Optimal Strategies for Sports Betting Pools

Bryan Clair and David Letscher

This page contains a preprint and supplementary material for our paper on sports betting pools. We derive strategies that maximize expected return for both NFL football pools and NCAA basketball tournament pools.

Preprint of the paper

The 2006 NCAA Basketball Tournament

The 2005-6 NFL Football Season

The 2005 NCAA Basketball Tournament

The CLOP pools package

CLOP is a suite of Unix command line utilities for working with sports betting pools, including NFL football pools and NCAA basketball pools. It is free software under the GNU General Public License. The package generally implements algorithms from our Optimal Strategies for Sports Betting Pools article, but also includes the main algorithm from March Madness and the Office Pool (Kaplan, Garstka 2001). The CLOP package comes with data from past NCAA and NFL seasons.

Here is the CLOP home page.

Links

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