A friend recently asked me what I thought about parlay betting. I figured this would make a good case study on practical data science. I’ll go over this like what would normally happen in a consulting engagement. Let’s get into it. The Question/Problem Friend thought parlay dumbing was a dumb bet and that sports books… Read More Practical Data Science: An Analysis of Sports Betting Winnability
Get the code Was talking with my Aunt about some bracket advice today and realized I should make a quick tutorial for more tech minded people. It’s a pretty reusable approach. Just scrape betting information to make picks. Golf is another good one where this works. In the tutorial I go through: Scraping a website… Read More March Madness Bracket using Betting Futures and Python
Hi everyone. It’s been a while since I posted on here. Today, I’m happy to share that I’ve launched Sports Data Direct. A sports data service for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. Go give it a look and let me know what you think. So far it is NFL only. Some of the highlights:… Read More Announcing Sports Data Direct
Earlier in the month, I posted a picture on social media comparing fantasy football team points compared with their draft position. Would you believe 4th pick is the worst spot in a fantasy football draft? Early data I’m acquiring is painting that picture #fantasyfootball pic.twitter.com/z8z7Zebgiv — Person (@ergosum_person) July 24, 2017 I thought I found… Read More A Quick Look into Fantasy Football Team Stats
There used to be working code out there to scrape sites such as Draft Kings. At least, back before Draft Kings changed it’s terms of use to specifically forbid automated scraping of it’s content. Here, I’m sharing how you can automatically download contest data from Draft Kings. How to do it Draft Kings protects it’s… Read More Scraping Draft Kings Contests
Every fantasy football manager wants to know what rookie will lead the league in scoring. Is the SEC always over hyped? Does a wide receiver with a fast forty in the NFL combine mean anything? As you’ll see, being the best in an event doesn’t mean much. Looking at the NFL Combine Data I’ve scraped… Read More The NFL Combine’s Impact on Rookie Fantasy Performance
Sports betting. For some it’s a great way to have fun but, for the professional “sharks”, it’s a way to make a living. I’ve been betting to mixed-success for 3 years now and want to share some resources so you can get started and learn from my mistakes. My worst mistake was losing when I… Read More The Guide to Sports Betting Online
This guide is to help you understand where to find data on sports, especially free sports data. Most of it requires coding so I’m working on creating a data scraping guide too. To skip all this work, sign up at Sports Data Direct and let them deal with getting the data for you. Contents MLB Data The… Read More The Guide to Sports Data
With the all star break upon us, I wanted to see how team records at the all star break compare to full season performance. The Chicago Cubs sit below .500 with a 43-45 record (.489) and as a White Sox Fan I get giddy at the prospect of them not doing well again. Last season… Read More Are the Cubs Bad Again? Visualizing MLB Team Records at the All Star Break
Before diving into how exactly Nate Silver’s Elo algorithm works I want to tell you a little about Nate Silver. Nate Silver first became famous from his MLB player projection tool PECOTA and managing Baseball Prospectus, a website devoted to baseball “sabermetrics”. Nate became publicly famous for predicting 49/50 states in the 2008 presidential election and was named… Read More Replicating Nate Silver’s NBA Elo Algorithm