SOFTWARE
$225
Data mining to beat the spread
The difference between winning and losing that Super Bowl bet can come down to one shred of numerical insight. To give gamblers an edge, statistics professor, author, and oddsmaking guru Michael Orkin has written a piece of pro football handicapping software that's a stat lover's dream. Optimizer8 mines data for patterns in NFL games stretching back to 1993, both regular and postseason. Every seven days, users can update their database by downloading the previous week's game results. Running under most flavors of Windows, the app presents stats in no-nonsense tables, and lets you search by raw fields or "situations" - combinations of conditions you define and can save for later use.
Optimizer8 sorts through thousands of situations - which can specify scores, won-loss percentages, point spreads, prior game conditions, regular or postseason, turf type, et cetera - to identify good prediction strategies. It won't tell you how to bet, but it will inform your choice beyond merely knowing who's injured and whatever other tips you glean from the sports section. For example, Optimizer8 revealed to me that for 1997 to 2000, the New York Jets are 92.86 percent versus the spread in road games coming off a win. For avid sports bettors, this kind of thing is manna.
Orkin's company, Snoop Data, just released a similar program for pro basketball for the 2001-02 NBA season. And Orkin is looking beyond sports: He hopes to turn the Optimizer's data mining success toward other data sets, like customer buying patterns, or assisting public health agencies in identifying patterns in the spread of diseases.
Snoop Data: +1 (510) 528 8016, www.snoopdata.com.
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