An Introduction

Hello and Welcome to Against All Odds, wherein a Jew and a Redneck will discuss wagering on sports and other vital issues of our time. We have been exchanging emails for our friends to read for some time now, and we decided recently to try to find a slightly larger audience. Before we start, we thought it would be a good idea to share a little about ourselves and our philosophy on wagering.

We are both attorneys who do well enough to put a roof over our heads and food on our tables. For us, sports wagering is a hobby, not a job. We do it for fun. That said, winning is fun. It's fun to be right, of course, and it's also not bad to have a few extra dollars in your bank account. So we try to always bet with discipline. The reasons behind every move we make will be explained on this page. And feel free to share your thoughts with us. We're egotistical pricks, but we're not so smug as to think there's nothing left for us to learn.

Our System: We do not believe in systems. If there was a single system that was guaranteed to work, there wouldn't be a tacky city in the Nevada desert with giant hotels and fancy restaurants and plastic women built on gambling losses. That said, we do have a few guiding principles:

(1) Conventional Wisdom is the road to ruin. We generally try to go against popular opinion when making picks. However, we won't do so automatically. We're not gonna run out and throw down money on the Hawks to beat the Celtics in the first round of the NBA playoffs this year just because everyone is saying the Celtics can't lose. We only bet against what we perceive as "conventional wisdom" when there is a sound statistical basis for doing so. See Grover's forthcoming post on pitchers' BABIP and misleading early season trends for an example of this.

(2) Fan is short for fanatic. Sports are fun for us, not a business. We both have teams we support. For Grover, it's the Washington DC-area teams and the UNC Tar Heels. For Hambone, it's Duke. Because fanatics by definition are emotional or irrational about their teams both in victory and in defeat, we do not wager or make recommendations when our teams are involved. Grover might think that Tyler Hansbrough is a Golden God, or that the Nationals will be lucky to win 60 games this year, but neither of those sentiments form the basis of a sound betting strategy.

(3) Baseball is best. Baseball is our preferred sport because it lends itself to less variation. We can almost always find a game or two a day out of the 10-15 every day, and if we play 200 or more games in the course of a season, the good and bad breaks tend to even out, and the sport becomes, dare we say it, predictable. It is also the sport in which difficult-to-measure variables like team chemistry and attitude play the least role, and therefore its results are the easist to predict over the long term.

(4) We're here to win. Look, betting is fun. If we were all about overcoming the house edge in all aspects of life, we wouldn't ever play the Hard Eight at the Craps table. But this isn't a vacation, and there's no trashy cougars walking around distracting us with watered-down booze and garish outfits with flesh-colored nylons. So we'll try to avoid giving away more to the house then is absolutely necessary. This means shopping for lines, avoiding futures for the most part, and never ever playing parlays.

That's all for now. Thanks for stopping by. And if anyone wants to explain how the heck we can make any money off a blog, we're all ears.