When I was growing up I could only get sports news from the 2 minute reports on the all news stations every half hour, the five minutes of sports reporting on the local nightly news, and the newspaper. In the 1980’s cable television brought the 24 hour sports network ESPN onto my television and I could get the scores and highlights on their SportsCenter show. Not long after the first all-sports radio station WFAN opened shop in New York with score updates every 20 minutes.
For the next 25 or so years, ESPN continued to grow, merging with ABC before being swallowed by Disney where it currently resides as a large division in that monolithic company along with the Mickey Mouse, the Star Wars franchise, and Marvel Comics. The station is a major player in live sports with major investments in Major League Baseball along with college and pro football. All the same the station has been losing cable subscribers, suffered falling ratings on its properties, and faces competition from other all-sports networks like Fox Sports that bids up the costs for on-air personalities and broadcast rights to live events, any number of apps and internet sites that instantaneously provide live scores and highlights, and the growing world of podcasts and websites devoted to both general sports opinions down to specialized takes on individual sports teams.
One of ESPN’s bellwethers was the SportsCenter franchise which bred a number of on-air personalities viewers would tune in to see. The show garnered high ratings and advertising fees and was shown with different hosts for hours on end and repeated overnight in a loop. As time went on Sports Center became less and less relevant. Top personalities were paid more to work elsewhere and left the company. Ratings and advertising fees have plummeted. What happened? Technology happened. Where once upon a time Sports Center was the only place to go to get highlights the internet has allowed other media outlets to have highlights available immediately and no one needs to wait for Sports Center to show highlights. Even ESPN is its own competitor in this regard. I can see highlights on ESPN’s website any time I want and never have to wait for a television show to bring them to me. The demand for immediacy is something the ESPN realized and even pioneered with their ‘Bottom Line’ showing continuous scores on ESPN2 in 1995.
The decline of SportsCenter has led ESPN to try many new formats for their flagship show and so far most have failed to stem the ratings decline as more and more people get their information from the Internet. The Scott Van Pelt midnight SportsCenter has been a ray of hope with improved ratings and a loyal following in its midnight time slot.
The biggest change for SportsCenter was the rebranding of the 6 pm SportsCenter as ‘SC6’ starring popular personalities Jemele Hill and Michael Smith discussing sports, politics, and popular culture in order to hopefully goose viewership. The ratings continued their slow decline. This downward trend wasn’t accelerated or halted by the firestorm surrounding Hill’s tweets calling the President a white supremacist and pointing out that boycotting the NFL may make the league take a different stance on players kneeling during the national anthem. Hill has since left the SC6 show and ESPN had moved the format back to its traditional roots and the ratings still haven’t changed from its downward trajectory.
The problem with SportsCenter is its offerings are just too general. A baseball fan can watch the MLB network for round the clock highlights and there are NBA and NFL networks for basketball and football fans. The world is more and more specialized and that goes for sports viewers also. Any format driven by sports news and highlights cannot get the numbers of the past since there are more and better options for purely football, basketball, baseball, or even tennis and golf fans. The only way shows like SportsCenter can hope to thrive again is to be personality based like the SC6 experiment but this approach takes time to develop an audience and find the right personalities and even then, a successful personality be very expensive to keep since they will be sure to get big offers to switch networks at the whiff of success.
ESPN’s other major initiative was the launch of their new morning show ‘Get Up’. This was originally supposed to be a show featuring Mike Greenberg of ESPN’s popular radio show Mike & Mike fame. Greenberg was given a new contract of 6.5 million dollars a year but as the show got closer to its premiere network stalwarts Jalen Rose and Michele Beadle were added as hosts. The ratings for the show have been tepid. I’ll give ESPN credit for trying. I like Jalen Rose a lot but I’m driving to work during his morning show and listen to his podcast on my drive home if I can download it when I’m working.
