Pinnacle Pulse
Pinnacle Pulse - Issue 72 Part 1
By Locke; Pinnacle Sports Betting
Aug 2, 2007, 11:00

Futures markets are interesting animals. From PinnacleSports.com's perspective, we know that there are individuals who are extremely sharp at betting futures, but discovering who the sharp bettors may be and how sharp they actually are can often take most of a year. Other times, you are lucky enough to catch on to them during shorter duration tournaments, and can then piggyback their moves when it comes to the opening season futures markets. Then again, handicapping futures for International soccer tournaments and doing the same for the big domestic leagues require different skill sets, which again leaves the book in a position where it can be tough to tell which plays are sharp and which plays just have a lot of money behind them.

Additionally, even well-contested futures are far from an easy win for books. Just ask any book with reasonable action how they felt about paying out to the sharp bettors who bet on Iraq at 50 to 1 for the Asian Cup, and you'll see that there can be some serious dangers involved with posting futures lines.

One of the questions we often encounter is how to properly determine which teams have value in the futures market. In baseball, Pythagoreans are kings of futures, but the market knows about those ahead of time and the numbers are factored into the price. However, it can certainly be interesting to apply such Pythagorean predictions to soccer and test the results. (For those of you who have never heard of this methodology, Google 'Baseball + Pythagorean' for more info.) Doing this should yield good values for leagues that are relatively constant in terms of player movement, but the danger in this system is properly calculating expected goals scored and allowed for teams that have undergone massive turnover. Clearly squads like Bayern Munich and even Premiership contenders Liverpool are significantly different than they were last year - how will this affect their performance? Let's see what the sharps have to say:

Bundesliga
We've had surprising two-way action on the 'Will Bayern Munich Win?' line, with around half of our bettors certain that Bayern with new signings Klose and Ribery have turned things around for the coming season after recently thrashing Werder Bremen 4-1 and Bundesliga champions VfB Stuttgart 2-0 en route to a 1-0 victory in the pre-season League Cup final against Schalke. Conversely the other half are confident that the results of the last two seasons will continue. Regardless, the market line says Bayern is nearly a 2:1 favorite to win the league title this year, so take that into account as you shop around.

Serie A
Bettors hit our Roma line hard as soon as we posted it, blasting them down below 10:1 dogs, meaning there's probably some value to be had in lines greater than that on other sites. AC Milan is the only other team that has seen heavy action, and anyone who watched their Champions League run last season, has to wonder if they really should be underdogs to cross-city rival Inter.

English Premier League
After spending more than £40m on new players over the summer, Liverpool were the first club on the list to see heavy action, as sharps took advantage of anything better than +600 (bet $100 to win $600) odds offered at PinnacleSports.com in the hope that Rafael Benitez and company will bring a long-awaited title to the hungry Scouser fans. Meanwhile, Sir Alex Ferguson's summer purchases encouraged heavy moves on Manchester United, while action on the rest of the field has been little more than a whisper.

Those of you who can't wait for the English Premiership season to start are encouraged to check out the live betting options on the Community Shield game this Sunday at PinnacleSports.com. This is just the beginning of our new live in-running betting program that we will be offering throughout the year at leading Internet sportsbook, PinnacleSports.com.

Also, I know we mentioned that we'd cover the opening of Ligue 1 this week, but there has been little sharp action to speak of on these games thus far, hence there's not much to say. We'll keep an eye on this league as it picks up during the season, and come back to it when the top French league merits further discussion from a betting perspective.

--Hobbes

Baseball Sharp Plays

T. Lincecum:
Our sharps liked Lincecum right from the start when he was called up; it's common for the sharps to back a new pitcher and unusual for them to oppose one. Our best guess on this is that either they are undervalued in general by the send-out numbers or it's a lot harder to be sure that a new pitcher doesn't have good stuff, than it is to like a new pitcher. In his last few starts, Lincecum has often had strong endorsements from our sharps and he has seen his price go up steadily over the course of the season.

E. Jackson:
When Jackson's terrible record was punctuated by one strong start, there was a huge groundswell of square support for him and at least some of that remains. As a result of that, there has been sharp action opposing him to take advantage of his inflated value. When a pitcher has an unusually strong start, squares will often take this approach. It is a mistake to automatically fade such a pitcher, as after all he did give a strong performance. However, when the reaction is this strong it is the natural predatory instinct of the sharp to buck the movement.

Houston Astros vs. Atlanta Braves:
The verdict is in on the Braves moves at the trade deadline, and the news is good. The chance seemed like a public overreaction at first, with no one taking an interest in their first inflated game against Houston either way, which was suspicious for its own reasons, but in the second one they got strong support from the sharpest group of all. That means there was a radical realignment, enough to move games by more than twenty basis points from where they would have been before; at the time of writing it could also be a downgrade of the Astros. It's too early to tell, but the Mets may be in for one hell of a pennant race. Given the dynamics currently out there, you want to back the Braves as early as possible and wait until later to oppose them until things settle down and their games find their new level, which should take a few days to a week.

--Locke

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