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.
Showing posts with label nba predictions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nba predictions. Show all posts
Friday, April 6, 2018
Friday, April 14, 2017
21st Century NBA Basketball Prediction Program - The Idea in Practice
The 2016-2017 NBA regular season ended on Wednesday and the playoffs will start on Saturday. This was the season I put my 30+ year old basketball prediction program to the test of real betting. I spent last summer entering in four seasons worth of scores from basketball-reference.com and betting lines from freeplays.com. Then I used my program to retroactively measure over a thousand formulas against the data. I found a formula that produced a winning margin over the magic break even betting winning percentage of 52.4% (11 wins for every 10 losses) for each year and opened a $500 account on bovada.lv on October 5th. I signed up for a $250 welcome bonus that was paid out in increments between a dollar or two every time I hit one of the bovada milestones towards the $3750 I needed to wager to get the full $250.
The season started on October 25th but the program didn’t have enough data for predictions until November 5th. When the betting started my program was a wonder to behold as I won my first five bets and was $50.53 up by November 12th. After that the program tread water and on November 17th was 9-3 and $56 to the plus side.
And then things went south. The program went 2-8 over the next week to put me at 11-10 with $1.59 in losses on November 21st Another week of treading water left me at 16-16 on November 26th but a 4 game losing streak left me at 16-20 and $61 in losses at the end of November. December and January weren’t much better and on January 17th I hit my low point of $146.63 in losses and 9 games under .500 at 46-55.
Then I got an unintended vacation. When I made my $500 deposit to Bovada in October my credit card statement had a charge of $539.95. When I signed up the customer service people at Bovada told me there was no service charge for the initial deposit. I wrote to Bovada asking what the $39.95 charge was for. Bovada said they only received $500 and I would have to ask my credit card company. I asked my credit card company and they immediately credited my account for $39.95. On January 18th I went to log into my Bovada account and was greeted with a screen telling me my account had been suspended for having a credit card chargeback. My email inbox had a note from Bovada telling me my account was suspended and that I should call the customer service number because “any and all uncollected negative balances are subject to a 3rd party collection agency, which we are trying to help you avoid.”
I called the customer service department who insisted I deposit another $500 using a credit card immediately. No matter how many times I explained that the only chargeback on my credit card account was the $39.95 that Bovada insisted was not their charge the only solution the Bovada customer service department had was for me to give them another $500. This sounded like a scam to me so I stopped calling customer service and kept logging my basketball picks to see if I needed to change my program or if the disastrous record over the past two months were an anomaly. The program went on a winning streak which made me happy to think the program was working but enraged that I was not erasing my losses at Bovada.
I was resigned to the loss of my balance at Bovada when I got another Bovada email on February 1st asking me to call the customer service line to avoid any collection agency issues. I called and got a different customer service rep who also wanted me to deposit $500 in the account that still had the initial $500 deposit (less my losses). The rep started talking about a collection agency and I mentioned that if I heard about a collection agency again I would call my credit card company and dispute the initial $500 deposit. This changed the tone of the conversation and the rep asked me to send him the credit card transactions from my last three statements. I sent them and my account was restored on February 3rd.
During my 16-day hiatus my program was 11 games over .500 and the improvement proved to be real as I slowly and steadily chipped away at my losses to even my record at 70-70 on March 9th with a $73 loss.
After another dip in late March, the program caught fire and went 18-5 from March 24th to April 2nd to trim my losses to $24 with a 98-91 record. The program has always been a proponent of picking road underdogs and I noticed that many of the losses were from very bad teams getting points against very good teams. I decided to reduce the bets on games involving losing teams at winning teams to half the normal $11 wager. I also doubled the wager when the program picked a top level team like the Warriors and Spurs at home. The strategy was reasonable but ultimately pointless as my half bets went 19-17 for a profit of $1.58 and my doubled bets went 2-1 for a profit of $9. I do know I would have been over $50 in the black if I hadn’t had my account suspended by Bovada during one of my program’s hot streaks and possibly over $150 in the black if the suspension had come 2 weeks earlier. In the end the computer and I finished 113-106 with a loss of $27.73 on the bets I did make.
Going through the season betting real money was very different than picking a game with a mythical bet. I followed the games a lot closer and woke up in the middle of the night a few times when I had a bet on a west coast game that finished well after midnight. I would follow games I had a wager on using the CBS or ESPN apps on my iPod over the last few minutes to see if I had won or lost. I had some terrifically lucky results like the Oklahoma City Thunder at Orlando Magic game on March 29th. I had the Thunder giving 6 points to the Magic. The Thunder were trailing by double digits for most of the game until the amazing Russell Westbrook took over and scored 13 points in the last three minutes including a 3 point shot with eight seconds left to tie the game. The only way I could win the bet was to have the game go to overtime AND have the Thunder cover. I had to sweat out last second missed shots by both teams and the Magic getting the first 3 points of overtime before the Thunder took an eight point lead with 30 seconds left. The game was decided but my bet wasn’t won until the Magic missed a 3 point shot that would have covered the spread and the Thunder ran out the clock, leaving me a winner on a $10 bet.
Of course, it seemed for every lucky result there were two bad beats like on April 7th. I had 4 computer selected bets. The Hawks beat the defending champion Cavaliers in Cleveland as a double digit underdog for the first game to finish. Then the Knicks were trailing the Grizzlies by 10 points with time running out. I had the Knicks and 13 points and had mentally put the game in the win column when the CBS app flashed the final score as 101-88 Grizzlies. It seems Wade Baldwin IV made his third three-point basket of the season (out of 21 attempts) as time expired to make the game a 13 point spread and a push (no money won or lost). My third game was a winner as the Timberwolves held on for a 7 point loss in Utah against the Jazz (I was getting 11 points). The fourth game of the night was the Kings getting 2.5 points in Los Angeles against the woeful Lakers. The game ended well after midnight and was close throughout. With one second left the and the Kings trailing by four Buddy Hield made a basket to bring the Kings to 2 points and make me a winner except Hield then fouled Lakers guard D’Angelo Russell, who made 2 free throws with less than a second left to turn my victory into a loss! There was not much sleep that night as a 4-0 night ended up as 2 wins and a loss and felt more like 0-4!
Lucky wins and bad beats are all part of the game and I’m looking forward to the playoffs where I’ll be on my own with no computer program to assist me. I learned a lot about my risk tolerance and the difference between betting in theory and betting in practice this year. My biggest problem with Bovada (aside from having my account suspended) was the many times the betting lines came out late in the afternoon., which left me little time to get my bets in when I had an evening appointment or activity. A big difference between betting for real and betting in theory is the point spreads are ever changing on Bovada as opposed to getting point spreads years later from freeplays.com. A late scratch can move a spread by 5 points or more which is something I’ll never know happened in previous years without more research than I’m prepared to do. Something I loved about Bovada was that they gave me $130.39 as a welcome bonus (a prorated portion of the amount I wagered over the first six months I used the site) and a $5 bonus to celebrate their 5th anniversary. In addition, I received $70 in PayPal donations to provide my picks in advance at the rate of $10 a month. This gave my regular season a profit of $172.66 and anyone who made the exact same bets on Bovada that I did would have realized a profit of $102.66 if they took the welcome bonus. When the playoffs are over I will attempt to withdraw my money from the Bovada account and if I can do so successfully I will use them for another year. In either case I will report the result of my attempts as well as my playoff results after the season is over in June.
Then I got an unintended vacation. When I made my $500 deposit to Bovada in October my credit card statement had a charge of $539.95. When I signed up the customer service people at Bovada told me there was no service charge for the initial deposit. I wrote to Bovada asking what the $39.95 charge was for. Bovada said they only received $500 and I would have to ask my credit card company. I asked my credit card company and they immediately credited my account for $39.95. On January 18th I went to log into my Bovada account and was greeted with a screen telling me my account had been suspended for having a credit card chargeback. My email inbox had a note from Bovada telling me my account was suspended and that I should call the customer service number because “any and all uncollected negative balances are subject to a 3rd party collection agency, which we are trying to help you avoid.”
I called the customer service department who insisted I deposit another $500 using a credit card immediately. No matter how many times I explained that the only chargeback on my credit card account was the $39.95 that Bovada insisted was not their charge the only solution the Bovada customer service department had was for me to give them another $500. This sounded like a scam to me so I stopped calling customer service and kept logging my basketball picks to see if I needed to change my program or if the disastrous record over the past two months were an anomaly. The program went on a winning streak which made me happy to think the program was working but enraged that I was not erasing my losses at Bovada.
I was resigned to the loss of my balance at Bovada when I got another Bovada email on February 1st asking me to call the customer service line to avoid any collection agency issues. I called and got a different customer service rep who also wanted me to deposit $500 in the account that still had the initial $500 deposit (less my losses). The rep started talking about a collection agency and I mentioned that if I heard about a collection agency again I would call my credit card company and dispute the initial $500 deposit. This changed the tone of the conversation and the rep asked me to send him the credit card transactions from my last three statements. I sent them and my account was restored on February 3rd.
During my 16-day hiatus my program was 11 games over .500 and the improvement proved to be real as I slowly and steadily chipped away at my losses to even my record at 70-70 on March 9th with a $73 loss.
After another dip in late March, the program caught fire and went 18-5 from March 24th to April 2nd to trim my losses to $24 with a 98-91 record. The program has always been a proponent of picking road underdogs and I noticed that many of the losses were from very bad teams getting points against very good teams. I decided to reduce the bets on games involving losing teams at winning teams to half the normal $11 wager. I also doubled the wager when the program picked a top level team like the Warriors and Spurs at home. The strategy was reasonable but ultimately pointless as my half bets went 19-17 for a profit of $1.58 and my doubled bets went 2-1 for a profit of $9. I do know I would have been over $50 in the black if I hadn’t had my account suspended by Bovada during one of my program’s hot streaks and possibly over $150 in the black if the suspension had come 2 weeks earlier. In the end the computer and I finished 113-106 with a loss of $27.73 on the bets I did make.
Going through the season betting real money was very different than picking a game with a mythical bet. I followed the games a lot closer and woke up in the middle of the night a few times when I had a bet on a west coast game that finished well after midnight. I would follow games I had a wager on using the CBS or ESPN apps on my iPod over the last few minutes to see if I had won or lost. I had some terrifically lucky results like the Oklahoma City Thunder at Orlando Magic game on March 29th. I had the Thunder giving 6 points to the Magic. The Thunder were trailing by double digits for most of the game until the amazing Russell Westbrook took over and scored 13 points in the last three minutes including a 3 point shot with eight seconds left to tie the game. The only way I could win the bet was to have the game go to overtime AND have the Thunder cover. I had to sweat out last second missed shots by both teams and the Magic getting the first 3 points of overtime before the Thunder took an eight point lead with 30 seconds left. The game was decided but my bet wasn’t won until the Magic missed a 3 point shot that would have covered the spread and the Thunder ran out the clock, leaving me a winner on a $10 bet.
Of course, it seemed for every lucky result there were two bad beats like on April 7th. I had 4 computer selected bets. The Hawks beat the defending champion Cavaliers in Cleveland as a double digit underdog for the first game to finish. Then the Knicks were trailing the Grizzlies by 10 points with time running out. I had the Knicks and 13 points and had mentally put the game in the win column when the CBS app flashed the final score as 101-88 Grizzlies. It seems Wade Baldwin IV made his third three-point basket of the season (out of 21 attempts) as time expired to make the game a 13 point spread and a push (no money won or lost). My third game was a winner as the Timberwolves held on for a 7 point loss in Utah against the Jazz (I was getting 11 points). The fourth game of the night was the Kings getting 2.5 points in Los Angeles against the woeful Lakers. The game ended well after midnight and was close throughout. With one second left the and the Kings trailing by four Buddy Hield made a basket to bring the Kings to 2 points and make me a winner except Hield then fouled Lakers guard D’Angelo Russell, who made 2 free throws with less than a second left to turn my victory into a loss! There was not much sleep that night as a 4-0 night ended up as 2 wins and a loss and felt more like 0-4!
Lucky wins and bad beats are all part of the game and I’m looking forward to the playoffs where I’ll be on my own with no computer program to assist me. I learned a lot about my risk tolerance and the difference between betting in theory and betting in practice this year. My biggest problem with Bovada (aside from having my account suspended) was the many times the betting lines came out late in the afternoon., which left me little time to get my bets in when I had an evening appointment or activity. A big difference between betting for real and betting in theory is the point spreads are ever changing on Bovada as opposed to getting point spreads years later from freeplays.com. A late scratch can move a spread by 5 points or more which is something I’ll never know happened in previous years without more research than I’m prepared to do. Something I loved about Bovada was that they gave me $130.39 as a welcome bonus (a prorated portion of the amount I wagered over the first six months I used the site) and a $5 bonus to celebrate their 5th anniversary. In addition, I received $70 in PayPal donations to provide my picks in advance at the rate of $10 a month. This gave my regular season a profit of $172.66 and anyone who made the exact same bets on Bovada that I did would have realized a profit of $102.66 if they took the welcome bonus. When the playoffs are over I will attempt to withdraw my money from the Bovada account and if I can do so successfully I will use them for another year. In either case I will report the result of my attempts as well as my playoff results after the season is over in June.
