7% probability to win but the +1050 odds you get on Caesars give the bet a 23.1 PROBLY Score.

An LA Sparks win also looks good on BetMGM with a slightly better 27.4% probability and a 4.2 PROBLY Score on their +280 odds. I also hit Dallas Wings under 43.5 (1st half) with a 51.1% probability and a 2.2 PROBLY Score since that has +100 odds on DraftKings. I’ll say this many times in the weeks, months,. and years to come but, for the risk averse bettor, bets around a 50% win probability with plus-money odds are the best way to build a sustained bankroll.

⚽️ The FIFA Women’s World Cup games going on right now are flooding our live probabilities (and won’t be of much value by the time you read this) too much to give a good read on the slate. If you want a fun ABSOLUTE lottery ticket, a South Africa win has a hilariously low 3.9% probability but the +3400 odds you can get on FanDuel give it a very compelling 35.5 PROBLY Score. These kinds of bets are the flip side of what I talked about above; they are DEEPLY unlikely to hit but, when they do, the payout can quite literally justify hundreds of these far flung bets when you can find favorable odds.

🏈 No more USFL or XFL these days so the CFL remains our one football reprieve until we get some preseason NFL action in the coming weeks. BC Lions over 27.5 has a 50.9% probability and +105 odds on Betway, giving it a 4.3 PROBLY Score (again: Best kind of bet to take for the risk averse). William Hill has an okay Saskatchewan Roughriders win line with a 22.2% probability and +360 odds that give it a 2 PROBLY Score, making it a cusp bet for me (a PROBLY Score of 3 or better tends to look the most like an opportunity you don’t want to miss).

Fine bets I’m sure but I personally cannot wait until we’re back doing the full NFL betting market writeups that I know drove a lot of value for you guys last season.

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 and in previous emails, I’m largely handcuffed as to what I can do for my part of things until we have the product where it needs to be in terms of functionality and accessibility. I can’t go out there tapdancing for the limited investor funds available in the betting space or trying to acquire users until we have an app that shows, without any failure, the breadth of what we consider Probly to be as your ideal pocket companion for any bet you want to make.

But I’m still trying to keep myself busy with the items I can control while waiting for some finality to those items needed from our CTO and tech teams. One of those things: Fleshing out our affiliate offering to ensure we can get on board some of the brightest content creators and companies with a mutually beneficial compensation package.

I’ve always been enamored with how Underdog did this, even though it’s different for them as a sportsbook operator than a profitability tool like Probly (or an Unabated/Stokastic/whatever). They created a user-friendly product — one that I have personally enjoyed more than any other as fodder for content streams on Splash Play — and also incentivized creators to incorporate it into their content roadmaps with respectable Cost Per Acquisition fees for users that creators send their way.

Some of the sportsbook head hunting CPAs out there have dried up from the days when Caesars would pay a company $200 to sell users on $1,000 of free bets. So everything I’ve modeled for our affiliate structure is around two things: 1) How do we provide adequate value for creators to promote and sell Probly to their audiences? and 2) How do we ensure long-term engagement to ensure we’re “rowing in the same direction” with these partners for an extended time period?

What I’ve begun to pitch to a select few launch affiliate partners is something that I think is a first in the space but is also something that I know would appeal to me as a creator. We’re basically guaranteeing them 50% of the spend from any user they bring in for the first six months that user is on the Probly platform, something that hopefully gets us close to that mythical sportsbook referral fee.

To sweeten it further — and attempt to limit churn from these users as well as our creator affiliates — we would then offer an additional 25% of that same user’s next seven months on the platform. If a content creator or company sent us, say, 1,000 signups for our $49.99/month all-access pass, they would be creating a tremendous amount of value for us. If they help us keep these users on the platform for an average of 8.1 months over that 13-month window, that particular example would provide a creator a CPA around $258 and over $150,000 in revenue from us in a little over one calendar year, something that creates value for us as well as a viable ongoing revenue stream for them too.

These are the kind of things that, to me, make Probly a unique potential part of the ecosystem and one that speaks to my experiences. I want to bring in users and revenue, provide them with value, and bring that value back into the ecosystem to help us fund other creators’ dreams (much like I’ve been lucky to benefit from in my over-15 years of doing this stuff).

These altruistic, utopian visions of Probly’s place in the market unfortunately don’t help me get this product into the hands of the people who need it any faster. But, rest assured, I’ve obsessively thought of every angle that we can have to bring value to the space while twiddling my thumbs in the meantime. And affiliates are tops among them (so feel free to hit me up if this is the kind of thing that sounds of interest to you).

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads all the way down here. I’ve said it before but it genuinely pains me to have to step up to the plate and write this email while still waiting to be able to show the world what we’ve been working on for the last 14 months. But I’m committed to doing it, to showing you guys the process and deliberate though we/I put into everything, so I’ll continue to do this until we get our beautiful Probly baby out to the world.

Just be ready in time for football season, that’s the only hope I have at this point. I’ll see you guys next week; let’s hope for my sanity that by then we’re one step closer to that goal!