Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Season and Game Predictions

538 Is now offering season predictions for won-loss records and various playoff odds, updated on a daily basis. If you click on a particular team line, you can see the probability of them winning their next six games.

Their system is based on Elo:

Elo is a simple but elegant system that can be tuned and customized endlessly to incorporate available data. In our baseball Elo system, each team has a rating (the average is about 1500), and after every game, the winning team gains some Elo points while the losing team loses the same number of points. The number of points exchanged is based on the chances our model gave each team to win the game and the margin of victory; a win by a big underdog results in a bigger exchange of Elo points than a win by a favorite, and the larger the margin of victory, the larger the exchange.

Before every game, we also adjust each team’s rating based on whether it has home-field advantage, how far it’s traveled to the game, how many days of rest it’s had and which pitcher is slated to start.

The explanation for Elo is here. Although I did not see it discussed in the literature, I suspect this can easily be used for betting. If the Elo probability of winning is better than the betting line, bet on that team! It would be interesting for someone to track this and see how it does as a betting scheme.



from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/1ry8RLV

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