Friday, November 25, 2016
21st Century NBA Basketball Prediction Program - Bovada Blues
The NBA season is underway and so is my basketball prediction program. I made good on last summer’s promise to put my money where my mouth (or predictions) is and use real money to track my progress this year. After some research I settled on bovada.lv as my online bookie of choice based on favorable reviews and the lack of laws in Iowa prohibiting online gambling.
I signed up for my Bovada account and deposited $500 into my account using paypal. I was not pleased to find that the charge for depositing the $500 was $39.35. I expected some charge but 8% seemed a little excessive. My chagrin was lessened when I received a $250 welcome bonus which was half of my deposit. I scanned over the conditions covering accepting the bonus. I noticed the funds wouldn’t be available for withdrawal until I had made an undiosclosed number of bets. This seemed reasonable to me and I accepted the bonus and was on my way.
I fed the game statistics into the prediction program and on November 8th the program spit out its first prediction, the Denver Nuggets getting 4 points at Memphis. I went to Bovada to place the bet. I clicked on the game, selected the amount I wanted to wager ($11), confirmed the bet and I was in. Why wager $11? Sports betting with the point spread normally charges a 10% penalty for losing bets. This is called ‘the vigorish’ and allows the gambling house to make money when an equal number of bets are made on both sides. It also means that the gambler must win 11 out of every 21 bets or 52.4% to break even. The notation on the betting sheet is -110 meaning 110 is bet to win 100. In the case of the Nuggets game the notation said -105 which meant that I only had to bet $10.50 to win $10. Some of the games are listed as -115 meaning $11.50 needs to be wagered to bet $10.
This changing of the odds adds an unwanted level of complexity. I just want to bet $11 to win $10. I would prefer that Bovada change the point spread instead of jacking with the odds to balance the betting. After some thought I decided I would just bet $11 per game and collect more or less than $10 depending on the betting odds. In the case of the Nuggets game my $11 wager would bring me $10.48 for a victory instead of $10. In the succeeding two weeks I’ve seem games listed as high as -120 which is tantamount to keeping an entire dollar on each winning bet.
I won my Nuggets wager and was $10.48 richer. The next day my prediction program said the Los Angeles Clippers was an easy cover giving 10.5 points at home to the Portland Trailblazers. I went to Bovada, placed the $11 bet, the Clippers easily covered, and I was now $20.48 ahead of the game.
My program didn’t give a prediction the next day but I noticed my account had been credited an extra.$1.47 which was listed as a ‘rollover’. This has continued for the past 2 weeks – every other day I get credited between $1.30 and $1.50 as a ‘rollover’. I found this confusing so I wrote to the Bovada customer support who replied within 24 hours to tell me the rollover was part of my $250 welcome bonus that I receive after passing ‘milestones’ which are still undefined as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to complain about getting an extra dollar or two credited to my account so I stopped asking.
The next day I went to enter the point spreads into my computer at 6 am and there was only 1 game of the 8 on the schedule with a listed point spread. I entered in the point spreads from freeplays.com and ran my prediction program which gave me a possible wager which I couldn’t place until after work when Bovada finally published the point spreads and opened the betting on NBA games. I wrote to Bovada customer support again and again they wrote back within 24 hours to let me know that ‘Lines are put up and taken down at our Book Managers discretion.’ It seems that the basketball lines are normally published in the afternoon with only a few games available in the morning. Since I’m at work when the lines are available this means I have to wait until I get home to run my prediction program and place my wagers. The problem with this is if I have a delay or internet problem I’ll be out of luck to make a pick in the short window of time I have to get a wager in for most games.
I won my first 5 wagers and 9 of my first 12 but hit a cold streak after that and my record stands at 11-9 as I write this on Sunday night. I have to admit all the little things that bothered me about Bovada bother me a lot more when I’m on a losing streak but ultimately it was winning wager that convinced me to question my commitment to the online gaming idea. Today my prediction program spit out two picks. I ran my program in the morning and made a bet on the 9-3 Hawks giving two points against the 5-7 Knicks in New York. That pick went down in flames when the Knicks not only covered but won by 10. The line on the Bulls-Lakers wasn’t published until the afternoon after the Hawks-Knicks game was over. I reran my prediction program and the computer picked the Bulls to win and they were getting points, I went to the site to make my pick which is as easy as clicking a button and entering the wager amount (in my case $11). I noticed two odd things about the line. The Bulls were getting a half point which is useless since there are no ties in the NBA and the odds were -120 so my $11 wager would only bring in $9.17 if I won. I made the bet and checked the score before I went to bed. The game was at halftime but Bovada had me already winning my bet! Why? Because when I clicked on the button to place the wager the line was only available for the first quarter which ended with a 30-30 score meaning I won by the half point the Bulls were getting!
This Sunday afternoon misadventure showed me that online gambling requires more of an attention span than I can spare right now. Having to check to see when the lines are up, adjust my thinking for the changing money payouts, and then having to make sure the line is for the entire game instead of the first quarter of first half is way more work than I bargained for. Having too many things to keep track of is sure to cost me money in the long run when I fail to notice an odds change, miss bets, or bet on the first quarter. I’ll finish this season until I either lose my $500 stake or the season ends but next season I’ll be back to making mythical bets only.
I signed up for my Bovada account and deposited $500 into my account using paypal. I was not pleased to find that the charge for depositing the $500 was $39.35. I expected some charge but 8% seemed a little excessive. My chagrin was lessened when I received a $250 welcome bonus which was half of my deposit. I scanned over the conditions covering accepting the bonus. I noticed the funds wouldn’t be available for withdrawal until I had made an undiosclosed number of bets. This seemed reasonable to me and I accepted the bonus and was on my way.
I fed the game statistics into the prediction program and on November 8th the program spit out its first prediction, the Denver Nuggets getting 4 points at Memphis. I went to Bovada to place the bet. I clicked on the game, selected the amount I wanted to wager ($11), confirmed the bet and I was in. Why wager $11? Sports betting with the point spread normally charges a 10% penalty for losing bets. This is called ‘the vigorish’ and allows the gambling house to make money when an equal number of bets are made on both sides. It also means that the gambler must win 11 out of every 21 bets or 52.4% to break even. The notation on the betting sheet is -110 meaning 110 is bet to win 100. In the case of the Nuggets game the notation said -105 which meant that I only had to bet $10.50 to win $10. Some of the games are listed as -115 meaning $11.50 needs to be wagered to bet $10.
This changing of the odds adds an unwanted level of complexity. I just want to bet $11 to win $10. I would prefer that Bovada change the point spread instead of jacking with the odds to balance the betting. After some thought I decided I would just bet $11 per game and collect more or less than $10 depending on the betting odds. In the case of the Nuggets game my $11 wager would bring me $10.48 for a victory instead of $10. In the succeeding two weeks I’ve seem games listed as high as -120 which is tantamount to keeping an entire dollar on each winning bet.
I won my Nuggets wager and was $10.48 richer. The next day my prediction program said the Los Angeles Clippers was an easy cover giving 10.5 points at home to the Portland Trailblazers. I went to Bovada, placed the $11 bet, the Clippers easily covered, and I was now $20.48 ahead of the game.
My program didn’t give a prediction the next day but I noticed my account had been credited an extra.$1.47 which was listed as a ‘rollover’. This has continued for the past 2 weeks – every other day I get credited between $1.30 and $1.50 as a ‘rollover’. I found this confusing so I wrote to the Bovada customer support who replied within 24 hours to tell me the rollover was part of my $250 welcome bonus that I receive after passing ‘milestones’ which are still undefined as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to complain about getting an extra dollar or two credited to my account so I stopped asking.
The next day I went to enter the point spreads into my computer at 6 am and there was only 1 game of the 8 on the schedule with a listed point spread. I entered in the point spreads from freeplays.com and ran my prediction program which gave me a possible wager which I couldn’t place until after work when Bovada finally published the point spreads and opened the betting on NBA games. I wrote to Bovada customer support again and again they wrote back within 24 hours to let me know that ‘Lines are put up and taken down at our Book Managers discretion.’ It seems that the basketball lines are normally published in the afternoon with only a few games available in the morning. Since I’m at work when the lines are available this means I have to wait until I get home to run my prediction program and place my wagers. The problem with this is if I have a delay or internet problem I’ll be out of luck to make a pick in the short window of time I have to get a wager in for most games.
I won my first 5 wagers and 9 of my first 12 but hit a cold streak after that and my record stands at 11-9 as I write this on Sunday night. I have to admit all the little things that bothered me about Bovada bother me a lot more when I’m on a losing streak but ultimately it was winning wager that convinced me to question my commitment to the online gaming idea. Today my prediction program spit out two picks. I ran my program in the morning and made a bet on the 9-3 Hawks giving two points against the 5-7 Knicks in New York. That pick went down in flames when the Knicks not only covered but won by 10. The line on the Bulls-Lakers wasn’t published until the afternoon after the Hawks-Knicks game was over. I reran my prediction program and the computer picked the Bulls to win and they were getting points, I went to the site to make my pick which is as easy as clicking a button and entering the wager amount (in my case $11). I noticed two odd things about the line. The Bulls were getting a half point which is useless since there are no ties in the NBA and the odds were -120 so my $11 wager would only bring in $9.17 if I won. I made the bet and checked the score before I went to bed. The game was at halftime but Bovada had me already winning my bet! Why? Because when I clicked on the button to place the wager the line was only available for the first quarter which ended with a 30-30 score meaning I won by the half point the Bulls were getting!
This Sunday afternoon misadventure showed me that online gambling requires more of an attention span than I can spare right now. Having to check to see when the lines are up, adjust my thinking for the changing money payouts, and then having to make sure the line is for the entire game instead of the first quarter of first half is way more work than I bargained for. Having too many things to keep track of is sure to cost me money in the long run when I fail to notice an odds change, miss bets, or bet on the first quarter. I’ll finish this season until I either lose my $500 stake or the season ends but next season I’ll be back to making mythical bets only.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
21st Century NBA Basketball Prediction Program - Chance or Skill?
After spending much of the summer in a fruitless attempt to get my chess game in shape for the tournaments in Duluth and Jackson I turned my attention to the upcoming professional basketball season and specifically my attempts to resuscitate my 30 year old basketball prediction program for the 21st century. I worked on this project last summer and thought I had a workable formula that predicted winners above the magical 52.4% break-even mark for the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 seasons. After a promising start to the 2015-2016 season the formula stopped being successful and I finished the season making picks on my own and finished the season just short of the break-even line, losing $600 mythical dollars in the process.
I started this year’s effort by creating a data table with different formulas combining the 16 variables I captured using the three seasons of NBA data I’ve assembled. I then created and ran a stored procedure to create the predictions for each season for each formula and save the results in my database. In addition to predicting winners, my software comes up with its own point spread which I compare to the published point spread. I summarize my results by how accurate my predictions are against the published line and how different my point spread is from the published spread. In a perfect world the bigger the difference between the two spreads the more correct my predictions will be.
While running a query against my result summary I discovered that out of the hundreds of formulas, three gave me over 55% correct predictions on games with a 5 point difference between my spread and the published spread for each of the three seasons used. Better yet, when the point spread difference was 7 points or more the success rate jumped to over 60%. I have 6 weeks before the start of the 2016-17 season and decided to use the time to verify these new formulas. I loaded the 2012-13 scores into my database and am entering in the point spreads from freeplays.com. I have 700 of the 1229 games loaded into the database and so far the results are very promising. Over the next week or so I’ll enter the rest of the season and find out for sure if my 3 ‘success stories’ are for real.
It seems absurd on face value that any computer program could beat the odds makers. In reality it makes perfect sense. Point spreads are not set in order to predict the actual score. They are set in order to guarantee that there is an equal amount of money bet on either side to allow the gambling facilitators to make money (on the 5-10% extra paid by the losing bettors) no matter who wins the contest. Any false assumption by the betting public (like betting blindly on the Warriors or Cavaliers) or any team with a fan base that always bets on or against then will cause the point spreads to be skewed to attract an equality of wagers on both teams.
