🥊 UFC 292, MLB, And NFL Preseason Bets Await!

It’s Saturday AM and, with the wife and baby safely out of the house this week, we’re back to our regularly timed Probly email!

We’ve got a run of product updates, interesting bets, market probabilities, and I even got an absolute dart throw tennis bet in to this email! So let’s waste no time getting into it. Here’s your Probly email for August 19th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The most probable bets from the NFL Preseason, MLB, UFC 292, and whatever else seems interesting!

• 🔓 Probly Beta updates — The Boring Part of Pushing Towards a Release

Once again, I have to flag for the sake of my OCD attempts at accuracy that an Oklahoma win in their 9/2 opener remains the true Most Likely winner, up to a 97% probability of a win.

But we don’t do repeats here so let’s move to the UFC where an Ian Garry win tonight in a solid UFC 292 card featuring an Aljamain Sterling vs Sean O’Malley main event leads the way at an 80.1% probability. Despite the high likelihood, he’s not a mathematically profitable bet due to lofty -435 odds or worse at most books.

🥊 The rest of the UFC’s top five, which features all the cards from the future, has not moved much besides the addition of a Gregory Rodrigues win tonight at a 74.8% probability.

In the aforementioned Sterling vs O’Malley main event, the most probable outcome is an Aljamain Sterling win at a 70.2% probability followed by the fight going under 3.5 rounds at a 56.9% probability. It’s UFC so it only takes one punch to run bad. But, with that info, there’s likely value to target a Sterling KO win at +550 or a Sterling Submission win at +140. If you bet both and the KO hits, you make a big profit. If the Submission hits, you’ll slightly profit.

If you really like the Suga Sean gimmick for O’Malley, try to only take the bet if you can get odds around +230. With a 31.1% probability of a win for O’Malley, that gives him a 2.7 PROBLY Score on bets with those odds.

The most +EV bet looks like a Maryna Moroz win with a 42.4% probability and a 4 PROBLY Score if you take +145 odds on a book like Caesars.

⚾️ The MLB top five overall is the usual mess that MLB’s most probable is: Brewers & Rangers over 4.5 runs leads the way at an 82.7% probability followed by Rays & Angels over 4.5 runs in Game 1 of their doubleheader at an 82.4% probability, Marlins & Dodgers over 4.5 runs in Game 2 of their doubleheader at an 82% probability, Tigers & Guardians over 4.5 runs at an 81.6% probability, and Mariners & Astros over 4.5 runs at an 81.6% probability. As is always the case for lines like these, it means there is an expectation of floor production but less obvious ceiling production (particularly given perhaps adverse weather situations for the two doubleheader games with the Southern California hurricane issues, assuming they go).

A Cubs win over the Royals is the most probable MLB winner of the day with a 64.8% probability. Ferris Bueller is thrilled (boomer reference alert).

Some currently +EV MLB bets:

-Pirates +1.5 has a 66% probability to win and a 13.2 PROBLY Score if you can get -140 odds
-Pirates -0.5 (1st half) also looks good if you can get +165 odds or better with a 9.7 PROBLY Score on a 41.4% probability
-Red Sox +1.5 has a 66% probability as well and an 11.5 PROBLY Score at -145 odds
-Spencer Torkelson over 0.5 home runs might be the best prop of the day with an 18.1 PROBLY Score if you can get +420 odds somewhere like BetRivers. It’s a low 22.7% probability since it’s a home run bet but a fun one if it hits.

🏈 The NFL preseason top five includes: A Chiefs win at a 73.3% probability, a Seahawks win at a 70.3% probability (go Zach Charbonnet, the only recent UCLA man I’ve ever loved), a Colts win at a 67.2% probability (go Anthony Richardson!), a Broncos win at a 64.9% probability, and a Raiders win at a 63.2% probability.

There aren’t many screaming positive expected values since it’s NFL preseason, a format without a tremendous amount of bankability (you can literally find some bets with a -55 PROBLY Score according to our EV calculations, meaning the bet loses you 55% of your money mathematically just by taking it). It looks like one of the best actionable bets is Vikings & Titans under 40.5 points with a 49.8% probability and +120 odds at some books that give it a 9.5 PROBLY Score.

🎾 A total long-shot in tennis, yes tennis, that has a positive PROBLY Score is an Alana Smith win in the WTA Cleveland event. She has a BRUTAL 13.6% probability to win but at the market’s +700 odds it has an 8.6 PROBLY Score that came in hot off the digital presses as I wrote this email. She is VERY likely to get smoked but these bets are some of the most fun ones to me relative to my bankroll when they hit.

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.

Not much new to report development wise in this section where I talk candidly about the process to get Probly out. It’s an unsexy time as we work out some of the final bugs and get the DNS settings good to go for our (not yet functional) Probly.com domain that will house the final product.

Our Markets page (which we have previously called “Stories” internally for obvious reasons but CANNOT do as a company due to Meta’s trademarks) has all the functionalities it needs, including fixed league filtering, and is good to go, which is a positive. That’s been the primary way I browse the site currently and if there are delays tidying up the Search Page, this is the primary feature we’ll have ready to go for NFL Week 1.

There are still things to be fixed on the Explore page which crams 100s of bets into much tighter real estate. It has the same modal experience with the key bet information but the tiles still need the game info added in. So if it says “Over 7.5 (Total Runs)”, you’ll have that context added without having to click the modal.

The search functionalities as well as filtering on the View All Bets tab is also being touched up to ensure it works as intended (i.e. searching “Philadelphia” will show you ever bet related to Philadelphia, searching “Moneyline” will give you every Moneyline bet with the sports/league filtering selected, etc).

The main thing to me at this point: The data works and the results have been there with my betting process — I’ve said it a few times but it bears repeating that our Probly data has singlehandedly funded my $1,500 of DraftKings best ball entries. But we have to continue to touch things up to make sure this has the full functionalities and stickiness we want before this starts getting circulated around and tries to convert people into customers.

Either way, we’re on track to get this out for Week 1 of NFL season and are aligned on that part of things. With that, the final month of MLB regular season, and NBA not far behind, there should be ample opportunities for people to try things out in the coming months with the hopes of heading into 2024 with momentum for what we want to execute.

Another one in the books and thanks, as always, to everyone who reads all the way down here. We continue to plug away to get this out at the most highly engaged and crucial time of the year for companies on the brink of NFL season and I’m excited to finally get our beautiful baby Probly into your hands to hopefully fall in love with it like I have.

Let’s prepare for me to get dusted thinking I can bet on a tennis player with less than a 20% shot to win her game because the math says so. But, hey, that’s what puts the “fun” in “insufficient funds” right? I’ll see you guys next week!