Thursday, January 29, 2009

Super Bowl- Please Advise

It's early yet, and I don't plan on posting our Super Bowl plays until Saturday morning. But since I've already gotten a couple inquiries from eager bettors:

My early leans are to play both Steelers -7 and the Under. Which means I'll have to waste the greatest day on the Sports calendar, our Sport-Related National Holiday, cheering on one of my least favorite teams and hoping for a boring game with no fireworks. Your thoughts as to how to deal with this depressing turn of events are welcome in the comments.

Also, a word on prop bets and Super Bowl-related futures: they are almost always bad news. See, the books know that even a Steelers fan is smart enough to see a -110 line and understand that means that he pays $1.10 on a loss and gets $1 on a win. But they also know that most of us (especially the ones betting on the Super Bowl) lack the patience to add up a series of futures odds (e.g. the odds to win the MVP trophy) and figure out how close they get to 1. Nor will they take the time to think things out rationally. They'll just see the big payday they could get on, say, the offchance that the Steelers win, this is one of those rare years that they give the MVP to a defensive player (only 8 times in 42 years, 3 of the last 20, and none of the last 5), and that Troy Polamalu is the one Steeler out of their 11 starters (which also includes the defensive player of the year and several other all-pros) that gets the nod, because Chris Berman and Tom Jackson have told you that he's awesome and a "ball hawk" of some kind. Even though Polamalu, as a safety that doesn't do much blitzing, would probably have to score a TD or get multiple turnovers to win the MVP, and he has grand totals of 17 INTs, 7 forced fumbles, seven sacks and TWO TOUCHDOWNS in 5 years and 88 regular season games?

Admit it- you thought of betting on Polamalu to win the MVP when you saw him up there at 20-1 or some other preposterous number, didn't you? Shame on you.

Anyway, if you do plan to place any of these "funny bets," I strongly advise you to do some line-shopping. Most huge differences among the books have been corrected at this point, but you'll still see a lot of disparity from site to site. I will look at some of these as part of our Super Bowl post and will try to direct you to the better value, even if we don't make any plays on these ourselves.

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