Real or not, I will soon be loading the 2016-2017 schedule into my database, I resolved this season to get an online gambling account on bovada.lv and make my predictions on my NBA point spread predictions blog with real and not mythical money. By using real money on an established gaming site I hope to print my predictions on my blog the day after the games using screen prints as verification and offer my predictions the day of the games on a subscription basis.
I plan to start my Bovada account with $500 and bet $10 on each game. I’m not expecting to go 45 games under .500 at any point in the season (which would exhaust my funds) but I’ll deal with that situation if it happens. The hardest part of this exercise will be to have the discipline to stick with my formula and not make picks every day just to be making picks. There are going to be plenty of days where my formula doesn’t differ from the published point spreads and those are the days that will test my patience.
I hope I manage to make some actual money picking NBA games this season because the thought is occurring to me that wagering on the outcome of sporting events is going the way of the dinosaur and I want to be successful before the practice goes extinct. The new way of gambling on sporting events is not betting on the winners and losers but by playing ‘Fantasy Sports’ where the gambler picks a roster of players and roots for his ‘squad’ to outscore the competing squads by having better statistics. Fantasy sports is at least 40 years old, having gotten its start as ‘Rotisserie Baseball’ and graduated to the big time as Fantasy Football. Originally these activities were done by small groups but have gone global with the arrival of Internet sites that allow players from all over the world to play in the same ‘leagues’ for huge amounts of money.
The biggest companies in the fantasy sports business are ‘DraftKings.com’ and ‘FanDuel.com’. Both companies advertise heavily on sports broadcasts and podcasts and like most of the successful drug dealers I’ve known will give new customers a free taste of the action.
While sports betting is only legal in Nevada (Delaware has state sponsored sports parlay betting), playing fantasy sports for money is allowed in over 35 of the 50 states. New York famously banned online fantasy sports in 2015 as gambling but did a turnaround after passing regulations that included taxing the gaming sites to the tune of 4 million dollars a year.
It’s amusing to see fantasy sports and betting on the outcomes of sport events decried as gambling by the same entities that run multi-million dollar lotteries that only pay out 50% of the take. Is sports betting gambling? For the unskilled, absolutely! But for the skilled it is not gambling at all. The Wall Street Journal reported that 91% of the prize money in the 2015 baseball fantasy season was won by 1.3% of the participants. I don’t know if the same ratio holds true for picking against the point spread but if it does I hope I’m a one percenter.
I started this year’s effort by creating a data table with different formulas combining the 16 variables I captured using the three seasons of NBA data I’ve assembled. I then created and ran a stored procedure to create the predictions for each season for each formula and save the results in my database. In addition to predicting winners, my software comes up with its own point spread which I compare to the published point spread. I summarize my results by how accurate my predictions are against the published line and how different my point spread is from the published spread. In a perfect world the bigger the difference between the two spreads the more correct my predictions will be.
While running a query against my result summary I discovered that out of the hundreds of formulas, three gave me over 55% correct predictions on games with a 5 point difference between my spread and the published spread for each of the three seasons used. Better yet, when the point spread difference was 7 points or more the success rate jumped to over 60%. I have 6 weeks before the start of the 2016-17 season and decided to use the time to verify these new formulas. I loaded the 2012-13 scores into my database and am entering in the point spreads from freeplays.com. I have 700 of the 1229 games loaded into the database and so far the results are very promising. Over the next week or so I’ll enter the rest of the season and find out for sure if my 3 ‘success stories’ are for real.
It seems absurd on face value that any computer program could beat the odds makers. In reality it makes perfect sense. Point spreads are not set in order to predict the actual score. They are set in order to guarantee that there is an equal amount of money bet on either side to allow the gambling facilitators to make money (on the 5-10% extra paid by the losing bettors) no matter who wins the contest. Any false assumption by the betting public (like betting blindly on the Warriors or Cavaliers) or any team with a fan base that always bets on or against then will cause the point spreads to be skewed to attract an equality of wagers on both teams.
Real or not, I will soon be loading the 2016-2017 schedule into my database, I resolved this season to get an online gambling account on bovada.lv and make my predictions on my NBA point spread predictions blog with real and not mythical money. By using real money on an established gaming site I hope to print my predictions on my blog the day after the games using screen prints as verification and offer my predictions the day of the games on a subscription basis.
I plan to start my Bovada account with $500 and bet $10 on each game. I’m not expecting to go 45 games under .500 at any point in the season (which would exhaust my funds) but I’ll deal with that situation if it happens. The hardest part of this exercise will be to have the discipline to stick with my formula and not make picks every day just to be making picks. There are going to be plenty of days where my formula doesn’t differ from the published point spreads and those are the days that will test my patience.
I hope I manage to make some actual money picking NBA games this season because the thought is occurring to me that wagering on the outcome of sporting events is going the way of the dinosaur and I want to be successful before the practice goes extinct. The new way of gambling on sporting events is not betting on the winners and losers but by playing ‘Fantasy Sports’ where the gambler picks a roster of players and roots for his ‘squad’ to outscore the competing squads by having better statistics. Fantasy sports is at least 40 years old, having gotten its start as ‘Rotisserie Baseball’ and graduated to the big time as Fantasy Football. Originally these activities were done by small groups but have gone global with the arrival of Internet sites that allow players from all over the world to play in the same ‘leagues’ for huge amounts of money.
The biggest companies in the fantasy sports business are ‘DraftKings.com’ and ‘FanDuel.com’. Both companies advertise heavily on sports broadcasts and podcasts and like most of the successful drug dealers I’ve known will give new customers a free taste of the action.
While sports betting is only legal in Nevada (Delaware has state sponsored sports parlay betting), playing fantasy sports for money is allowed in over 35 of the 50 states. New York famously banned online fantasy sports in 2015 as gambling but did a turnaround after passing regulations that included taxing the gaming sites to the tune of 4 million dollars a year.
It’s amusing to see fantasy sports and betting on the outcomes of sport events decried as gambling by the same entities that run multi-million dollar lotteries that only pay out 50% of the take. Is sports betting gambling? For the unskilled, absolutely! But for the skilled it is not gambling at all. The Wall Street Journal reported that 91% of the prize money in the 2015 baseball fantasy season was won by 1.3% of the participants. I don’t know if the same ratio holds true for picking against the point spread but if it does I hope I’m a one percenter.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
A Gambling Odessey
The NBA season ended Sunday with the Cleveland Cavaliers winning Game 7 of the NBA Finals to cap a comeback from a 3-1 hole against the Golden State Warriors team that set the regular season record at 73-9. This was Cleveland’s first major sports championship since 1964 and the basketball podcasts I listen to have changed their discussions from whether the Warriors are a dynasty to whether LeBron James is the greatest player of all time given his supreme performance in the final three games of the Finals. While James is the greatest player of his generation I rate him behind Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Julius Erving on the greatest player of all time lists. If you are wondering why Erving is on this list I can only assume that you never saw him when he played for the Virginia Squires and New York Nets of the ABA.
Does the Warriors’ failure to win the championship invalidate their record breaking regular season and remove them from the conversation as the greatest team of all time? To my mind it does. How can a team that didn't win the championship be considered an all-time great team? The Warriors’ season will take the place of the 1996 Chicago Bulls when NBA discussion turns to great regular seasons much like the Patriots 2007 season that saw an 18-0 regular season end in a Super Bowl defeat has supplanted the 1972 Miami Dolphins undefeated season that DID end in a Super Bowl victory as the comparison of choice when an NFL team threatens to go undefeated. I’m not sure that the Warriors weren’t a better team than the Cavaliers but I am sure that after the first two games of the series (both Warrior wins) the Cavaliers outworked the Warriors. The Warriors made lazy passes, half-hearted efforts to get rebounds, and slacked off getting back on defense. In the last few minutes of the final game while Kevin Love was bodying up on Stephen Curry and LeBron James was racing back 50 feet on a full sprint to block a layup, Curry made a crazy behind the back pass out of bounds and then couldn’t stay with Kyrie Irving on a go ahead three. Warriors center Draymond Green gave a great effort in Game 7 but cost the team dearly by getting suspended for game 5 when he slapped LeBron James in the groin in the last seconds of a won game. It looked like the Warriors 3 point shooting would bail them out but they went cold for long stretches in the series and when their shots aren’t falling they look like an undisciplined mess of a team. Stephen Curry will have to learn like all the great players do that when points are at a premium the star players have to head to the rim, get contact, and get to the free throw line. It will be interesting to see how the Warriors respond now that they have changed in the media’s perception from a group of whiz kids to a group of groin punching whiny players.
I had previously written about the process of updating my 30 year old basketball prediction program to the 21st century. I completed my programming over the summer and as the season started I assembled the scores and point spreads daily into my database. I used a starter formula that led to promising early results but as the season went on the formula’s performance deteriorated and despite my best efforts I could not find a reliable formula that would work for the three seasons of data I had.
After a handful of NBA predictions in this Broken Pawn Blog I moved my predictions to its own blog (nbapointspreadpredictions.blogspot.com). Since I has no reliable prediction formula, I just made the best picks I could and once my predictions were on its own blog I made predictions every day there were games on the schedule including making a pick for every single playoff game.
My picks weren’t awful but they weren’t great either. All told my record was 168 wins, 158 losses, and 3 pushes which was enough to lose me $600 based on making a $100 bet on each game which means $110 per loss (the extra $10 being the 'vigorish' or betting cost. I has two bets of $200 that came through and I lost a $300 bet on the Warriors to win the Finals game 7 which would have pulled me to a $30 profit if Golden State had won and covered.
My high point was a month into the season when I was up $960 on a 14-4 record. A month later I was down $480. A hot streak in January brought me to a plus $370 and a week later I had lost 5 straight and back in the red. My nadir was on April 18th when I was down $1260 but I rebounded to go 37-22 over the next month to get back to plus $20 on May 19th. After that I hit another down patch and spent the rest of the season in the minus column scrambling to get back to the plus side of the ledger.
It would have been great to have won my last bet of the year to finish in the black but at least I put myself in a position to be on the plus side on the last game of the year. Making 153 blog posts from December 26th to June 19th every day was exhausting. It took a lot of self-control not to take my picks personally especially when I would lose because of a missed free throw or meaningless last second shot to let a team that I picked to lose by 10 points only lose by 9. Now that I’ve had a week to reflect on publishing NBA predictions for a full season I believe it is something I want to continue when the season starts up again in late October. I hit on 51.2% of my picks which is perilously close to blind luck and also just a 2.5% improvement away from the magical 52.4% break even mark.
How can I get that 2.5% improvement? The easy solution would be to get my basketball prediction program working and I will be working on that possibly quixotic endeavor over the summer. But even if I can’t get a programmatic answer there are a few small changes I can make to improve my results. One change will be to not pick games every single day unless I see a game I want to pick. I was so fixated on providing content every day there were games on the schedule I would occasionally 'reach' for games. Another change will be to stop publishing my picks at 5am. Instead I will spend some time considering my picks and publish them in the afternoon or early evening. While I’m trying to fix my prediction program I will spend some time seeing what bets I was the most successful at. I like to pick favorites and I love to pick home favorites playing a teams that played the night before. I don’t know if I did better or worse with these bets compared to my overall bets. Finding out how good my instincts are has to be useful.
The biggest change I have planned for next year has nothing to do with improving my results. I will pick an online betting service (as long as they are still legal in Iowa) and make bets with real money. I’m planning on betting $10 a game instead of a mythical $100 a game which would have given me a $60 loss for this year. I got a few donations from my NBA prediction blog – not $60 worth but if I am betting real money with real screen shots to prove it I would expect to get more donations even if it is from readers that profit from picking the opposite of my predictions. Making picks with play money gave entertainment value but afforded a certain lack of self discipline that led to me reaching for picks to break losing streaks and make a pick every day. Just like an overweight person doesn't suddenly lose weight by purchaseing smaller clothes I doubt think betting real money will suddenly give me more self-discipline in my betting but combined with the mindfulness of my other changes it is worth the gamble.
Does the Warriors’ failure to win the championship invalidate their record breaking regular season and remove them from the conversation as the greatest team of all time? To my mind it does. How can a team that didn't win the championship be considered an all-time great team? The Warriors’ season will take the place of the 1996 Chicago Bulls when NBA discussion turns to great regular seasons much like the Patriots 2007 season that saw an 18-0 regular season end in a Super Bowl defeat has supplanted the 1972 Miami Dolphins undefeated season that DID end in a Super Bowl victory as the comparison of choice when an NFL team threatens to go undefeated. I’m not sure that the Warriors weren’t a better team than the Cavaliers but I am sure that after the first two games of the series (both Warrior wins) the Cavaliers outworked the Warriors. The Warriors made lazy passes, half-hearted efforts to get rebounds, and slacked off getting back on defense. In the last few minutes of the final game while Kevin Love was bodying up on Stephen Curry and LeBron James was racing back 50 feet on a full sprint to block a layup, Curry made a crazy behind the back pass out of bounds and then couldn’t stay with Kyrie Irving on a go ahead three. Warriors center Draymond Green gave a great effort in Game 7 but cost the team dearly by getting suspended for game 5 when he slapped LeBron James in the groin in the last seconds of a won game. It looked like the Warriors 3 point shooting would bail them out but they went cold for long stretches in the series and when their shots aren’t falling they look like an undisciplined mess of a team. Stephen Curry will have to learn like all the great players do that when points are at a premium the star players have to head to the rim, get contact, and get to the free throw line. It will be interesting to see how the Warriors respond now that they have changed in the media’s perception from a group of whiz kids to a group of groin punching whiny players.