If you caught the last sentence you are not alone. ESPN also understands that the online world is their path to the future. They had a head start in podcasting when Bill Simmons set up a number of podcasts under the ‘Grantland’ project but never figured out how to monetize it and frittered their lead away when Simmons left the company. Now their podcasts are increasing in number and have the same ads that most other podcasts have. Under new president James Pitaro ESPN is launching a streaming service that will generate revenue irrespective of cable subscribers. The purchase by Disney of 22 Fox regional sports networks will buttress the streaming service. The two regional networks I get from Fox as part of my $200+ monthly cable\phone\internet package from Mediacom gives me Timberwolves and Pacers basketball, St. Louis Blues hockey, and Cardinals and Royals baseball. If I was a fan of any of these teams I could easily see pitching ESPN $5 or more a month to see my teams play just like I pay $15 a year to MLB so I can hear the radio broadcasts of the Yankees (as well as every other team).
Live sports is one of the proven ratings grabbers in the digital age because it is live and doesn’t translate to being viewed on demand after the fact and by making the Fox purchase ESPN has gained a major foothold in this area beyond their high priced national sports packages. Shows like SportsCenter and Get Up will always have their place at the network as signature pieces but by making their move in the digital space ESPN has shown that they are ready to get on with the future and continue their leadership in sports programming.
Friday, April 27, 2018
Friday, April 20, 2018
TV Review - The Walking Dead Season 8 Episodes 9-16
WARNING : THE WALKING DEAD SEASON #8 EPISODES 9-16 SPOILERS BELOW!!!
AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ concluded its eighth season Sunday night with the end of the ‘All Out War’ saga that pitted Rick Grimes and his hardy band of zombie apocalypse survivors against Negan and his group of Saviors over the past two and a half seasons. The show has been in a rating decline for some time but after talking to a number of fellow viewers I believe the decline is not as severe as previously imagined since many of my fellow viewers don’t watch the show week to week like me but binge watch a half season at a time. I agree that the show is no longer the pop culture phenomenon of a couple of years ago and I also believe the show is way more popular than the ratings would suggest.
I thought the show had become slow moving in seasons six and seven but started to pick back up in the first half of the current season with the war between the baseball bat wielding Negan and his Saviors against the combined communities of the Hilltop, Alexandria, and the Kingdom taking full flight. Part of this feeling may have been because I watch a show week to week that may well be intended to be binge-watched. This past half season saw the show return to the terror of trying to survive attacks of flesh eating zombies.
If I want to see people fight and argue I can watch any police or lawyer show but The Walking Dead gave me three solid episodes featuring zombie terror in the half season. In the half season opener the late Simon from the Saviors gave the order to massacre the mysterious trash people from the garbage dump. Trash leader Jadis was the sole survivor but had to escape from the reanimated zombies of her trashy companions. The 4th episode showed the Saviors attacking the Hilltop and cutting many of the residents with weapons dipped in zombie guts. The wounded were all placed in the main house of the Hilltop where they died and reanimated, eating survivors and spreading terror in their wake. In the 6th episode, Rick and Morgan are captured by a group of renegade Saviors and brought to a dive bar headquarters but the bar is soon overrun by a zombie horde. In a great battle scene, Rick convinces the Saviors to cut them loose to help fight the zombies which they do until the zombie danger is clear whereupon Rick turns into Savior-killer and as a bonus we get to see Morgan trap Jared (the most sadistically vile of all the Saviors) in a room with zombies and hold him through a conveniently placed gate while Jared is eaten alive! Most of the zombie action in the show over the past few years have been battles against a few straggling zombies suddenly appearing in the woods or a swamp or a sewer but these three zombie attacks were superior in their sense of menace and the actual destruction involved.
I spent the weeks leading up to the conclusion of this season by reading the comics from issue 1 to the end of all-out war in issue 126. I didn’t have to buy any of the comics since they can all be seen on YouTube under various channels. Except for the death of Rick’s son Carl (who is still alive in the comics 50 issues past the end of the war) the show was reasonably faithful to the comics although it seemed to lurch and stagger between iconic comic scenes as if the showrunners spent more time hitting the iconic moments without reasoning out how to logically get from one point to the next. This led to inanities like Aaron sleeping outside in the woods outside the all-female compound of Oceanside to solicit their help in the war, never mind that Rick’s group had previously stolen all their guns and Aaron’s traveling companion (Enid) just shot and killed their leader. The plot conveniences (the oceansiders arrive just in time to save the Hilltop community from the saviors with dozens of Molotov cocktail explosives) were a small price to pay for the iconic zombie action that makes this show must-see television for me.
