Curses! Foiled Again!

I have slipped back into an overnight schedule despite my efforts to avoid it. That is the main reason I ended up skipping a few posts. I have been trying to take naps when I am not tired; cut my sleep short so I can stay up though tired. My efforts have only served to put me in a cycle of sleeping from 8am to 4pm. Probably the worst period of the day for me to be sleeping, especially now that Basketball is getting too tight to bet and I'll have to start betting on baseball.

Baseball is not a sport I am overjoyed at having to bet. A lot of the games are afternoon games, and that means afternoon relative to an east coast schedule. On the west coast, some games will start as early as 9:30am, though more commonly they'll start at 11am. In any event, they start at a time when I want to be awake enough to be able to place a bet!

I think my only choice is to take the next few days to keep pushing the time I go to bed later and later so after 3-5 days I'll be going to bed in the really late afternoon or early evening. I don't mind getting up really early if it allows me the chance to do some research and time to make the bet.

Since I had such a lengthy post yesterday, I did not want to add to it by throwing in a bunch of miscellaneous crap. I will now throw that crap in this post since all I am doing is whining anyway.

Last week, for the second week in a row, I managed to obtain my goal of 4000 words with my writing. Due to my sleeping woes, I wrote on four of the seven days. So obviously, the days I did write I averaged over a thousand words a day. Though I guess it really was two good days and two average days.

Also, because that large bet did not settle by the end of the month, nor did it pay in full, I only made about $500 through gambling for the month. This puts me at +$1200 for the two months out here, so I can't complain, though as expected, my finances are a slow bleed.

I would like to push things a bit more aggressively so as to make at least $1000 a month, but baseball is a tough sport to bet on. It's not like basketball in several key ways. First, it does not play with the same emotional intensity.

Second, there are twice as many baseball games in a season compared to the basketball season. Which means each game has less value to the players. In baseball, there is more of an, "Oh well, we'll get them tomorrow" attitude, because the teams are literally going to play again tomorrow.

Third, the talent pool in baseball is spread much more thin and evenly than in basketball. This manifests itself in two ways, on a microcosmic level and a macrocosmic. In the microcosm sense, basketball games are often decided by one player "getting hot" and running away with the game for their team. This happens a lot. In baseball, it is less likely for a single player to have a game turning offensive and defensive performance in the same game.

In the macrocosm sense, a good baseball team will finish the season winning only 60% of their games and a bad team will win about 40%. This means that on a day to day basis, betting on baseball is at best a 60/40 proposition. Contrariwise, a good basketball team will win 65-70% of their games and a bad team will win 20-25% of their games. As you can see, there is a discrepancy in terms of the weaker teams winning fewer games than the better teams are losing. This is because the talent pool is not spread quite so evenly in the league.

The quick summation of all that is there are more good teams to bet on in basketball and those good teams are more likely to win the day to day games that they ought to win, which makes predicting game winners a lot easier. Regardless, for the next five months, baseball is the number one professional sport and I'll have to find some way to win at it.