do you mean the reasons underlying a >60% ATS claim? or are you talking about the actual performance of >60% ATS?
No I simply doubt that he made a greater than 60% return ATS last year playing the NFL all season. Simple as that.
basketball, baseball, hockey, cricket, tennis, world cup soccer - college and pro. from sport to sport, there is no difference to me. just like trading - all markets behave the same way because the participants are the same. the behavior of the lines on any given day fall into several categories for me: some are right on some are a little off some are way off a few are "OMG - who set this line"? i only bet on the last one. they seem to come up very often.
i did 68% winners (35-16) ATS in the NFL including the playoffs, so i know it's possible. i didn't think that was great until i saw some research done on sportsbetting, and it seems like only 1 in 100,000 people can go > 60% ATS. i thought the number would be way higher than that. i checked around just to get a feel for accurate this is, and most of the old timers agreed that number is about right. they said in their lifetime they thought they were good, but they probably have extracted at most 100x bet size in any one season. they also said it is the inability for them to follow their system 100% is what caused their win rate to drop. if you run a really good box and run it really hard, sports is a great way to go because you can get the exact position size. i like MLB and NHL a lot more because the run line and puck line pay so much more for -1.5 runs or -1.5 goals.
1) I did not say it was impossible. I simply said that I doubted that he did it. 2) I too am a fan of the run line. It's much more intuitive. And less followed.
Really excellent handicappers will get you above 60% winners with close to 1 : 1 payoff. That works out to about a 40% edge, certainly worthwhile in the trading world...
Not assuming. There are simply large parallels...both can be done profitably with a robust and back-tested system.
+1 less followed is REALLY IMPORTANT. i check out the sportsbooks recently, and i talk to the people taking bets. they haven't seen anyone recently that are consistenly successful on the runline. lots of bad systems out there.
There seems to be some confusion about my response to Kassz007's question. He asked what did I consider a good winning percentage and I said >60%. I never claimed >60% personally, although I was aware that my stats for the past two years have been around that. Just to check, I pulled up last year's thread. I was 16-11, when I had to stop due to some pressing issues that just didn't give me the time to do the thread justice. That's a 59% win percentage.