I thought the showrunners and writers did a great job in showing Negan in a human context as opposed to the buffoon-like character spouting one-liners in season seven. Negan repeatedly passes up opportunities to destroy the allied communities, instead opting to make examples in order to bring the communities into line to pay their protection ‘fees’. His second-in-command Simon massacres the trash people and leads an insurrection against Negan which he puts down with a mixture of smarts and savagery. The show conveyed the idea that Negan really thinks he is saving the world by taking it over.
Meanwhile the show paints Rick as a beloved and respected leader by his people but he does plenty of shady stuff in the War. When held prisoner in the dive bar by the Saviors he tells them they will be welcome in his community and gives his word saying, “A man’s word gotta mean something”. And it does until he gets the chance to stick his hatchet into as many Saviors as he can once out of danger from the zombies. In the climactic scene of the war, Rick asks for ten seconds of Negan’s time to invoke the wishes of his dead son. This gives Negan pause – just enough pause for Rick to slit Negan’s throat with a shard of glass.
I really liked the juxtaposition of Rick and Negan ‘trading places’. Just as in the comics, Negan is held prisoner, the Saviors head back to their sanctuary to rebuild, and the stage is set for the ‘time jump’ from the comics where our survivors have established a medieval civilization of sorts until the next major threats come along. Without Carl, I see no reason to have a lengthy time jump and hope Season 9 can continue in the current timeline with conflicts between the existing communities (already Maggie at the Hilltop is plotting to kill Negan) and one yet to be discovered (there ares still the mysteries of the pantsuited-Georgie who trades knowledge for vinyl records and the helicopter that does random flyovers). This season and specifically the last half season has given me a renewed thirst for the show and I hope it won’t change from its newfound terror orientation when season nine appears in the fall.
To mark the end of a great season I am going to pass along some of my favorite snippets. These YouTube clips will probably be taken down before long so enjoy them while you can!
AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ concluded its eighth season Sunday night with the end of the ‘All Out War’ saga that pitted Rick Grimes and his hardy band of zombie apocalypse survivors against Negan and his group of Saviors over the past two and a half seasons. The show has been in a rating decline for some time but after talking to a number of fellow viewers I believe the decline is not as severe as previously imagined since many of my fellow viewers don’t watch the show week to week like me but binge watch a half season at a time. I agree that the show is no longer the pop culture phenomenon of a couple of years ago and I also believe the show is way more popular than the ratings would suggest.
I thought the show had become slow moving in seasons six and seven but started to pick back up in the first half of the current season with the war between the baseball bat wielding Negan and his Saviors against the combined communities of the Hilltop, Alexandria, and the Kingdom taking full flight. Part of this feeling may have been because I watch a show week to week that may well be intended to be binge-watched. This past half season saw the show return to the terror of trying to survive attacks of flesh eating zombies.
If I want to see people fight and argue I can watch any police or lawyer show but The Walking Dead gave me three solid episodes featuring zombie terror in the half season. In the half season opener the late Simon from the Saviors gave the order to massacre the mysterious trash people from the garbage dump. Trash leader Jadis was the sole survivor but had to escape from the reanimated zombies of her trashy companions. The 4th episode showed the Saviors attacking the Hilltop and cutting many of the residents with weapons dipped in zombie guts. The wounded were all placed in the main house of the Hilltop where they died and reanimated, eating survivors and spreading terror in their wake. In the 6th episode, Rick and Morgan are captured by a group of renegade Saviors and brought to a dive bar headquarters but the bar is soon overrun by a zombie horde. In a great battle scene, Rick convinces the Saviors to cut them loose to help fight the zombies which they do until the zombie danger is clear whereupon Rick turns into Savior-killer and as a bonus we get to see Morgan trap Jared (the most sadistically vile of all the Saviors) in a room with zombies and hold him through a conveniently placed gate while Jared is eaten alive! Most of the zombie action in the show over the past few years have been battles against a few straggling zombies suddenly appearing in the woods or a swamp or a sewer but these three zombie attacks were superior in their sense of menace and the actual destruction involved.