After a strong start, my basketball picks went south and left me scrambling to get into the black money wise while my winning percentage stayed between 50 and 52 percent.
I had previously written about the process of updating my 30 year old basketball prediction program to the 21st century. I completed my programming over the summer and as the season started I assembled the scores and point spreads daily into my database. I used a starter formula that led to promising early results but as the season went on the formula’s performance deteriorated and despite my best efforts I could not find a reliable formula that would work for the three seasons of data I had.
After a handful of NBA predictions in this Broken Pawn Blog I moved my predictions to its own blog (nbapointspreadpredictions.blogspot.com). Since I has no reliable prediction formula, I just made the best picks I could and once my predictions were on its own blog I made predictions every day there were games on the schedule including making a pick for every single playoff game.
My picks weren’t awful but they weren’t great either. All told my record was 168 wins, 158 losses, and 3 pushes which was enough to lose me $600 based on making a $100 bet on each game which means $110 per loss (the extra $10 being the 'vigorish' or betting cost. I has two bets of $200 that came through and I lost a $300 bet on the Warriors to win the Finals game 7 which would have pulled me to a $30 profit if Golden State had won and covered.
My high point was a month into the season when I was up $960 on a 14-4 record. A month later I was down $480. A hot streak in January brought me to a plus $370 and a week later I had lost 5 straight and back in the red. My nadir was on April 18th when I was down $1260 but I rebounded to go 37-22 over the next month to get back to plus $20 on May 19th. After that I hit another down patch and spent the rest of the season in the minus column scrambling to get back to the plus side of the ledger.
It would have been great to have won my last bet of the year to finish in the black but at least I put myself in a position to be on the plus side on the last game of the year. Making 153 blog posts from December 26th to June 19th every day was exhausting. It took a lot of self-control not to take my picks personally especially when I would lose because of a missed free throw or meaningless last second shot to let a team that I picked to lose by 10 points only lose by 9. Now that I’ve had a week to reflect on publishing NBA predictions for a full season I believe it is something I want to continue when the season starts up again in late October. I hit on 51.2% of my picks which is perilously close to blind luck and also just a 2.5% improvement away from the magical 52.4% break even mark.
How can I get that 2.5% improvement? The easy solution would be to get my basketball prediction program working and I will be working on that possibly quixotic endeavor over the summer. But even if I can’t get a programmatic answer there are a few small changes I can make to improve my results. One change will be to not pick games every single day unless I see a game I want to pick. I was so fixated on providing content every day there were games on the schedule I would occasionally 'reach' for games. Another change will be to stop publishing my picks at 5am. Instead I will spend some time considering my picks and publish them in the afternoon or early evening. While I’m trying to fix my prediction program I will spend some time seeing what bets I was the most successful at. I like to pick favorites and I love to pick home favorites playing a teams that played the night before. I don’t know if I did better or worse with these bets compared to my overall bets. Finding out how good my instincts are has to be useful.
The biggest change I have planned for next year has nothing to do with improving my results. I will pick an online betting service (as long as they are still legal in Iowa) and make bets with real money. I’m planning on betting $10 a game instead of a mythical $100 a game which would have given me a $60 loss for this year. I got a few donations from my NBA prediction blog – not $60 worth but if I am betting real money with real screen shots to prove it I would expect to get more donations even if it is from readers that profit from picking the opposite of my predictions. Making picks with play money gave entertainment value but afforded a certain lack of self discipline that led to me reaching for picks to break losing streaks and make a pick every day. Just like an overweight person doesn't suddenly lose weight by purchaseing smaller clothes I doubt think betting real money will suddenly give me more self-discipline in my betting but combined with the mindfulness of my other changes it is worth the gamble.
Friday, December 25, 2015
NBA Predictions December 25th, 2015
There are five games in the NBA's traditional wall to wall nationally televised Christmas schedule and all five games look tempting from a betting perspective. Wednesday's 1-2 record trimmed my mythical winnings to $320 with my record of 23-18-2. Today I will take depart from my usual liking for road teams and pick three teams that are at home or very close to it. As usual I'll pick today's games using the the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered (although for recordkeeping purposes I'll bet $110 to win $100 on each game.
Chicago Bulls at Oklahoma City Thunder
The Bulls have lost 3 games in a row and their best player Jimmy Butler has publicly criticized new coach Fred Hoiberg for being too laid back. I expect the Bulls to give their best effort for their national television appearance and I expect it to make no difference against the Thunder, winners of 3 straight and and 9 of 10 with 5 blowouts. I will take the Thunder and happily give the 9 points.
San Antonio Spurs at Houston Rockets
The Rockets have rebounded slightly after firing coach Kevin McHale and evened their season record at 15-15. Even though the Rockets have won their last three home games I'll be picking the Spurs since they have won their last seven games with six coming by blowout. My only concern in giving the 7 points is that the Spurs are on the front end of a back to back and may rest some players but I think the resting will happen in tomorrow's home game agianst the Nuggets and not under the glare of the national spotlight.
Los Angeles Clippers at Los Angeles Lakers
The Clippers were my pick to win the championship yet here they are limping along with a 16-13 record. The Clippers have lost three in a row to the Spurs, Rockets, and Thunder by 10 or less points. Meanwhile the Lakers are playing their best ball of the season with 2 wins in 5 games after breaking their 6 game losing streak. I am not a buyer of the Kobe farewell tour hype and expect the Clippers to take out their frustrations in what is nominally a Lakers home game (the two teams play in the same arena) and easily cover the 11.5 points.
I am not picking the Cavaliers-Warriors game which is the most anticipated game so far this season. The Warriors are 7 point favorites but I expect the Cavaliers to cover the spread and probably win outright. Having said that I have been wrong about the Warriors all season long so I will keep my money in my pocket and enjoy this game as a fan.
Chicago Bulls at Oklahoma City Thunder
The Bulls have lost 3 games in a row and their best player Jimmy Butler has publicly criticized new coach Fred Hoiberg for being too laid back. I expect the Bulls to give their best effort for their national television appearance and I expect it to make no difference against the Thunder, winners of 3 straight and and 9 of 10 with 5 blowouts. I will take the Thunder and happily give the 9 points.
San Antonio Spurs at Houston Rockets
The Rockets have rebounded slightly after firing coach Kevin McHale and evened their season record at 15-15. Even though the Rockets have won their last three home games I'll be picking the Spurs since they have won their last seven games with six coming by blowout. My only concern in giving the 7 points is that the Spurs are on the front end of a back to back and may rest some players but I think the resting will happen in tomorrow's home game agianst the Nuggets and not under the glare of the national spotlight.
Los Angeles Clippers at Los Angeles Lakers
The Clippers were my pick to win the championship yet here they are limping along with a 16-13 record. The Clippers have lost three in a row to the Spurs, Rockets, and Thunder by 10 or less points. Meanwhile the Lakers are playing their best ball of the season with 2 wins in 5 games after breaking their 6 game losing streak. I am not a buyer of the Kobe farewell tour hype and expect the Clippers to take out their frustrations in what is nominally a Lakers home game (the two teams play in the same arena) and easily cover the 11.5 points.
I am not picking the Cavaliers-Warriors game which is the most anticipated game so far this season. The Warriors are 7 point favorites but I expect the Cavaliers to cover the spread and probably win outright. Having said that I have been wrong about the Warriors all season long so I will keep my money in my pocket and enjoy this game as a fan.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
NBA Predictions December 23rd, 2015
None of yesterday's games caught my eye (although I was quite close to giving away $110 by picking the Nuggets at home giving 6 points to the Lakers). I split Monday's picks when the Clippers stayed close enough to the Thunder to cover the 2 point spread, losing by 1. My season results stand at a plus $440 mythical dollars with a record of 22-16-2. As usual I'll bet tonight’s NBA games using the the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Oklahoma City Thunder at Los Angeles Lakers
Not only did the Lakers cover last night against the Nuggets, they won the game behind 31 points from soon to be retired Kobe Bryant. I can;t expect this kind of performance two games in a row. These two teams met last week in Oklahoma City with the result being a 40 point Thunder win. I expect this game to be closer but unless the Thunder have been hitting the LA party scene I expect then to easily cover the 13 point spread and will make a $110 wager on it to win $100.
Memphis Grizzlies at Washington Wizards
The Grizzlies played last night in Philadelphia and blew out the hapless 76ers (now the 1-29 Philadelphia 76ers). The Wizards have had two days off but I will pick the Grizzlies because they have a 5-1 mark on the second half of back to back games which includes a 112-95 thumping of these same Wizards in Memphis earlier this month. As a bonus I will even be getting a point for my $110 bet.
Dallas Mavericks at Brooklyn Nets
The Mavericks fell behind early to the Toronto Raptors last night which caused coach Rick Carlisle to empty his bench and rest his starters. The reserves nearly pulled off the comeback but lost by 4 in the end. After the game Carlisle blasted the starters lack of effort and threatened his players saying "Look, if it's going to be like that, these guys aren't going to be Mavericks very long". I expect Carlisle's rant to have a short term effect on his fundamentally flawed team even though the Nets are coming off an upset win in Chicago to break their 5 game losing streak I'll lay then 3.5 points against the Nets in Brooklyn for a $110 bet.
Oklahoma City Thunder at Los Angeles Lakers
Not only did the Lakers cover last night against the Nuggets, they won the game behind 31 points from soon to be retired Kobe Bryant. I can;t expect this kind of performance two games in a row. These two teams met last week in Oklahoma City with the result being a 40 point Thunder win. I expect this game to be closer but unless the Thunder have been hitting the LA party scene I expect then to easily cover the 13 point spread and will make a $110 wager on it to win $100.
Memphis Grizzlies at Washington Wizards
The Grizzlies played last night in Philadelphia and blew out the hapless 76ers (now the 1-29 Philadelphia 76ers). The Wizards have had two days off but I will pick the Grizzlies because they have a 5-1 mark on the second half of back to back games which includes a 112-95 thumping of these same Wizards in Memphis earlier this month. As a bonus I will even be getting a point for my $110 bet.
Dallas Mavericks at Brooklyn Nets
The Mavericks fell behind early to the Toronto Raptors last night which caused coach Rick Carlisle to empty his bench and rest his starters. The reserves nearly pulled off the comeback but lost by 4 in the end. After the game Carlisle blasted the starters lack of effort and threatened his players saying "Look, if it's going to be like that, these guys aren't going to be Mavericks very long". I expect Carlisle's rant to have a short term effect on his fundamentally flawed team even though the Nets are coming off an upset win in Chicago to break their 5 game losing streak I'll lay then 3.5 points against the Nets in Brooklyn for a $110 bet.
Monday, December 21, 2015
NBA Predictions December 21st, 2015
I went 2-1 on yesterday’s predictions with the Timberwolves easily covering 1.5 points on the road against the hapless Nets and the Cavaliers also easily covering the 16 point spread at home against the now 1-28 Philadelphia 76ers. The Cavaliers game was worrisome since anything can happen in garbage time but the 76ers are so historically bad the outcome was never in doubt. The Pelicans spoiled my chance at a perfect day with a comeback win over the Nuggets. Yesterday’s results boosted my mythical winnings to $450 and my record to 21-15-2. Today I will be picking from the best of tonight’s NBA games using the the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Oklahoma City Thunder at Los Angeles Clippers
This is a battle between two hot teams. The Thunder have won seven of eight with the loss on the road against the Cavaliers in which they blew double digit leads twice. Meanwhile the Clippers had won six of seven before losing back to back road games to the Spurs and Rockets over the weekend. I believe the Thunder will make this a statement game and blow out the Clippers so I will give the two points and take the Thunders for $110 to win $100
Indiana Pacers at San Antonio Spurs.
The Spurs have gone 9-1 in December with eight double digit wins. The Pacers were on a 3 game winning streak until they lost in Memphis on Saturday. The Pacers have lost their last four road games three by double digits. The Spurs likely won’t be resting players since they last played Friday and won’t play until Wednesday so I will pick the Spurs to continue their spectacular play and give the 8.5 points on a $110 bet.
