I'd love to find those odds. So far most casinos are posting 20/1 for Portland, although if you shop you can find some selling for 25/1 (I think a few raised from 20 to 25 after the CP3 thing fell through, they were hovering steady with the 8th best odds for a few weeks there when CP3 was in question).
Somewhat removed in the last couple years. But I designed a Neyman-Pearson based predictive model for a collegue that is now using it. He's one of the leads of a firm based out of Reno. He actually hired me to program it when I used a rough version of it many many years ago to win a Vegas handicapping competition. But I digress, that wasn't the question. LOL.
It's amazing how quickly people forget that this is a business that makes money by convincing you that a bad bet is a good bet!
That's not how Vegas oddsmakers work. You're thinking of the casinos. The sports books aren't attempting to make money by "winning bets"...they try to set the odds so that the money on each side balances. And then they make their money off taking a cut from each bet. So "Vegas" isn't betting one way or the other. They're just finding the break-even point of all the bettors. If you bet the over, you're making the bet that most gamblers have underrated the Blazers. And gamblers are really no more sophisticated as sports analysts than regular fans. They're just as susceptible to the factors that can lead fans to underrate or overrate a team. Though they will often follow injury reports closer than most average fans.
if that really was the over/under. i'd need someone here to take my money and put a bet down(not old enough)
Well put. I like to think of it as the Oddsmakers are running the computer programs that get a line to exactly 50% either way, so they have a contract with the casinos/bookmakers to "mint the coin" so when you flip it, it comes out no worse than 53%/47% over time so they can make money on their "cut". That's the sole purpose of an oddsmaker, to "mint the perfect 50/50 coin" so the casino will know the starting point. The Bookmakers will then use that information to attempt to get the perfect 50/50 split with betting. If their own history shows that a lot of Los Angeles fans come in and like to bet the Lakers, they will push their statistical line of say 57.3 wins up to 59 as a starting point using historical data that the bettors will artificially push the line. So their objective is still not to entice anyone with a bad bet, it's to get the perfect mix. Right now, odds probably say Miami is 4:1 to win the title and Lakers are also probably 5:1, but nobody is running in and betting Denver or Atlanta or Utah, etc. Everyone visiting Vegas and getting 3-4 beers in them is saying, "Hey, Miami just got LeBron and Bosh, I'm going to drop a couple hundred on Miami to win the title". The the sheer mass of millions of stupid, drunk bettors on a weekly basis saying that to themselves will literally push Miami to some absurd 2:1 or worse. LA fans are thinking Kobe is still going to be healthy for some reason and that they're going to beat Miami, so suddenly they're flocking and betting themselves down to 3:1 . The bookies all know this and lowered their lines from the start and are forcing people to make bad bets if they want it, because it's the only way it will even out the line in the end when the smart money comes in and bets the arbitrage on other side.
There's a more realistic over/under, right at where the 50% probability seems to be. The optimist in me still wants to take the over, but it's not like the Lincolns are crying to get out of my wallet anymore.
