Sports Handicapping Tutorial

By Reed E. Shuffstall


I promised most of the viewers this past season that I'd go into my personal strategy, and try to do my greatest to show others how to handicap college football games. This can be a multi-part handicapping tutorial sequence that will go into all of the tiny details that you need to consider to be on the correct side constantly. Don't hesitate to use the comment area along the way if you have any queries. Be sure to visit us everyday for professional sports handicappers picks and analysis.

Tools

A lot of the evaluation I actually do begins with the data of certain teams. To put things into context, you have to be able to examine stats on a common level. To achieve that, if you don't have a calculator

Microsoft Excel

With no excel, 80% of my capping will be non-existent. In addition to that, I'd spend an unbearable length of time on analysis. Excel is an amazing tool and I cannot reiterate that enough. In excel, there are numerous tools and formulas that you can use to make your analysis better, and simpler. If you don't know the basics, the more advanced steps to follow will be much more complicated.

TRIM: Excel is definitely a frustrating program as well. Oftentimes, your vlookup will not work since the lookup value contains an unnoticeable difference, when compared to table you are referencing. The trim function will delete almost all unnecessary spaces from the cell, making the Vlookup very likely to work.

RANK: This could take a list of values and give them a rank order. This is very important when making power rankings, or while using correlation matrix.

CORRELATION: Once we get deeper in the weeds in the future post, we will begin to discuss correlations. There are certain statistics that matter, and particular statistics that don't. We could study the relativity of stats using the correlation formula.

STANDARD DEVIATION: When you have several methods to anticipate a score, the standard deviation becomes an extremely helpful tool to evaluate variability. This will give you a window of variability to the mean, as well as measure confidence of any data set.

The Main

WEB QUERIES: Initially when I first began using excel at an advanced level to produce my handicapping system, I would manually enter the stats I wanted right into a cell. This could fill other cells that contained formulas. It took me at least Fifteen minutes to enter the statistics of 2 teams, before I even started to analyze the game and figure out if I wanted to cap it further or otherwise not.

What a web query essentially does is download files coming from an excel friendly website, and set it in a location in excel. What is great about this, is it will do it on command. Once I have the data downloaded once, it'll download it on your own command. College football is nice because there are numerous sites that you could utilize. So long as the site does not change their format, you won't have to customize the format of one's system also.

I can't start to describe exactly how much utilizing web queries have helped save me time.




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