Oklahoma City Thunder at Los Angeles Clippers
This is a battle between two hot teams. The Thunder have won seven of eight with the loss on the road against the Cavaliers in which they blew double digit leads twice. Meanwhile the Clippers had won six of seven before losing back to back road games to the Spurs and Rockets over the weekend. I believe the Thunder will make this a statement game and blow out the Clippers so I will give the two points and take the Thunders for $110 to win $100
Indiana Pacers at San Antonio Spurs.
The Spurs have gone 9-1 in December with eight double digit wins. The Pacers were on a 3 game winning streak until they lost in Memphis on Saturday. The Pacers have lost their last four road games three by double digits. The Spurs likely won’t be resting players since they last played Friday and won’t play until Wednesday so I will pick the Spurs to continue their spectacular play and give the 8.5 points on a $110 bet.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
NBA Predictions December 20th, 2015
The NBA season is a third over and will start to take center stage in the sports world on Christmas Day. My predictions haven’t generated the traffic I would have hoped after last year’s spike when my playoff predictions made the second page of the Bing search engine so I am going to give my predictions their own blog post and title to make it easier for the search engines to locate them. Last Monday's picks went 1-2 with a push to drop my mythical winnings to $360 and my record to 19-14-2. As usual, today’s picks will be made using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Philadelphia 76ers at Cleveland Cavaliers.
The 76ers experiment in losing to gain top draft picks seems to be at an end with the hiring of Jerry Colangelo as the overseer of basketball operations and Mike D’Antoni as associate head coach, The 76ers have won only one of their first 28 games this year and have been particularly futile of late with three straight 20 point blowouts in road games. Today the 76ers take their show on the road against the Eastern Conference leading Cavaliers. The Cavaliers have struggled at home lately, winning three of four by five points or less. Despite the Cavaliers not being able to run up the score at home lately I will give the 16 points and bet $110 to win $100 that the Cavaliers will have a breakout game fueled by their inept opposition and the return of all-star point guard Kyrie Irving.
Minnesota Timberwolves at Brooklyn Nets.
The Timberwolves broke their four game losing streak on Friday night at home against the Kings while the Nets four game losing streak continues. The Timberwolves had been playing wel l on the road but have lost their last four games away from Minneapolis. The Nets have been able to play good teams close during their losing streak while still managing to lose. While I’m concerned about the young Timberwolves possibly partying too late for today’s noon start I will bet on youth and pick the Timberwolves to cover the 1.5 points they are giving to win $100 on a $110 wager.
New Orleans Pelicans at Denver Nuggets.
The surprising Nuggets have followed a eight game losing streak by winning five of their last seven (including a win in Toronto over the Raptors) to put them on the fringes of the Western Conference playoff race. Tonight the Pelicans finish their five game road trip in the Mile High city, having lost three out the first four. While the Pelicans have played better of late I think the Nuggets will wear them down with their superior depth in the thin mile high air and will give the point to pick the Nuggets on a $110 wager.
Philadelphia 76ers at Cleveland Cavaliers.
The 76ers experiment in losing to gain top draft picks seems to be at an end with the hiring of Jerry Colangelo as the overseer of basketball operations and Mike D’Antoni as associate head coach, The 76ers have won only one of their first 28 games this year and have been particularly futile of late with three straight 20 point blowouts in road games. Today the 76ers take their show on the road against the Eastern Conference leading Cavaliers. The Cavaliers have struggled at home lately, winning three of four by five points or less. Despite the Cavaliers not being able to run up the score at home lately I will give the 16 points and bet $110 to win $100 that the Cavaliers will have a breakout game fueled by their inept opposition and the return of all-star point guard Kyrie Irving.
Minnesota Timberwolves at Brooklyn Nets.
The Timberwolves broke their four game losing streak on Friday night at home against the Kings while the Nets four game losing streak continues. The Timberwolves had been playing wel l on the road but have lost their last four games away from Minneapolis. The Nets have been able to play good teams close during their losing streak while still managing to lose. While I’m concerned about the young Timberwolves possibly partying too late for today’s noon start I will bet on youth and pick the Timberwolves to cover the 1.5 points they are giving to win $100 on a $110 wager.
New Orleans Pelicans at Denver Nuggets.
The surprising Nuggets have followed a eight game losing streak by winning five of their last seven (including a win in Toronto over the Raptors) to put them on the fringes of the Western Conference playoff race. Tonight the Pelicans finish their five game road trip in the Mile High city, having lost three out the first four. While the Pelicans have played better of late I think the Nuggets will wear them down with their superior depth in the thin mile high air and will give the point to pick the Nuggets on a $110 wager.
Monday, December 14, 2015
For a Fistful of Dollars
Welcome to the new Dollar Tree of Marshalltown, Iowa. 'Bucky' the Dollar Tree mascot was at the Grand Opening on Thursday.
I love all dollar stores and the Dollar Tree is the best of class in that particular department. It has a steady supply of closeouts, bargains, not so top quality merchandise, and top quality merchandise in tiny portions. Two months ago the old Dollar Tree stopped restocking their shelves and moving their remaining inventory to the front of the store. I went there to get some dollar store items as bribes for my chess club at St. Francis and the pickings were getting pretty slim. The Dollar Tree clerks told me that the new store was going to open in December and they were running a skeleton staff until then.
Last week the grand opening of the new Dollar Tree was announced for Thursday December 10th. I happened to have the day off in order to get some warranty work done on my car so Kathy and I took a trip to the new Dollar Tree. The parking lot was so full that we had to park in the bank across the street but the new Dollar Tree was so roomy that once we were inside it didn’t seem crowded at all.
The old Dollar Tree was very tiny with five aisles with a counter with two registers. The new store was massive by comparison with five registers, ten aisles, and coolers for cold and frozen food. Kathy and I inspected each aisle. There was the same Dollar Tree merchandise just a lot more of it. One entire wall consisted of gift bags with different holiday sayings in different holiday colors. While the old store had room for a few cans of vegetables the new store has an entire section of canned vegetables.
In addition to name brand cereal knock-offs, the new Dollar Tree has an impressive selection of canned vegetables at 79 cents a can which may or may not be a bargain.
The Dollar Tree has it's share of knockoffs some of which are disguised more than others. On the left is just FOR MEN hair color not JUST FOR MEN. The item in the center looks like cheese but is really 'sandwich slices'. At least the SOURCREME on the right is clearly labeled as UNREAL...
There is some top quality merchandise at The Dollar Tree. The toothpaste for a buck seems like a bargain and would be especially useful if you fail the marijuana test.
The new Dollar Tree has room for cold and frozen food in addition to the normal fare of candy, cookies, and other junk food but the Broken Pawn does not condone the battering of mushrooms or any other fruit, vegetable, meat, fish, or poultry and strongly condemn any such actions!
After selecting our purchases we were able to quickly checkout and were on our way!
My 3-2 mark in NBA games on Friday netted me $80 which would have made for a nice Dollar Tree spending spree. I got extremely lucky when Pelicans missed a last second free throw to allow the Wizards to cover the spread and was very unlucky when the Timberwolves blew a second half 16 point lead against the Nuggets. Friday's result puts my record at 18-12-1 with $480 in mythical winnings. As usual, tonight's picks will be using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with mythical wagers of $110 per game to win $100.
My computer likes four of tonight's 10 games. I will take the Pistons getting 2 at home against the Clippers, the visiting Raptors getting 5 at the struggling Indiana Pacers, the Wizards getting 4 on the road against the Memphis Grizzlies (who played in Miami last night), and the Trailblazers getting three in New Orleans against the Pelicans.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Extremists Everywhere
Last week there was a mass shooting in San Bernardino California. Two weeks ago there was a mass shooting in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Last month there was a mass suicide bombing attack in Paris France.
People who are in favor of stricter gun control are focusing their attention on the mass shootings as proof positive that there are too many guns in the hands of too many people. People who are against stricter gun controls are muted about the Planned Parenthood shooting while focusing their attention on the fact that the Paris bombings used suicide bombers as well as guns, the San Bernardino murderers used guns that were purchased legally in California under some of the strictest gun laws and if more people were armed less people die in mass shootings.
Opponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the Planned Parenthood attack was performed by a ‘white terrorist’ and it is racist to want to keep Syrian refugees and other muslims out of the county while not assuming that all white people could be closet terrorists. Proponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the San Bernardino was carried out by seemingly normal people who converted to Islamic jihadists. The next question is usually how we can be sure that Syrian refugees being proposed to be resettled in the United States won’t become similarly converted. Soon to follow is how can a country with at least 11 million people residing illegally claim to have safe borders or be able to keep the population secure from even more terrorist attacks.
All these shooters and bombers are pretty extreme. While the western world may not be at war with Islam it certainly appears that there are large parts of Islam at war with the western world. Presidential candidate Donald Trump got lambasted in the media for claiming that there were Muslims cheering the 911 attacks. I heard a lot of the same anecdotes at the time but now there doesn’t seem to be any written or recorded evidence. I do remember seeing pictures of large numbers of people in other countries wearing Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. Playing to people fears is a sure fire way to garner a certain amount of support and not being able to go to work or a supermarket or a planned parenthood facility without knowing whether or not you are going to be shot at or suicide bombed makes it easy for the fear mongers to do what they do best.
The general consensus of America about Planned Parenthood shootings and the recent extremist attacks is to do everything and nothing at the same time. The right has a deadlock on any relaxation of gun control – not even to deny weapons to ‘non-violent felons’ where they are as intransigent as the left is in declaring that restrictions of partial birth abortions constitutes a ‘war on women’. In both cases one side sees any compromise as the harbinger to an all-out assault on what is seen as constitutional rights and when viewed through that lens it is reasonable to view any compromise as the first step to surrender.
President Obama took to the airwaves on Sunday to ask for calm, gun restrictions from people on the no-fly lists, more screening on people entering the country without visas, and for Americans not to blame all Muslims for the San Bernardino attacks. He also said that the US was not going to send ground troops to the Middle East (even as the government is sending special operations forces to that region).
While the President was been called a lot of names and his ideas called weak I’m not sure what anyone would expect. The country as a whole has decided that they are tired of sending troops to the Middle East where we have no friends and invested trillions of dollars and thousands of lives with very little to show for it. The constant air strikes have been damaging but not decisive. The forces we hope to back in that part of the world don’t seem capable of taking back their territory and likely an even money bet to defect to ISIS. It is easy for someone like Donald Trump to say they would keep all muslims out of the country because he isn’t in a position to make that order just like every presidential candidate in my life time has had a plan to balance the federal budget that has happened only once in my lifetime no matter how many presidents get elected.
Personally I don’t see why if I have to prove to the State of Iowa that I am competent to drive a car why gun owners shouldn’t have to prove competency to own a firearm. I have no idea why anyone would ever need to own an assault weapon but the people I know who do have plenty of reasons most of which involve their basic human freedoms and rights which sounds a lot to me like the basic reproductive rights that allow any kind of abortion including the late term ones which sounds a lot to me like the basic human rights that are invoked whenever the subject of removing the 11 million plus people that are in this country illegally is brought up.
So we have mentally unstable people and converted jihadists seemingly able to get firearms at will, millions of people in the country illegally and even if one in a million were terrorists that would be enough to have an attack like the one in Paris or the Boston Marathon bombings. Any attempts to solve any of these issues meets with such a hue and cry from the left or right that nothing gets accomplished. As extreme as the Islamist extremists and anti-abortionists are they can’t hold a candle to the extremists that run American politics.
Speaking of extreme, my Monday basketball picks were extremely bad as I went 0-2 thanks to the Raptors dilly-dallying around with the Lakers and the Bulls blowing a huge second half lead. My current record stands at 15-10-1 with my mythical winnings down to $400. For tonight's picks I will be using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with mythical wagers of $110 per game to win $100.
There are 11 games on the schedule tonight and my computer likes 5 of the games. I will take the Timberwolves getting 1 at Denver against the Nuggets, The Hornets getting 3.5 at Memphis to face the Grizzlies, the Wizards getting 2.5 at the New Orleans Pelicans, the Spurs giving 14.5 against the visiting Lakers, and the Magic getting 3.5 points for their home game against the Cavaliers. My mind is screaming that these are all the wrong picks but so far this year the computer has been right far more often than my mind.
People who are in favor of stricter gun control are focusing their attention on the mass shootings as proof positive that there are too many guns in the hands of too many people. People who are against stricter gun controls are muted about the Planned Parenthood shooting while focusing their attention on the fact that the Paris bombings used suicide bombers as well as guns, the San Bernardino murderers used guns that were purchased legally in California under some of the strictest gun laws and if more people were armed less people die in mass shootings.
Opponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the Planned Parenthood attack was performed by a ‘white terrorist’ and it is racist to want to keep Syrian refugees and other muslims out of the county while not assuming that all white people could be closet terrorists. Proponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the San Bernardino was carried out by seemingly normal people who converted to Islamic jihadists. The next question is usually how we can be sure that Syrian refugees being proposed to be resettled in the United States won’t become similarly converted. Soon to follow is how can a country with at least 11 million people residing illegally claim to have safe borders or be able to keep the population secure from even more terrorist attacks.
All these shooters and bombers are pretty extreme. While the western world may not be at war with Islam it certainly appears that there are large parts of Islam at war with the western world. Presidential candidate Donald Trump got lambasted in the media for claiming that there were Muslims cheering the 911 attacks. I heard a lot of the same anecdotes at the time but now there doesn’t seem to be any written or recorded evidence. I do remember seeing pictures of large numbers of people in other countries wearing Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. Playing to people fears is a sure fire way to garner a certain amount of support and not being able to go to work or a supermarket or a planned parenthood facility without knowing whether or not you are going to be shot at or suicide bombed makes it easy for the fear mongers to do what they do best.
The general consensus of America about Planned Parenthood shootings and the recent extremist attacks is to do everything and nothing at the same time. The right has a deadlock on any relaxation of gun control – not even to deny weapons to ‘non-violent felons’ where they are as intransigent as the left is in declaring that restrictions of partial birth abortions constitutes a ‘war on women’. In both cases one side sees any compromise as the harbinger to an all-out assault on what is seen as constitutional rights and when viewed through that lens it is reasonable to view any compromise as the first step to surrender.
President Obama took to the airwaves on Sunday to ask for calm, gun restrictions from people on the no-fly lists, more screening on people entering the country without visas, and for Americans not to blame all Muslims for the San Bernardino attacks. He also said that the US was not going to send ground troops to the Middle East (even as the government is sending special operations forces to that region).
While the President was been called a lot of names and his ideas called weak I’m not sure what anyone would expect. The country as a whole has decided that they are tired of sending troops to the Middle East where we have no friends and invested trillions of dollars and thousands of lives with very little to show for it. The constant air strikes have been damaging but not decisive. The forces we hope to back in that part of the world don’t seem capable of taking back their territory and likely an even money bet to defect to ISIS. It is easy for someone like Donald Trump to say they would keep all muslims out of the country because he isn’t in a position to make that order just like every presidential candidate in my life time has had a plan to balance the federal budget that has happened only once in my lifetime no matter how many presidents get elected.
Personally I don’t see why if I have to prove to the State of Iowa that I am competent to drive a car why gun owners shouldn’t have to prove competency to own a firearm. I have no idea why anyone would ever need to own an assault weapon but the people I know who do have plenty of reasons most of which involve their basic human freedoms and rights which sounds a lot to me like the basic reproductive rights that allow any kind of abortion including the late term ones which sounds a lot to me like the basic human rights that are invoked whenever the subject of removing the 11 million plus people that are in this country illegally is brought up.
So we have mentally unstable people and converted jihadists seemingly able to get firearms at will, millions of people in the country illegally and even if one in a million were terrorists that would be enough to have an attack like the one in Paris or the Boston Marathon bombings. Any attempts to solve any of these issues meets with such a hue and cry from the left or right that nothing gets accomplished. As extreme as the Islamist extremists and anti-abortionists are they can’t hold a candle to the extremists that run American politics.
Speaking of extreme, my Monday basketball picks were extremely bad as I went 0-2 thanks to the Raptors dilly-dallying around with the Lakers and the Bulls blowing a huge second half lead. My current record stands at 15-10-1 with my mythical winnings down to $400. For tonight's picks I will be using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with mythical wagers of $110 per game to win $100.
There are 11 games on the schedule tonight and my computer likes 5 of the games. I will take the Timberwolves getting 1 at Denver against the Nuggets, The Hornets getting 3.5 at Memphis to face the Grizzlies, the Wizards getting 2.5 at the New Orleans Pelicans, the Spurs giving 14.5 against the visiting Lakers, and the Magic getting 3.5 points for their home game against the Cavaliers. My mind is screaming that these are all the wrong picks but so far this year the computer has been right far more often than my mind.
Monday, December 7, 2015
Raising and Lowering the Bar
It appears the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls single season record of 72-10 is in serious jeopardy for the first time in 20 years. The defending champion Golden State Warriors have started the season 22-0 which means they can lose three games and still be ahead of the Bulls pace. Not only are the Warriors setting their sights on the all-time best regular season record they are also taking aim at the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers record winning streak of 33 games in a row. The Warriors are in the middle of a seven game road trip with tough games in Toronto and Indiana as part of back to back games before heading home with the Cleveland Cavaliers being the last big test on Christmas Day. I don’t think the Warriors will be able to win 13 more games without running into a team that is playing out of their minds or having a cold shooting night from MVP Stephen Curry but I didn’t think they would start the season with 21 straight wins and here they are.
The New England Patriots most recent attempt to join the looked to be on target to join the 1972-73 Miami Dolphins as the only perfect team in NFL went by the wayside last week when they lost to the Denver Broncos in overtime. In 2007 the Patriots were 18-0 before losing the Super Bowl to the New York Giants in the most serious challenge to the Dolphins record to date. The Patriots loss left the Carolina Panthers as the last remaining challenger to perfection with their 12-0 start. The Panthers remaining five games include zero games against teams with winning records (there is a home and home with the 6-6 Atlanta Falcons and a home finale against the 6-6 Tampa Bay Buccaneers). On paper it looks like the Panthers will go 16-0. I don’t believe the Panthers will be able to finish a perfect season. While they have a great defense and an efficient offense led by MVP Cam Newton I’ve seen Newton go high and wide on short passes a number of times which I expect to be very costly come playoff time.
I wouldn’t have minded seeing the 2007-2008 Patriots go undefeated (if they hadn’t had to play my favorite Giants in the Super Bowl). I won’t mind seeing the Golden State Warriors rewrite the NBA record book or even seeing the Panthers go 19-0. At the same time there is a part of me that likes to think that when I saw the Dolphins and Bulls play that I was witnessing something once in a lifetime special but it is also possible that this years Panthers or Warriors are also once in a lifetime special even though I’m not seeing it in the Panthers.
In chess new records are set all the time. Most of them are age related. Last year Samuel Sevian became the youngest American Grandmaster at the age of 13 years 10 months and 27 days. Before that he was the youngest American International Master at the age of 12 years 10 months and 16 days. Chasing close behind Sevian is Wisconsin’s Awonder Liang. I became acquainted with Awonder and his family when his dad Will took him to three chess tournaments I directed in 2013 and 2014. Last month Awonder broke Sevian’s record for America’s youngest ever International Master by claiming the title at the age of 12 years 7 months and 16 days. I am happy for Awonder breaking the record but at the same time I feel sorry for him. He has a mere 15 months to attempt to become America’s youngest chess Grandmaster and is already being chased by Connecticut’s Maximillian Lu who recently broke Awonder’s record as the youngest American chess master by 12 days, claiming the title at the age if 9 years 11 months and 2 days. Liang also took that record from Sevian who attained master status at the age of 9 years 11 months and 24 days for those who keep track of such things.
I thought I had found a trend that the bar for achievement is getting higher and higher until I noticed n Saturday that the Texas Longhorns college football team defeated the 12th ranked Baylor Bears on Saturday to close their season with 5-7 mark. The reason I thought Texas had closed their season was that I was under the impression that a team needed to win six wins to become bowl-eligible. For example on Saturday the Kansas State Wildcats beat the West Virginia Hokies in their season finale to even their record a 6-6 with the ESPN.com headline saying “Kansas State earns bowl eligibility, knocks off West Virginia”. But instead the Texas game article discussed the possibility of the Longhorns going to a bowl.
What I didn’t understand was that not being bowl-eligible doesn’t mean a team isn’t eligible for a bowl. There are 40 bowl games this year and only 77 teams that have the six wins required to be bowl eligible. I would have expected some of these bowls to be cancelled or one of the many teams in the minor league FCS with six wins to get a shot at a bowl game but instead the NCAA is going to allow teams with five wins to go to bowls based on their Academic Progress Rate which grades schools on the percentage of their student-athletes that receive financial aid, stay in school, and remain academically eligible. Schools that fail to keep a large percentage of their athletes in school and eligible are penalized with the loss of practice time up to postseason ineligibility.
The NCAA is going to allow the five win teams with the highest Academic Progress Rate to fill the bowl slots left open by the lack of teams with at least an even record. Isn’t it nice of the NCAA to factor in Academic Progress in deciding who gets the scraps from the bowl table? Since a losing team is a losing team is a losing team wouldn’t it be even nicer to let the losing teams with the highest Academic Progress Rate no matter how many wins they have? The losing teams that maintain high academic standards would have a chance at going to a bowl game. In any event I was happy to see the bar being lowered in at least one aspect of society to give the rest of us low achievers a chance at the rewards of high achievement without having to achieve much of anything.
The bar was neither raised or lowered were my basketball predictions after Friday Night's split. I picked the Nets to cover the three point spread and they were 20 down at the end of the first quarter. Luckily the Pistons bailed me out with a 7 point win over the Bucks which barely covered the 6 point spread. Splitting the picks brought my mythical winnings down $10 to $620 and my season record remains +7 at 15-8-1. As usual I will be making tonight’s picks using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Phoenix Suns at Chicago Bulls
The Bulls have won 2 out of 3 on their current home stand and will host the Phoenix Suns who have the last four games of their six game road trip that ends tonight. The Bulls beat the Suns in Phoenix two weeks ago by six points and the Suns played in Memphis yesterday so I will take the Bulls for $110 and give the six points to the Suns to win $100
Los Angeles Lakers at Toronto Raptors
After another blowout loss to the Pistons yesterday, the Lakers head to Toronto where the Raptors looked like the second best team in the league on Saturday night. Unfortunately for Toronto they happened to be playing the best team in the league and lost by three to the Warriors. I predict the Raptors will take out their frustrations on the Lakers and will bet $110 to win $100 that they will cover the 13 point spread.
The New England Patriots most recent attempt to join the looked to be on target to join the 1972-73 Miami Dolphins as the only perfect team in NFL went by the wayside last week when they lost to the Denver Broncos in overtime. In 2007 the Patriots were 18-0 before losing the Super Bowl to the New York Giants in the most serious challenge to the Dolphins record to date. The Patriots loss left the Carolina Panthers as the last remaining challenger to perfection with their 12-0 start. The Panthers remaining five games include zero games against teams with winning records (there is a home and home with the 6-6 Atlanta Falcons and a home finale against the 6-6 Tampa Bay Buccaneers). On paper it looks like the Panthers will go 16-0. I don’t believe the Panthers will be able to finish a perfect season. While they have a great defense and an efficient offense led by MVP Cam Newton I’ve seen Newton go high and wide on short passes a number of times which I expect to be very costly come playoff time.
I wouldn’t have minded seeing the 2007-2008 Patriots go undefeated (if they hadn’t had to play my favorite Giants in the Super Bowl). I won’t mind seeing the Golden State Warriors rewrite the NBA record book or even seeing the Panthers go 19-0. At the same time there is a part of me that likes to think that when I saw the Dolphins and Bulls play that I was witnessing something once in a lifetime special but it is also possible that this years Panthers or Warriors are also once in a lifetime special even though I’m not seeing it in the Panthers.
In chess new records are set all the time. Most of them are age related. Last year Samuel Sevian became the youngest American Grandmaster at the age of 13 years 10 months and 27 days. Before that he was the youngest American International Master at the age of 12 years 10 months and 16 days. Chasing close behind Sevian is Wisconsin’s Awonder Liang. I became acquainted with Awonder and his family when his dad Will took him to three chess tournaments I directed in 2013 and 2014. Last month Awonder broke Sevian’s record for America’s youngest ever International Master by claiming the title at the age of 12 years 7 months and 16 days. I am happy for Awonder breaking the record but at the same time I feel sorry for him. He has a mere 15 months to attempt to become America’s youngest chess Grandmaster and is already being chased by Connecticut’s Maximillian Lu who recently broke Awonder’s record as the youngest American chess master by 12 days, claiming the title at the age if 9 years 11 months and 2 days. Liang also took that record from Sevian who attained master status at the age of 9 years 11 months and 24 days for those who keep track of such things.