I spent the weeks leading up to the conclusion of this season by reading the comics from issue 1 to the end of all-out war in issue 126. I didn’t have to buy any of the comics since they can all be seen on YouTube under various channels. Except for the death of Rick’s son Carl (who is still alive in the comics 50 issues past the end of the war) the show was reasonably faithful to the comics although it seemed to lurch and stagger between iconic comic scenes as if the showrunners spent more time hitting the iconic moments without reasoning out how to logically get from one point to the next. This led to inanities like Aaron sleeping outside in the woods outside the all-female compound of Oceanside to solicit their help in the war, never mind that Rick’s group had previously stolen all their guns and Aaron’s traveling companion (Enid) just shot and killed their leader. The plot conveniences (the oceansiders arrive just in time to save the Hilltop community from the saviors with dozens of Molotov cocktail explosives) were a small price to pay for the iconic zombie action that makes this show must-see television for me.
I thought the showrunners and writers did a great job in showing Negan in a human context as opposed to the buffoon-like character spouting one-liners in season seven. Negan repeatedly passes up opportunities to destroy the allied communities, instead opting to make examples in order to bring the communities into line to pay their protection ‘fees’. His second-in-command Simon massacres the trash people and leads an insurrection against Negan which he puts down with a mixture of smarts and savagery. The show conveyed the idea that Negan really thinks he is saving the world by taking it over.
Meanwhile the show paints Rick as a beloved and respected leader by his people but he does plenty of shady stuff in the War. When held prisoner in the dive bar by the Saviors he tells them they will be welcome in his community and gives his word saying, “A man’s word gotta mean something”. And it does until he gets the chance to stick his hatchet into as many Saviors as he can once out of danger from the zombies. In the climactic scene of the war, Rick asks for ten seconds of Negan’s time to invoke the wishes of his dead son. This gives Negan pause – just enough pause for Rick to slit Negan’s throat with a shard of glass.
I really liked the juxtaposition of Rick and Negan ‘trading places’. Just as in the comics, Negan is held prisoner, the Saviors head back to their sanctuary to rebuild, and the stage is set for the ‘time jump’ from the comics where our survivors have established a medieval civilization of sorts until the next major threats come along. Without Carl, I see no reason to have a lengthy time jump and hope Season 9 can continue in the current timeline with conflicts between the existing communities (already Maggie at the Hilltop is plotting to kill Negan) and one yet to be discovered (there ares still the mysteries of the pantsuited-Georgie who trades knowledge for vinyl records and the helicopter that does random flyovers). This season and specifically the last half season has given me a renewed thirst for the show and I hope it won’t change from its newfound terror orientation when season nine appears in the fall.
To mark the end of a great season I am going to pass along some of my favorite snippets. These YouTube clips will probably be taken down before long so enjoy them while you can!
Best Mass Kill
This category was very strong with the massacre of the trash people and the Hilltopers dying and reanimating for a midnight snack but the winner is Jadis's zombie puree using what may be the only working trash grinder left in the world.Most Devious Double-Cross
This season saw the double crosses of Simon, Dwight, and even Eugene against Negan but my favorite was Rick giving his word to the Saviors before flipping his kill switch.Best Fight
Rick and Negan had two epic battles but the winner is Negan and Simon going 'Fight Club' for the leadership of the Saviors.Most Idiotic Moment
The entire episode of blind Father Gabriel and Doc Carson on the run was ridiculous and Aaron camping out at Oceanside even more so but Eugene's escape by projectile vomiting his mac & chess & sardine dinner on Rosita may well be the most idiotic scene ever captured on film!Friday, April 13, 2018
New Challenges for New Challengers
American/Italian Fabiano Caruana won the FIDE candidates chess tournament last month which gives him a match for the world championship against Magnus Carlsen of Norway later this year. This will be the first championship between players from the Western Hemisphere since the 1937 match between Max Euwe of the Netherlands and Alexander Alekhine of France. If you consider Alekhine Russian since that is his country of birth and only left for France after the 1917 revolution than this is the first Western Hemisphere match since Jose Capablanca of Cuba and Emmanuel Lasker of Germany battled for the crown in 1921.
