A NHL Betting Strategy: The Streak Breaker Play (based on 9 years of data)

Hello savvy sports investors, today I’m going to unveil an interesting hockey betting strategy that I call “The NHL Streak Breaker Play”. It basically answers the intuitive question I asked myself a while ago:

Considering the public’s tendency to overreact to recent results, should we bet on teams which are currently on a losing streak facing a team riding a winning streak (in the NHL)?

Let’s see if we can profit from this proposal!

1. Basic Exploration

First of all, you should note that the results presented in this article come from a dataset containing information about all NHL games from the nine (9) seasons covering the 2007/2008 to 2015/2016 period.

Let’s kick off this study with a very simple analysis: we are betting $1 on each team coming off at least one loss playing against a team coming off at least one win. Here are the results:

·         Record = 2533-2767 (win percentage = 47.8%)

·         Profit = -$202.16 (ROI = Return On Investment = -3.8%)

To put these numbers in perspective, how much money would we have won or lost from using the opposite strategy (i.e. betting on teams coming off at least one win facing a team coming off at least one loss)? The answer is: -$181.43 (-3.4%). As you can see, the initial suggested strategy is not doing any better than the opposite plan. We are not off to a good start, but please hang on because the sun is about to shine!

From now on, I will use odds with “reduced juice”. In my dataset, when two teams were evenly matched the juice was 20 cents (for example -110 versus -110 in American format, which is the equivalent of 1.91 lines in decimal format). That is not representative of the reality as you can obtain much better odds simply by playing with sportsbooks like Pinnacle or 5Dimes. Also, if you have an account with multiple bookies you can get even better odds by shopping for the best line. Consequently, I have adjusted odds in my dataset so that we are now getting -105 lines (1.95 in decimal format) when both teams are equally likely to win the match.

With reduced juice, the profit numbers above become -$100.95 (-1.9%) when betting the team on a losing streak versus -$89.98 (-1.7%) when betting the team on a winning streak.

Saw a guy do something similar to these a number of years ago but he used the lines completely different. Similar scenarios but you pkay the team on the losing streak when they are a certain level fave over the team on the winning streak. The trend supposedly being that the line tells yiu when the scenarios are going to change. He did very well with it but only had a play every once in a while.

Typing on my phone....