I thought I had found a trend that the bar for achievement is getting higher and higher until I noticed n Saturday that the Texas Longhorns college football team defeated the 12th ranked Baylor Bears on Saturday to close their season with 5-7 mark. The reason I thought Texas had closed their season was that I was under the impression that a team needed to win six wins to become bowl-eligible. For example on Saturday the Kansas State Wildcats beat the West Virginia Hokies in their season finale to even their record a 6-6 with the ESPN.com headline saying “Kansas State earns bowl eligibility, knocks off West Virginia”. But instead the Texas game article discussed the possibility of the Longhorns going to a bowl.
What I didn’t understand was that not being bowl-eligible doesn’t mean a team isn’t eligible for a bowl. There are 40 bowl games this year and only 77 teams that have the six wins required to be bowl eligible. I would have expected some of these bowls to be cancelled or one of the many teams in the minor league FCS with six wins to get a shot at a bowl game but instead the NCAA is going to allow teams with five wins to go to bowls based on their Academic Progress Rate which grades schools on the percentage of their student-athletes that receive financial aid, stay in school, and remain academically eligible. Schools that fail to keep a large percentage of their athletes in school and eligible are penalized with the loss of practice time up to postseason ineligibility.
The NCAA is going to allow the five win teams with the highest Academic Progress Rate to fill the bowl slots left open by the lack of teams with at least an even record. Isn’t it nice of the NCAA to factor in Academic Progress in deciding who gets the scraps from the bowl table? Since a losing team is a losing team is a losing team wouldn’t it be even nicer to let the losing teams with the highest Academic Progress Rate no matter how many wins they have? The losing teams that maintain high academic standards would have a chance at going to a bowl game. In any event I was happy to see the bar being lowered in at least one aspect of society to give the rest of us low achievers a chance at the rewards of high achievement without having to achieve much of anything.
The bar was neither raised or lowered were my basketball predictions after Friday Night's split. I picked the Nets to cover the three point spread and they were 20 down at the end of the first quarter. Luckily the Pistons bailed me out with a 7 point win over the Bucks which barely covered the 6 point spread. Splitting the picks brought my mythical winnings down $10 to $620 and my season record remains +7 at 15-8-1. As usual I will be making tonight’s picks using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Phoenix Suns at Chicago Bulls
The Bulls have won 2 out of 3 on their current home stand and will host the Phoenix Suns who have the last four games of their six game road trip that ends tonight. The Bulls beat the Suns in Phoenix two weeks ago by six points and the Suns played in Memphis yesterday so I will take the Bulls for $110 and give the six points to the Suns to win $100
Los Angeles Lakers at Toronto Raptors
After another blowout loss to the Pistons yesterday, the Lakers head to Toronto where the Raptors looked like the second best team in the league on Saturday night. Unfortunately for Toronto they happened to be playing the best team in the league and lost by three to the Warriors. I predict the Raptors will take out their frustrations on the Lakers and will bet $110 to win $100 that they will cover the 13 point spread.
Friday, December 4, 2015
TV Review - The Walking Dead Season Six (First Half)
WARNING : WALKING DEAD SEASON 6 EPISODES 1 THROUGH 8 SPOILERS BELOW!!!
The first half of the sixth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead concluded on Sunday night with our intrepid band of zombie apocalypse survivors trapped inside their homes in the Alexandria ‘Safe’ zone while the hordes of zombies that had laid siege to the town roamed the streets after a collapsing tower created a breach in the walls that had sheltered the community. There were more questions raised than answers provided in the last 10 minutes of the final episode when the group led by Rick Grimes slathered themselves in zombie guts in order to walk past the herd undetected. Undetected at least until the youngest son of Rick’s new flame Jessie starts calling “Mom..Mom..Mom’’ as the group walks through the middle of the zombie pack. Jessie’s parenting skills must be called into question since her oldest son Ron allowed the zombies into the house in the first place by trying to kill Rick’s son Carl in the garage which led to a fistfight which broke a door that let the zombies in the house. Meanwhile on the other side of the camp Carol and her brass knuckle knife took on Morgan and his bo staff in an argument over whether Carol was going to kill the member of the ‘Wolves’ that Morgan was keeping prisoner in an attempt to convert him to Morgan’s pacifist world view. After a fantastic fight Morgan knocks out Carol but is in turn knocked out by the Wolf, who then takes Denise the town doctor as a hostage into the zombie horde.
The entire first half of season six took place in the course of one day and I feel very sorry for the people of Alexandra who had led a sheltered existence with running water and solar power before Rick Grimes and company moved in. The morning started with a discussion on how to make homemade pasta while Rick talked the town into his plan to lure the thousands of zombies trapped in a nearby quarry far away from the town. The plan was going fine until the zombies broke out of quarry on their own and moved up the time table. Then the Wolves attacked the town while most of the best fighters were herding the zombies. After the Wolves’ attack was repulsed thousands of zombies broke away from the main herd and surrounded Alexandria leaving the town rationing their food instead of discussing how to make homemade pasta. And then the tower fell, breaking through the walls and letting the zombies in the town. It was quite the day and I hope if Marshalltown ever gets overrun by zombies and my house is surrounded that Daisy and Baxter won’t have some sort of squabble that breaks a window and lets the zombies in to devour everyone.
It seems like most of the Alexandrians were either eaten by zombies or killed by the Wolves but luckily there are more Alexandrians than the red shirted Star Trek crew members that always seemed to be killed in the first few minutes of each episode. Alexandrians were killed leading the zombies away from town, in the attack on the town by the Wolves, trying to get back to Alexandria after the zombies went off course, and finally Deanna the town leader was bitten by the zombies after the tower smashed the wall open. Being bitten allowed Deanna to say her goodbyes to Rick and Michonne but she got her chance to be zombie food when she used the gun she was going to commit suicide with to shoot five zombies instead. Miraculously none of our familiar band of zombie hunters succumbed although Glenn had a close call when he was trapped in small fenced in area lying on the ground surrounded by dozens of zombies that were feasting on the intestines of the cowardly Nicholas who had just shot himself rather than try to survive. Luckily, Glenn rolled under a nearby dumpster and the zombies moved on after their Nicholas-feast to allow his escape.
The entire first half of the season seemed contrived to me but it is a television show about a zombie apocalypse after all and the first two episodes were as action packed as any of this series. The characters lurched from crisis to crisis with very little break in between. One of the hallmarks of The Walking Dead is showing man’s inhumanity to man. This half season had very little of that with the exception of the Wolves’ attack and the Darryl/Abraham/Shasha encounter with another group of survivors. It all felt like a long prologue to the second half of the season with a final battle with the Wolves and the introduction of Negan (the baddest of bad guys from the comic series).
A longtime staple of this show that continued through season six was offering hope to the main characters and then smashing that hope to bits. After episodes not knowing whether Glenn was dead or alive he floats some balloons towards the town as a signal. His pregnant wife Maggie points it out and as the townspeople marvel at the balloons the tower comes crashing down through the walls and lets the zombies into the town. Darryl escapes from a small group of survivors, stealing a bag that had his crossbow and insulin that one of the survivors needed. He brings the insulin back and helps them fight off the group they stole the insulin from. He offers them a place in Alexandria but the diabetic gets eaten by some zombies in sleeping bags and the remaining survivors pull a gun on Daryl and steal his motorcycle and crossbow. Then Darryl finds a working oil truck, picks up Abraham and Sasha, and the trio is happily rolling down the road when they run into Negan’s group of motorcycle warriors that demands the truck.
As disjointed as this season has seemed so far with long periods of inaction before the next crisis The Walking Dead remains one of my favorite television programs. It’s going to be a long ten weeks until the second half of season six starts on February 14th but until then I can ponder how many of the Alexandria residents will survive until the end of the season (the over under is 13.5) and why Rick didn’t cover himself in zombie guts when the zombies were still outside the gates and he was looking for a way to get to one of the cars outside the walls to lead the zombies away. I’m sure these and many more questions will be answered in the next half season.
One question I sure my readers want to know is what happened to my Monday basketball picks. Not only did none of the three road favorites I picked cover, two of them lost outright to drop my season record to 14-7-1 and my mythical winnings to $630. Just like my favorite characters from the Walking Dead I will rebound from Monday’s crisis and look for better days ahead starting with tonight’s picks using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Brooklyn Nets at New York Knicks
Even though the Nets are technically on the 'road' I am going to bank on the fact that Brooklyn has won their last four home games and will bet $110 to win $100 that they will be able to beat the Knicks who have lost four out of five games. As an additional bonus, the Nets are getting three points.
Milwaukee Bucks at Detroit Pistons
The Bucks have lost four out of five games and travel to Detroit where the Pistons have won two games of their current four game homestand. I think the Pistons will avenge their blowout loss to the Bucks in Milwaukee two weeks ago and cover the six points and will wager $110 to win $100 on the Pistons.
Zombie attack, anyone?
The entire first half of season six took place in the course of one day and I feel very sorry for the people of Alexandra who had led a sheltered existence with running water and solar power before Rick Grimes and company moved in. The morning started with a discussion on how to make homemade pasta while Rick talked the town into his plan to lure the thousands of zombies trapped in a nearby quarry far away from the town. The plan was going fine until the zombies broke out of quarry on their own and moved up the time table. Then the Wolves attacked the town while most of the best fighters were herding the zombies. After the Wolves’ attack was repulsed thousands of zombies broke away from the main herd and surrounded Alexandria leaving the town rationing their food instead of discussing how to make homemade pasta. And then the tower fell, breaking through the walls and letting the zombies in the town. It was quite the day and I hope if Marshalltown ever gets overrun by zombies and my house is surrounded that Daisy and Baxter won’t have some sort of squabble that breaks a window and lets the zombies in to devour everyone.
Glenn is the Houdini of The Walking Dead. Witness this escape from an alley of zombies!
The entire first half of the season seemed contrived to me but it is a television show about a zombie apocalypse after all and the first two episodes were as action packed as any of this series. The characters lurched from crisis to crisis with very little break in between. One of the hallmarks of The Walking Dead is showing man’s inhumanity to man. This half season had very little of that with the exception of the Wolves’ attack and the Darryl/Abraham/Shasha encounter with another group of survivors. It all felt like a long prologue to the second half of the season with a final battle with the Wolves and the introduction of Negan (the baddest of bad guys from the comic series).
A longtime staple of this show that continued through season six was offering hope to the main characters and then smashing that hope to bits. After episodes not knowing whether Glenn was dead or alive he floats some balloons towards the town as a signal. His pregnant wife Maggie points it out and as the townspeople marvel at the balloons the tower comes crashing down through the walls and lets the zombies into the town. Darryl escapes from a small group of survivors, stealing a bag that had his crossbow and insulin that one of the survivors needed. He brings the insulin back and helps them fight off the group they stole the insulin from. He offers them a place in Alexandria but the diabetic gets eaten by some zombies in sleeping bags and the remaining survivors pull a gun on Daryl and steal his motorcycle and crossbow. Then Darryl finds a working oil truck, picks up Abraham and Sasha, and the trio is happily rolling down the road when they run into Negan’s group of motorcycle warriors that demands the truck.
As disjointed as this season has seemed so far with long periods of inaction before the next crisis The Walking Dead remains one of my favorite television programs. It’s going to be a long ten weeks until the second half of season six starts on February 14th but until then I can ponder how many of the Alexandria residents will survive until the end of the season (the over under is 13.5) and why Rick didn’t cover himself in zombie guts when the zombies were still outside the gates and he was looking for a way to get to one of the cars outside the walls to lead the zombies away. I’m sure these and many more questions will be answered in the next half season.
Waiting in the wings is super bad guy Negan...
Brooklyn Nets at New York Knicks
Even though the Nets are technically on the 'road' I am going to bank on the fact that Brooklyn has won their last four home games and will bet $110 to win $100 that they will be able to beat the Knicks who have lost four out of five games. As an additional bonus, the Nets are getting three points.
Milwaukee Bucks at Detroit Pistons
The Bucks have lost four out of five games and travel to Detroit where the Pistons have won two games of their current four game homestand. I think the Pistons will avenge their blowout loss to the Bucks in Milwaukee two weeks ago and cover the six points and will wager $110 to win $100 on the Pistons.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Movie Review - Creed (and the Fridley Theater Fraud)
I went with Kathy to see Creed on Thanksgiving afternoon. Creed is the seventh movie in the saga of Sylvester Stallone’s ‘Rocky Balboa’ character and at the same time a stand-alone film with Rocky as an important but decidedly supporting role. Adonis Johnson is an orphaned juvenile delinquent that we first meet punching out a bigger juvenile delinquent in a juvenile delinquent center when he is rescued from his situation by Mary Anne Creed, the widow of Apollo Creed (the boxer who Rocky beats for the world championship and killed in the ring by Russian Ivan Drago in Rocky IV), dropping the bombshell that Johnson is Creed’s illegitimate son. Mary Anne Creed is played by Phylicia Rashad and when she gets Adonis out of the juvenile delinquent center the first thing that popped into my mind was whether she was looking for Bill Cosby so she could bail him out of jail.
