Last week I attempted to apply a recognition heuristic to my decision making of which NFL teams would win. Overall the results were positive as I went 10-4 with Point Spreads and 8-6 with Money Line. From a betting perspective there was no money won as I played two 14-team parlays and a 7-team parlay. The risk was small so the damage done was inconsequential. Had I wagered each game individually and of equal amounts there would have been a profit realized at the end of the weekend.

As I did last week, I went through the entire NFL slate (save for Thursday night’s Denver-Cleveland game, and today’s Pittsburgh-Indianapolis game as there was no line on the game at the time of preparation) and I choose a winner of each game. I did this without performing any research. I simply relied on what I recognized when I viewed the two teams that would be competing against each other. I took the teams I decided would win and entered them into one parlay.

I then went back to each game to view them with the point spreads intact. There is an exercise I perform when viewing lines, which consists of me setting a line for each game, then comparing it to the Crowd’s Line and also the Vegas Line. I set my own line prior to looking at what the actual lines are. The Crowd’s Line is the line displayed on ESPN.com next to each game. Without going into too much detail, a visitor to ESPN.com can set the line for each game and then ESPN averages each selection to arrive at the Crowd’s Line. There are some inherent flaws in this, but for our purposes the flaws are not so overwhelming as to make the numbers obsolete.

This work is all done in order to have cues from which to operate the next type of heuristic. Understand that in the first parlay I was only deciding winners, and not trying to account for how many points a team may win by. Dealing with point spreads adds a level of complexity, and the recognition heuristic in my opinion is not powerful enough. So we will give ourselves some cues from which to infer an outcome.

One inference that can be made initially is any difference from my line, to the Crowd’s line, to the Vegas line. There are various ways that people will view a line that is different from what they believe it should be. I am not going to get into these right now as it unnecessarily complicates the process. Personally, I view a line that varies from my own line in different ways depending on other factors.

The point spread difference is not the only cue used, and in some instances it isn’t used at all. The process that followed was one of looking at each game with the point spread and identifying all the underdogs that I initially believed, via the recognition heuristic, would win the game. In these instances the point spreads are irrelevant. The next step is to attempt to use the point spread differences as a cue to a game. For example, I set the Seahawks-Dolphins line at Dolphins -4. The Crowd had the Dolphins at -7 and Vegas had them at -8. Being that I believed the Dolphins would win, the question in this regard is, “will the Dolphins win by more than 8 points?”. By my setting the line at Dolphins -4 my initial reaction is, ‘No, the Dolphins won’t win by more than 8.’ Since the Crowd also believed that the Dolphins would not win by more than 8, that gives me a bit more confidence in taking the Seahawks. To this point I have used two cues, but I needed a third cue for this game to make a decision. The cue that pushed me to choose the Seahawks is that 8 points signifies 2 scores, and I believe the Seahawks can keep this game within 2 scores.

Now, that may seem like a lot of work, but that whole process (except for the data entry of the lines) took less than 15 seconds. I could have gone and factored in a lot of additional statistics and trends, but they do not add any benefit in my deciding this particular game. That does not hold true in all instances, and in those games where the point-spread cue was not enough to satisfy me, I would then go to an additional cue. The additional cue is that of adding stats.

I will save the statistics cue for another time as all of us can argue over which statistics are the most relevant.

Today I am playing a 12 Team Parlay (Money Line), a 12 Team Parlay (Point Spreads), and a 4-Team 6 Point Teaser. The teams that comprise these wagers can be viewed HERE at The Fourth Down presented by Gear Live.

The Dean’s Week 10 NFL Picks can be viewed be viewed HERE