The Cheat Sheet: December 10th, 2010

If you’re looking over the NHL betting board and want an unbiased second opinion, then scroll on down to the Cheat Sheet. A very busy computer crunched a bunch of numbers from this season and the last to produce an analytical summary of the day’s available bets. Do the numbers match with your opinions, or do they throw your predictions for a loop?

Scroll down to find out.

—

INDEX:

as sim. Fv/Dg: This is the team’s record this season as a similar-sized favorite/underdog.

Circles: The circles indicate the strength of the play on the side relative to the other available plays on the day. A white circle indicates a highly recommendable play on the day, whereas a black circle indicates a highly not recommended play. Circles highlighted in green represent the most highly recommended plays on the day. Plays are recommended based on a team’s projected chances of winning, the line value in a team’s betting odds, and also the reliability and availability of statistics to support the recommendation (see ‘Stat Balance’).

Arrows: The arrows indicate whether the prediction favors a play on the Over or the Under. Upward arrows point to the Over, and downward arrows point to the Under. Horizontal arrows are neutral.

Score: Projected to be the most-likely score for the game. The numbers are color-scaled red-purple-indigo-blue, with red being the highest and blue being the lowest.

shot%: This is the average of the team’s projected shot percentage and the opponent’s projected save percentage.

SOG: This is a gauge of how many shots on goal a team is projected to have. A checkmark indicates a more than average amount, an exclamation mark indicates an average amount, and an “X” indicates a below average amount.

PP: This is a gauge of how well the team’s PP is projected to do against the opponent’s PK. A checkmark indicates above average, an exclamation mark indicates average, and an “X” indicates below average. The amount of PP opportunities that the team is likely to receive is also factored in, so if the team’s opponent is discipline, then success on the PP will be projected to be less likely.

Stat Balance: This is used as a gauge of how reliable the statistics used in the prediction are. The system uses statistics from both teams’ records, but it is rarely perfectly balanced, due to differences in situational games played. The closer this number is to 1.00, the more balanced the stats are for this prediction.

—

Friday’s Cheat Sheet: (goalies as of 2:00 PM ET)

An opinion or two:

– Sort of liking the Overs in COL/ATL and TBL/EDM, but I’m not entirely sold on them.

– Both Colorado and Atlanta actually play at pretty high paces–their games lately averaging over 60 SOG total. Pavelec has been (damn) good though, making this a borderline call for me.

– Tampa Bay’s offense has been inconsistent on the road, and Edmonton is starting to play to a lot of Unders. I don’t really want to lay the -135 here for the Over 5.5.

– This might be a night off from the NHL for me. Still lots of time to get talked into betting something though, which tends to happen a lot (with mixed results).

—