We next see Johnson as an adult working for a big financial services firm and boxing on the side in Mexico. He uses the name of Johnson to avoid unwanted comparisons to his father and to make his own name even though he has no problem living in the Creed family palatial mansion. Johnson quits his day job to become a full time boxer. He heads to the local gym but can’t get respect as a serious fighter so he heads to Philadelphia to get Rocky Balboa to train him.
Rocky Balboa is much the same as the Rocky we left at the end of the 2005 Rocky Balboa movie except he is lonelier than ever before. Rocky still has his restaurant but Paulie is buried next to Adrian, Little Marie and her son Steps aren’t working at the restaurant any more, and his son Robert has moved to Vancouver. All Rocky does is feed his turtle, buy food for the restaurant, and visit Adrian and Paulie’s graves. Johnson spills the beans about his father and Rocky finds a new purpose in training him.
After the introductions the movie becomes a version of the original Rocky except in a sort of funhouse mirror with Michael B. Jordan playing Rocky’s part and Stallone playing the role of Mick the trainer. Instead of meeting a girl in a pet store who lives with an abusive alcoholic brother, Johnson meets a singer in an apartment in his building that lives with a degenerative hearing condition. Rocky as Mick trains Johnson using the drills Mick made him go through like chasing chickens and boxing with his shoe tied to each other. I especially liked how Mick’s old gym has become a shiny redone showplace so Rocky finds a filthy dive gym to do his training.
Johnson wins his first fight against the son of one of Rocky’s old pals but is outed as Apollo Creed’s son by the jealous father. This leads to an opportunity to take on the English World Champion in Liverpool under the condition that Johnson takes on the ‘Creed’ name to cash in on the box office appeal. Around the same time Rocky finds out that he has cancer and while he really wants to join Adrian and Paulie in the afterlife he and Johnson decide to take on their challenges like the champions they are, were, and want to be.
Creed has gotten highly positive reviews and Stallone is being touted as a potential Academy Award winner. I liked the movie a lot but wouldn’t say it was the best movie I’ve seen in years or even this year (Terminator:Genisys gets my vote for 2015). I thought the fight scenes were the best I’ve ever seen. There were a lot of close-up shots of only one boxer that made it look like I was in the ring and could smell his breath. The fighting was fast and furious but I never felt like it was speeded up artificially by cutting shots to different angles the way some of the other so-called action movies do. Stallone plays his aging Rocky character to perfection. Before he decided to train Johnson he reminded me of a lot of old guys I see that have nothing to live for and are just waiting to die. When he decided to train Johnson he reminded me of the old guys I know that are always living for something even if it is just to wake up tomorrow. His waffling between the two view points when he finds out he has cancer is a great character study. I liked Michael B. Jordan as Johnson-Creed, especially how he showed that he was scared senseless before his fights even while he was putting up the obligatory tough guy stance.
The thing I didn’t like about the movie was that since it was certainly a Rocky reboot I didn’t really understand Johnson/Creed’s motivation to be a boxer. Unlike the original Rocky who was a leg-breaker for the mob with no way out except his once in a lifetime chance to fight Apollo Creed, Johnson lives in a mansion and has a six or seven figure career as a financial services big shot waiting for him whenever he wants. I never really got the sense of desperation that I got from the Rocky movies. Out of all the Rocky movies I never cared for the third and fourth ones because Rocky had it made and his struggles seemed artificial. Rocky V is universally thought of as the worst of the series but it’s my favorite because it gets the character back to the struggles for survival and drags his family into it for good measure. I would have empathized with Creed more if the main character didn’t have a ready made safety net. That safety net may be the reason that the movie proves popular with the younger generation. It may well be that the new heroes of a world where the Kardashians are celebrities because of their celebrity aren't celebrated because they triumph against all odds but because they triumph an have a safety net.
In addition to the drama on the screen I had a small dose of drama at the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa where I saw the movie. The theater advertises free refills of soda and popcorn. I paid $12 for our movie tickets and got a large popcorn for $5.00 and a medium Mountain Dew for $4.5) instead of the $5.00 large soda. After the movie I thought I wanted some more soda so I want to the concession stand and asked for a refill. The young clerk stopped applying his pimple cream to one his many pimples and said “We don’t actually give refills for medium drinks.” As I was leaving the theatre without my refill I was telling Kathy about my lack of a refill an the lady trying to sell me a gift certificate for the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa chimed by telling me I should get a large soda next time. What an asinine policy! If I was trying to beat the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa out of 50 cents I would have tried for the whole dollar by getting the $4.00 small soda instead of the $4.50 medium soda. I was leaving the theatre and wasn’t going to be watching movies all day drinking out of the same cup. Get with it Fridley Theater of Marshalltown Iowa – give out a refill for the medium drink!
Leaving the world of boxing drama for the world of basketball prediction drama, I overcame all odds to go 3-0 in last Friday’s games to boost my season record to 14-4-1 with my mythical winnings at a season high of $960. The odds I overcame was the Spurs covering against the Nuggets on the road despite leaving two of their better players (Manu Ginobli and Tim Duncan) in San Antonio to rest for the Saturday night home game against the Hawks which the Spurs also won and also covered. As usual I’ll be betting $110 to win $100 on tonight's picks using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Boston Celtics at Miami Heat
The Celtics started their five game road trip with a 20 point loss in Orlando last night and made the short trip to Miami to face the Heat. The Heat are starting a four game homestand, have had two days off and will have another two days off after this game. I expect the Heat to play with a lot of energy and easily cover the five point spread.
San Antonio Spurs at Chicago Bulls
The Spurs have now won 10 of 11 with nine of the wins by double digits after beating the Nuggets in Denver and the Hawks in San Antonio this weekend. Tonight the Spurs travel to Chicago to give 3.5 points to the Bulls. take on the Bulls who are home after splitting a four game western road trip. I think the Spurs are playing like a well oiled machine and will give the points even though the Bulls have only lost one game in Chicago this year and have had two days of rest.
Golden State Warriors at Utah Jazz
The Jazz are coming off two double digit wins over the Clippers and Pelicans and are home against the 18-0 defending champion Golden State Warriors. Is this where the Warriors finally lose? I think the Warriors will get their six game road trip off to a good start and will lay the nine points as they continue their chase towards the NBA records of 33 wins in a row and 72 wins in a season.
We next see Johnson as an adult working for a big financial services firm and boxing on the side in Mexico. He uses the name of Johnson to avoid unwanted comparisons to his father and to make his own name even though he has no problem living in the Creed family palatial mansion. Johnson quits his day job to become a full time boxer. He heads to the local gym but can’t get respect as a serious fighter so he heads to Philadelphia to get Rocky Balboa to train him.
Rocky Balboa is much the same as the Rocky we left at the end of the 2005 Rocky Balboa movie except he is lonelier than ever before. Rocky still has his restaurant but Paulie is buried next to Adrian, Little Marie and her son Steps aren’t working at the restaurant any more, and his son Robert has moved to Vancouver. All Rocky does is feed his turtle, buy food for the restaurant, and visit Adrian and Paulie’s graves. Johnson spills the beans about his father and Rocky finds a new purpose in training him.
After the introductions the movie becomes a version of the original Rocky except in a sort of funhouse mirror with Michael B. Jordan playing Rocky’s part and Stallone playing the role of Mick the trainer. Instead of meeting a girl in a pet store who lives with an abusive alcoholic brother, Johnson meets a singer in an apartment in his building that lives with a degenerative hearing condition. Rocky as Mick trains Johnson using the drills Mick made him go through like chasing chickens and boxing with his shoe tied to each other. I especially liked how Mick’s old gym has become a shiny redone showplace so Rocky finds a filthy dive gym to do his training.
Johnson wins his first fight against the son of one of Rocky’s old pals but is outed as Apollo Creed’s son by the jealous father. This leads to an opportunity to take on the English World Champion in Liverpool under the condition that Johnson takes on the ‘Creed’ name to cash in on the box office appeal. Around the same time Rocky finds out that he has cancer and while he really wants to join Adrian and Paulie in the afterlife he and Johnson decide to take on their challenges like the champions they are, were, and want to be.
Creed has gotten highly positive reviews and Stallone is being touted as a potential Academy Award winner. I liked the movie a lot but wouldn’t say it was the best movie I’ve seen in years or even this year (Terminator:Genisys gets my vote for 2015). I thought the fight scenes were the best I’ve ever seen. There were a lot of close-up shots of only one boxer that made it look like I was in the ring and could smell his breath. The fighting was fast and furious but I never felt like it was speeded up artificially by cutting shots to different angles the way some of the other so-called action movies do. Stallone plays his aging Rocky character to perfection. Before he decided to train Johnson he reminded me of a lot of old guys I see that have nothing to live for and are just waiting to die. When he decided to train Johnson he reminded me of the old guys I know that are always living for something even if it is just to wake up tomorrow. His waffling between the two view points when he finds out he has cancer is a great character study. I liked Michael B. Jordan as Johnson-Creed, especially how he showed that he was scared senseless before his fights even while he was putting up the obligatory tough guy stance.
The thing I didn’t like about the movie was that since it was certainly a Rocky reboot I didn’t really understand Johnson/Creed’s motivation to be a boxer. Unlike the original Rocky who was a leg-breaker for the mob with no way out except his once in a lifetime chance to fight Apollo Creed, Johnson lives in a mansion and has a six or seven figure career as a financial services big shot waiting for him whenever he wants. I never really got the sense of desperation that I got from the Rocky movies. Out of all the Rocky movies I never cared for the third and fourth ones because Rocky had it made and his struggles seemed artificial. Rocky V is universally thought of as the worst of the series but it’s my favorite because it gets the character back to the struggles for survival and drags his family into it for good measure. I would have empathized with Creed more if the main character didn’t have a ready made safety net. That safety net may be the reason that the movie proves popular with the younger generation. It may well be that the new heroes of a world where the Kardashians are celebrities because of their celebrity aren't celebrated because they triumph against all odds but because they triumph an have a safety net.
In addition to the drama on the screen I had a small dose of drama at the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa where I saw the movie. The theater advertises free refills of soda and popcorn. I paid $12 for our movie tickets and got a large popcorn for $5.00 and a medium Mountain Dew for $4.5) instead of the $5.00 large soda. After the movie I thought I wanted some more soda so I want to the concession stand and asked for a refill. The young clerk stopped applying his pimple cream to one his many pimples and said “We don’t actually give refills for medium drinks.” As I was leaving the theatre without my refill I was telling Kathy about my lack of a refill an the lady trying to sell me a gift certificate for the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa chimed by telling me I should get a large soda next time. What an asinine policy! If I was trying to beat the Fridley Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa out of 50 cents I would have tried for the whole dollar by getting the $4.00 small soda instead of the $4.50 medium soda. I was leaving the theatre and wasn’t going to be watching movies all day drinking out of the same cup. Get with it Fridley Theater of Marshalltown Iowa – give out a refill for the medium drink!
Leaving the world of boxing drama for the world of basketball prediction drama, I overcame all odds to go 3-0 in last Friday’s games to boost my season record to 14-4-1 with my mythical winnings at a season high of $960. The odds I overcame was the Spurs covering against the Nuggets on the road despite leaving two of their better players (Manu Ginobli and Tim Duncan) in San Antonio to rest for the Saturday night home game against the Hawks which the Spurs also won and also covered. As usual I’ll be betting $110 to win $100 on tonight's picks using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with no real money wagered.
Boston Celtics at Miami Heat
The Celtics started their five game road trip with a 20 point loss in Orlando last night and made the short trip to Miami to face the Heat. The Heat are starting a four game homestand, have had two days off and will have another two days off after this game. I expect the Heat to play with a lot of energy and easily cover the five point spread.
San Antonio Spurs at Chicago Bulls
The Spurs have now won 10 of 11 with nine of the wins by double digits after beating the Nuggets in Denver and the Hawks in San Antonio this weekend. Tonight the Spurs travel to Chicago to give 3.5 points to the Bulls. take on the Bulls who are home after splitting a four game western road trip. I think the Spurs are playing like a well oiled machine and will give the points even though the Bulls have only lost one game in Chicago this year and have had two days of rest.
Golden State Warriors at Utah Jazz
The Jazz are coming off two double digit wins over the Clippers and Pelicans and are home against the 18-0 defending champion Golden State Warriors. Is this where the Warriors finally lose? I think the Warriors will get their six game road trip off to a good start and will lay the nine points as they continue their chase towards the NBA records of 33 wins in a row and 72 wins in a season.
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