Newsletter - Greg Frank wins the staff NCAA Picks Pool - Bettors Insider, Vol. 1, No. 42 (April 9, 2019)

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Greg Frank wins the staff NCAA Picks Pool

Congratulations to Greg Frank, who beat your humble newsletter writer by one game (I will note that I started out 1-5).

But this isn't really about Greg's victory, it's about hard this tournament was to predict and how good the lines were.

Six of our regular contributors picked games from each of the rounds of the Tournament and Robert Mims joined in at the Sweet 16. We didn't speak to each other, discuss which early round games we were picking and it was free choice, Two of our pickers covered college basketball for decades. Two others have seen a couple thousand college basketball games between them. Two others are too young to have seen a couple of thousand games but are just a little obsessed.

So with all that experience and knowledge and statistical help from sites like kenpom.com, how did we all do? Eh.

Greg was best at 27-18-1, winning 60% of the games. So not bad.

I was next at 26-19-1 (25-14-1 if you throw out that first day when I was still thinking about Ivy League teasers). That's a 57.8% winning percentage,

Mark Eckel finished over .500 at 24-21-1, 53.3%

Boop Vetrone finished at .500, 23-23.

So we had three over .500, one at .500 and three under .500 finishing a combined 45-62-1. That's 42%.

All that basketball savvy, days at practices, hours interviewing coaches, charting games, analyzing games, watching games and we turned out to be a perfect distribution of wins and losses . . . for The House.

To steal the old PGA commercial slogan, when it comes to setting lines and over/unders . . . These guys are good.

Because you can bet on anything . . .

Bettor Bit

Wait, is it that time already?

MLB Fantasy Stars of the night

Today's Schedule

• Overnight - How we fared on Monday.
• Overnight - Neal Abrams first round picks for the U.S. Clay Courts and the ATP Grand Prix Hassan II tournament in Morocco.
• 10 am - Mick McMudder's Tuesday picks for Parx.
• 10 am - RTs Tuesday picks for Mahoning Valley.
• 10 am - Sean Miller's European soccer picks.
• 10 am - Andrew Albert 's baseball picks.
• 10 am - Boop Single Digits (BoopStats for the digital attention span) (Single Digits will also give you an early peek at Boop's Quickie Quiz, which posts at noon on Twitter @BoopStats.)
• Noon - The Swish Analytics MLB Deep Dive Game of the Day - Yankees vs. Astros
• Noon - Alan Mitchell's harness racing picks for Yonkers.
• 1 pm - Craig Dietel's NHL Playoffs preview.
• 1 pm - 5 pm - Maybe a little Greg Frank NBA.
• 6 pm - Boop's Philly Props.
• Tonight - Mike Kern tells you who's going to win The Masters (with at least one special guest predictor)

Monday Results

Today's got a lot going on, but not so much yesterday. We spoke about our NCAA Tournament picks above. Only other highlights were that Mick McMudder picked two winners in three races at Parx and Boop Vetrone went 2 out of three with his De'Andre Hunter prop bets.

We'll try to do better today.

Good luck at the tables, windows, kiosks and apps.

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