Caruana was nearly the challenger two years ago when he entered the last round tied with Sergei Karjakin for the lead and playing Karjakin in the final round with an idiotic tiebreak system that was going to have another game decide the tournament winner if the players drew without a playoff. Caruana had the black pieces and as the events in the 'non-deciding' game unfolded needed to play for a win in order to become the challenger. Karjakin won the game and with it the right to challenge Carlsen for the world championship and even held a lead in the championship match with four games left before losing the match in tiebreaks.
This year’s edition of the Candidates started as Carauana’s to lose as he took the lead in round 4 of the 14-round tournament and held it until round 12 when he lost to Karjakin. Karjakin had lost two of his first four games but with the round 12 win tied Caruana and held the tiebreak in case of a tie with two rounds to go. It looked as if the stage was set for a collapse but Caruana rebounded with two wins in the final two rounds to easily win the tournament. And if winning the candidates tournament wasn’t enough, the very next week Caruana played in the GRENKE Chess classic in Germany and won that tournament with four wins and five draws ahead of Carlsen who managed two wins and seven draws.
Over the last month it seemed to me that Caruana’s opponents were in the habit of over pressing promising positions and falling prey to counterstrikes but that is just my impression and I am likely not qualified to judge. Winning the last two rounds of the candidates tournament following his losing the sole lead speaks volumes to Caruana’s fighting abilities and grace under pressure. It was certainly a far cry from January’s Tata Chess tournament where Caruana finished 10th out of 14 players with one win and four losses while Carlsen tied for first and won the tournament in a playoff.
While Caruana has shown flashes of exceptional form and is playing in tournament after tournament, Carlsen has seemed to be enjoying himself. He has been playing in the increasingly popular online blitz tournaments on lichess.org and chess.com. Carlsen has not been beaten in his two classical tournaments this year but has not seemed able to pull out the same amount of victories using his normal strategy of outplaying his opponents after an innocuous opening. I wouldn’t say he seems bored but I don’t seem the same level of effort on his chess than the past.
In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors do not have the NBA’s best regular season record for the first time in four years. The Warriors have seemed unmotivated all season long with enough talent to still win 70% of their games but the Houston Rockets with their 65 wins have captured the best record in the league and conference and the Toronto Raptors won 59 games to give both teams the home court advantage in a conference finals or NBA finals against the Warriors. In addition to their disinterest, Warriors' two-time MVP Stephen Curry has suffered a series of ankle sprains and will miss the first round of the playoffs with a ligament sprain in his knee. The Warriors have made the last three finals and won two championships which could have been three if they hadn’t had a meltdown for the ages in losing a 3-1 series lead to LeBron James' Cavaliers in the 2016 Finals and it seems the grind of 100+ games per season has gotten to them.
Will Caruana be the man to take the championship from Carlsen? He is certainly the only one with a chance this year. Caruana has beaten Carlsen in the past and outpaced him in tournaments like the 2014 Sinquefeld Cup and this year’s GRENKE Chess Classic. Caruana has shown the ability to string wins together so the possibility exists that he could just take two or three early games against Carlsen and draw his way to the championships in the current era of 12 game championship matches. Two years ago I felt that the only person that could beat Carlsen was Carlsen himself. This year I think Caruana has a chance of taking the title if he plays at his top level no matter how Carlsen is playing with the big question being whether Caruana will be able to retain the tremendous form he has shown over the past two months.
Can the Rockets win the NBA title? They seem like a hungry team to me, scapping for wins long after clinching the best record in the league. They also carry a lot of baggage. Superstar James Harden disappeared in last years playof loss to the Spurs with what was purported to be ‘a mysterious illness’ while celebrated new addition Chris Paul has never been to the conference finals as his Clippers teams seemed unable to maintain their poise for more than one playoff series per year. Head coach Mike D’Antoni went to the conference finals twice with the ‘7 seconds or less’ Suns and was seen as being outcoached twice. The team reminds me a lot of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks team that had a crew of hungry experienced players that came together to win a championship but they also remind me of the Maverick teams from the mid 2000’s that consistently underperformed in the playoffs. I tend to think these Rockets are for real and the Warriors will have trouble flipping the switch but the Rockets' collective past failures makes them far from a sure thing although still the favorite.
The Rockets have much more to prove than Caruana. While Caruana has only one (large) step before claiming the championship, the Rockets have to win four playoff series. The only thing their regular season record has earned them is the right to open each series at home and play a deciding game seven at home is a series comes down to a single game. Caruana has earned a level of immortality by becoming the challenger while the Rockets are only an asterisk at this point.
