THE BETTING FOOL
By a Man Who Should Know Better
Longer pieces that sit apart from the weekly card: a question, the arithmetic, and what it means at the betting window. Each one is built from the same data as the picks.
Ask a football bettor how often the team that wins the game also covers the spread and you will get a number near fifty. The real answer, over twenty seasons, is 83.2 percent. Here is why it is arithmetic, and why it changes how you read a bet.