🏀 Does WNBA Betting Have An Obvious Edge?

Last week was a lengthy intro with my deep dive on lessons learned from the first two years of starting up Probly. It’s worth a read if you missed it with some meaningful takeaways on betting, products, and startup life write large. This week, we’ll keep it brisk!

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Today, we’ll take a run through the day’s MLB bets, some bonus EMAIL EXCLUSIVE ones for the NBA Playoffs, and some additional convo about the potential edge in WNBA betting as well as company and product updates at the end! It’s your Probly Email for May 17th, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• 🏀 MLB And NBA Playoffs Best Bets!

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Is WNBA Betting Undervalued Right Now?

Another Friday MLB slate after a solid , these are the Top 10 (aka my usual 15ish including long shot bets) bets from today’s video:

Last week, Donovan Mitchell was the lone albatross in the top 5 email exclusive bets AND LOOK AT HIM NOW, eliminated from the playoffs! Let’s cue up another top 5 for the NBA playoffs today/this weekend, solely for you fine people who read the email:

Of course our best bets, probabilities, and PROBLY Scores are always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store.

^Here’s our video tutorial on optimal settings. Read our previous post on optimal settings before you dive in to betting with Probly’s data.

We mentioned WNBA in the intro and I do want to talk about our WNBA markets because it’s something we’ve worked on a bit this week.

First of all — I know we have like 99% men reading this. The WNBA came out when I was a kid and, I can candidly say (as I know the common male refrain is online), I have never loved the product.

That said, the game has changed. If you spent any time watching the Women’s NCAA Tournament, you’d see some players operating at a high level offensively. You’d see some really impressive athletes and power players. You’d also seem some absolute slugs who are large and not much more.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the 90s NBA. You had your low-skill guys who were dominant for their size advantage. You had your slashers who, admittedly, brought a lot of dunking power if nothing else. You had your ball handlers and shooters, sometimes in the same package. The game has evolved and it deserves to be treated as a new package.

The WNBA right now is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Number 1: These women are some of the biggest stars in sports right now. Caitlin Clark moves the needle for ratings, including one of the WNBA’s highest rated games ever in her debut. Similar for Angel Reese, who is an SI Swimsuit model occasionally in between being a Chris Bosh-like 4, someone they expanded WNBA League Pass for just to ensure they showed her games after 2 million people watched a bootleg stream of her in the preseason. Cameron Brink is hot Chet Holmgren with less shooting range. There are big presences.

Number 2: This is a sport that is very projectable. In fact, I actually thought about spinning up WNBA projections for myself if there were any DFS tournaments of note because it’s a one-to-one modeling compared to NBA projections. There’s easily accessible public data there and a theoretical edge because people are manipulating that data effectively less.

That said, there’s an issue we encountered as we made sure our WNBA data was good to on the app this week: Top sportsbooks around the world do not do player props. They do primary markets, some derivatives on spreads, but WNBA props are largely limited to US books trying to beat up casual bettors with overly juiced lines (that, based on a quick test of projections, seem less accurate than they could be).

As a result, the WNBA market right now is not as solid as it can be. I imagine a bettor with a model can clean up on it. I had a lot of success last summer just betting the same derivatives we offer here at Probly (the same ones you can find right now, just filter down to Basketball » WNBA). The top books still do spreads, totals, and derivatives so there’s sharp money coming in there. But at other sportsbooks, there’s less data points to operate off of because these top books create less markets and there’s less liquidity overall from sharp bettors.

If you were to aggressively bet WNBA right now, you might run a risk of being limited on a sportsbook if you keep beating up their lines. I know from personal experience you can clean up using market data for the spreads, totals, and derivatives therein. I also think you’d do even better if you used custom projections using the same minutes + performance + rate data for NBA principles. I’d try to keep unit size reasonable and flat for every bet to avoid getting hit on that but, realistically, there is money to be made on WNBA lines if you use quality market data or projections.

Forget private jets or massive TV ratings, this might be way the way we know WNBA has made it: When all sportsbooks finally care enough to make good — and plentiful — lines that are equally as skilled as they are in other sports in trying to rip you off.

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On the product front, we pushed some fixes and updates on the backend, a few of which we had to roll back after an issue with sportsbook filtering cropped up yesterday (we fixed it within an hour so hopefully none of you were affected). We’re fixing that stuff before we push our new build, which has nothing that will impact you guys.

Besides that, we’re now working on a Google Play version of the app and hope that’ll be a decently fast turnaround. We’ve heard the requests before — and could use another discovery-focused platform to help us keep moving numbers in the right direction alongside our organic content — so that’s currently priority #1 besides wrapping up these update-related bugs.

Companywise, I remain in investor pitching hell until we get funding at the price we feel is appropriate. There’s been some blue sky lately but I’m continuing to press the pipeline for more people to talk to until something is papered. It’s a grind amidst everything else to do on a daily basis but there’s no surrender to be had.

If you guys encounter any issues not covered here or want to provide feedback, you can email me [email protected].

As always, thanks to all of you who read all the way down here. As we head into the summer, there’s no letup for us at Probly.

Last plug of the email to close us out: It’s a great time to get your free seven-day trial of Probly+ on the App Store or use promo code FIRST to get 50% off at Probly.com/subscribe (under $100 for a first year or under $10 for a first month). Start winning more in sports betting! I’ll see you guys next week!