Caruana was nearly the challenger two years ago when he entered the last round tied with Sergei Karjakin for the lead and playing Karjakin in the final round with an idiotic tiebreak system that was going to have another game decide the tournament winner if the players drew without a playoff. Caruana had the black pieces and as the events in the 'non-deciding' game unfolded needed to play for a win in order to become the challenger. Karjakin won the game and with it the right to challenge Carlsen for the world championship and even held a lead in the championship match with four games left before losing the match in tiebreaks.
This year’s edition of the Candidates started as Carauana’s to lose as he took the lead in round 4 of the 14-round tournament and held it until round 12 when he lost to Karjakin. Karjakin had lost two of his first four games but with the round 12 win tied Caruana and held the tiebreak in case of a tie with two rounds to go. It looked as if the stage was set for a collapse but Caruana rebounded with two wins in the final two rounds to easily win the tournament. And if winning the candidates tournament wasn’t enough, the very next week Caruana played in the GRENKE Chess classic in Germany and won that tournament with four wins and five draws ahead of Carlsen who managed two wins and seven draws.
Over the last month it seemed to me that Caruana’s opponents were in the habit of over pressing promising positions and falling prey to counterstrikes but that is just my impression and I am likely not qualified to judge. Winning the last two rounds of the candidates tournament following his losing the sole lead speaks volumes to Caruana’s fighting abilities and grace under pressure. It was certainly a far cry from January’s Tata Chess tournament where Caruana finished 10th out of 14 players with one win and four losses while Carlsen tied for first and won the tournament in a playoff.
While Caruana has shown flashes of exceptional form and is playing in tournament after tournament, Carlsen has seemed to be enjoying himself. He has been playing in the increasingly popular online blitz tournaments on lichess.org and chess.com. Carlsen has not been beaten in his two classical tournaments this year but has not seemed able to pull out the same amount of victories using his normal strategy of outplaying his opponents after an innocuous opening. I wouldn’t say he seems bored but I don’t seem the same level of effort on his chess than the past.
In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors do not have the NBA’s best regular season record for the first time in four years. The Warriors have seemed unmotivated all season long with enough talent to still win 70% of their games but the Houston Rockets with their 65 wins have captured the best record in the league and conference and the Toronto Raptors won 59 games to give both teams the home court advantage in a conference finals or NBA finals against the Warriors. In addition to their disinterest, Warriors' two-time MVP Stephen Curry has suffered a series of ankle sprains and will miss the first round of the playoffs with a ligament sprain in his knee. The Warriors have made the last three finals and won two championships which could have been three if they hadn’t had a meltdown for the ages in losing a 3-1 series lead to LeBron James' Cavaliers in the 2016 Finals and it seems the grind of 100+ games per season has gotten to them.
Will Caruana be the man to take the championship from Carlsen? He is certainly the only one with a chance this year. Caruana has beaten Carlsen in the past and outpaced him in tournaments like the 2014 Sinquefeld Cup and this year’s GRENKE Chess Classic. Caruana has shown the ability to string wins together so the possibility exists that he could just take two or three early games against Carlsen and draw his way to the championships in the current era of 12 game championship matches. Two years ago I felt that the only person that could beat Carlsen was Carlsen himself. This year I think Caruana has a chance of taking the title if he plays at his top level no matter how Carlsen is playing with the big question being whether Caruana will be able to retain the tremendous form he has shown over the past two months.
Can the Rockets win the NBA title? They seem like a hungry team to me, scapping for wins long after clinching the best record in the league. They also carry a lot of baggage. Superstar James Harden disappeared in last years playof loss to the Spurs with what was purported to be ‘a mysterious illness’ while celebrated new addition Chris Paul has never been to the conference finals as his Clippers teams seemed unable to maintain their poise for more than one playoff series per year. Head coach Mike D’Antoni went to the conference finals twice with the ‘7 seconds or less’ Suns and was seen as being outcoached twice. The team reminds me a lot of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks team that had a crew of hungry experienced players that came together to win a championship but they also remind me of the Maverick teams from the mid 2000’s that consistently underperformed in the playoffs. I tend to think these Rockets are for real and the Warriors will have trouble flipping the switch but the Rockets' collective past failures makes them far from a sure thing although still the favorite.
