The Cheat Sheet: January 20th, 2011

While most people use their vacation time to travel to exotic locations and synchronously engage in acts of eating, praying, and loving, I regrettably spent my month off wallowing in depression and self-loathing from the comfort of my living room floor (and synchronously watching Julia Roberts movies and Vancouver Canuck games).  About halfway through the month of January though, it occurred to me that I could actually continue to post Cheat Sheets on Dailyfaceoff without missing a beat (as I spiral deeper and deeper into a black hole of unconfined cynicism)…

So, without further ado, the Cheat Sheet returns!

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For those of you who didn’t stay in touch over the holidays via Facebook (what up with that? I thought we were cool…) there have been a number of minor updates to the Cheat Sheet.

For starters, plays are now ranked daily from ‘Gold’ to ‘Silver’ to ‘Bronze’, and then to everything else. You’ll figure it out once you see it.

Another recent addition is the ‘Inflation’ column. The numbers in this column are based on teams’ respective home/away winning percentages, with a slight skew towards home ice advantage. The numbers indicate where a betting line should be if it were set using just these percentages–negative numbers suggesting that the line is set too low, and positive numbers suggesting that the line is set too high (green = good, red = bad).

Meanwhile, I’ve also started practicing a new method for bet analysis: before looking at the actual betting board, quickly go down the list of the day’s games and make up odds for each game which you deem to be ‘fair’. Then compare the odds that you set on paper to the actual lines from the books, find the lines which have the biggest discrepancies, and circle those games. Those should be the ones that you focus on. I’ll be posting my daily results for this method on the Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Round-Table/172895052741794

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Thursday’s Sheet: (goalies updated)

 

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Agree with the Gold pick? Disagree with it? See a betting line on the board that seems wrong? You know what to do (fill up the comment section).

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