The Rockets have much more to prove than Caruana. While Caruana has only one (large) step before claiming the championship, the Rockets have to win four playoff series. The only thing their regular season record has earned them is the right to open each series at home and play a deciding game seven at home is a series comes down to a single game. Caruana has earned a level of immortality by becoming the challenger while the Rockets are only an asterisk at this point.
Friday, April 6, 2018
21st Century NBA Basketball Prediction Program - Stuck In Neutral
I had high hopes for my basketball prediction program heading into the 2017-2018 NBA season. My program had better than the magic 52.4% percentage in each of the last 5 seasons, 4 in retrograde analysis and the 2016-217 season which was the first one in which I took donations for advance predictions and put my money where my mouth was by placing bets on the gambling site Bovada. The only sour taste was that my Bovada account was suspended (you can read about it here) during a hot streak which made my season bets $4.06 in the red. This sting was offset by $70 in donations for advance picks and anther $126 in a Bovada welcome bonus so all told I ended the season over $190 on the plus side.
My gambling problem from last year wasn’t my program – it was psychological. I started off with $10 bets but then switched to $5 bets and then varied my bets from $2.50 to $20 dollars depending on how I felt about the computer picks. In retrospect this seemed panicky and I resolved to place bets designed to win $5 on a successful outcome on each computer prediction and attempt to remain detached from the bets. In large part I kept to this resolution and only broke it a handful of times by adding three of my own predictions and leaving three computer bets unacted upon (the reasons of which I will get to later).
The way I had this season planned was that my program would break off to a good start which would allow me to advertise my success online and pick up lots of donations to fund even more advertising which would lead to even more donations which would allow me to increase my bets from $5 to $7.50 with the extra capital I would be accumulating. Unfortunately my program started off by going 1-3 and only got close to .500 three 3 weeks into the season at 19-20 which didn’t give me anything to advertise about since in the gambling world an even record is losing money since you have to have 11 wins for every 10 losses to make up for the 10% penalty on losses (otherwise known as the vig or juice) which is why the break even winning percentage is 52.4% and not 50%.
From there the pattern was maddenly consistent. My picks went from 19-20 to 22-29 on November 27th to 31-31 on December 3rd to 36-44 on December 13th and bottomed out at 54-65 on January 3rd with losses of $86.25. At this point the program started doing better and on February 27th the record stood at 87-84 with losses of $25.25. Since then the program and I have treaded water and heading into April 3rd the record stands at 110-110 with $52 in losses and only a week to go in the regular season at which point the computer doesn’t pick playoff series and I am on my own.
I haven’t started a deep dive into the individual games that made up this year’s medicore result but a cursory glance showed that my record picking teams playing the second half of back to back games has been far worse than last year. I think the reason for this is paradoxically that the NBA schedule has been altered this season to reduce the number of back to back games which likely makes each set of back to back games more of a burden than something a team gets used to. I will research whether teams are faring worse on back to back games than in years past and try to adjust my formula for it. The problem is now that the scheduling has been so drastically changed I can’t just change a formula and test it on prior years.
Another and far more serious reason for this year’s decline is that teams are resting players far more often than in years past. I have never made an adjustment for injured players because there is generally a short-term bounce in results that the formula has been able to take advantage while the betting line over-reacts to the injury as role players tend to have a few good games in increased roles before showing why in fact they are role players. Resting players is a bigger issue for me. I lost several games where Marc Gasol of the Grizzlies and Joel Embiid of the 76ers were rested on the front end of back to back games after I made the pick. There may have been some ‘insider trading’ in these games although the main culprit is my making the bets earlier in the day instead of trying to wait until the last minute to determine late scratches. Teams have been sitting uninjured players out for ‘rest’ in ever increasing numbers this year or at least it seems to me. I even stopped picking Warrior games since they stopped playing their All-Stars to get them ready for the playoffs that coach Steve Kerr insisted they would be available for if they had started last week. There was a flip side to the Warriors situation since they were still undervalued as all-stars Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green returned and I lifted my ban in time for a few winning bets.
Having lost $50 in the season is no big deal - the playoffs haven’t started yet and I have always done pretty good in the playoffs and have every expectation of getting back in black by the time a champion is crowned. A bigger concern is that since I didn’t have a good year I didn’t get any donations for my picks in advance of when I post them on my blog after the last game of the night finishes. I started the season blogging my picks and results and am driven to finish what I start even though I haven’t been able to turn my program into a revenue stream as I hoped. Once this season is over I will be done with my predictions blog and the true question is going to be whether I want to continue entering in schedules, lines, and results and placing bets. That is what I have the summer to think about.
My gambling problem from last year wasn’t my program – it was psychological. I started off with $10 bets but then switched to $5 bets and then varied my bets from $2.50 to $20 dollars depending on how I felt about the computer picks. In retrospect this seemed panicky and I resolved to place bets designed to win $5 on a successful outcome on each computer prediction and attempt to remain detached from the bets. In large part I kept to this resolution and only broke it a handful of times by adding three of my own predictions and leaving three computer bets unacted upon (the reasons of which I will get to later).
The way I had this season planned was that my program would break off to a good start which would allow me to advertise my success online and pick up lots of donations to fund even more advertising which would lead to even more donations which would allow me to increase my bets from $5 to $7.50 with the extra capital I would be accumulating. Unfortunately my program started off by going 1-3 and only got close to .500 three 3 weeks into the season at 19-20 which didn’t give me anything to advertise about since in the gambling world an even record is losing money since you have to have 11 wins for every 10 losses to make up for the 10% penalty on losses (otherwise known as the vig or juice) which is why the break even winning percentage is 52.4% and not 50%.
From there the pattern was maddenly consistent. My picks went from 19-20 to 22-29 on November 27th to 31-31 on December 3rd to 36-44 on December 13th and bottomed out at 54-65 on January 3rd with losses of $86.25. At this point the program started doing better and on February 27th the record stood at 87-84 with losses of $25.25. Since then the program and I have treaded water and heading into April 3rd the record stands at 110-110 with $52 in losses and only a week to go in the regular season at which point the computer doesn’t pick playoff series and I am on my own.
I haven’t started a deep dive into the individual games that made up this year’s medicore result but a cursory glance showed that my record picking teams playing the second half of back to back games has been far worse than last year. I think the reason for this is paradoxically that the NBA schedule has been altered this season to reduce the number of back to back games which likely makes each set of back to back games more of a burden than something a team gets used to. I will research whether teams are faring worse on back to back games than in years past and try to adjust my formula for it. The problem is now that the scheduling has been so drastically changed I can’t just change a formula and test it on prior years.
Another and far more serious reason for this year’s decline is that teams are resting players far more often than in years past. I have never made an adjustment for injured players because there is generally a short-term bounce in results that the formula has been able to take advantage while the betting line over-reacts to the injury as role players tend to have a few good games in increased roles before showing why in fact they are role players. Resting players is a bigger issue for me. I lost several games where Marc Gasol of the Grizzlies and Joel Embiid of the 76ers were rested on the front end of back to back games after I made the pick. There may have been some ‘insider trading’ in these games although the main culprit is my making the bets earlier in the day instead of trying to wait until the last minute to determine late scratches. Teams have been sitting uninjured players out for ‘rest’ in ever increasing numbers this year or at least it seems to me. I even stopped picking Warrior games since they stopped playing their All-Stars to get them ready for the playoffs that coach Steve Kerr insisted they would be available for if they had started last week. There was a flip side to the Warriors situation since they were still undervalued as all-stars Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green returned and I lifted my ban in time for a few winning bets.
Having lost $50 in the season is no big deal - the playoffs haven’t started yet and I have always done pretty good in the playoffs and have every expectation of getting back in black by the time a champion is crowned. A bigger concern is that since I didn’t have a good year I didn’t get any donations for my picks in advance of when I post them on my blog after the last game of the night finishes. I started the season blogging my picks and results and am driven to finish what I start even though I haven’t been able to turn my program into a revenue stream as I hoped. Once this season is over I will be done with my predictions blog and the true question is going to be whether I want to continue entering in schedules, lines, and results and placing bets. That is what I have the summer to think about.
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