Sports Betting Tips

Mid February is time to shop for some decent NBA futures contracts on Tradesports. Today we’ll take a look at the Western conference. At Tradesports the contracts read NBA.WEST.TEAM, for example NBA.WEST.JAZZ. If you don’t know how binary contacts work by now, shame on you! Suffice it to say that they define an event and the contracts expire at either 0 or 100 and trade anywhere in between before the event expires. In this case the event is a particular team winning the NBA West this year.

If you think the event will happen you buy the contract, if you don’t you sell it (like selling a futures contract short to open a position). Let’s just take a look at the long prices since we are simply going to buy under-priced teams. Here are the current offer prices.

Spurs 21.5

Suns 22

Mavs 20

Lakers 19.7

Jazz 7.3

Hornets 7.0

Rockets 4.8

Nuggets 3.7

Warriors 2.0

Blazers 0.6

All the Rest 0.1

Now, does anything jump out at you? The first thing I notice is that the Hornets who are currently in first place not only for their division but for the entire Western conference aren’t getting much respect. the Tradesports marketplace obviously isn’t sold on them yet. If they hang in there and make the playoffs with a high seeding, that contract price can only go up. This is a no brainer.

Next, I like the Nuggets at that price. We are talking a $37 risk for a potential $963 reward. They are a good team this year, gotta love that.

The Warriors are hanging in there with Phoenix and the Lakers this year, and at 2.0 that’s a $20 risk to potentially win $980. Need a little bit of that.

Finally, I want a total lottery ticket. All those 0.1 teams are real dogs with the possible exception of Sacramento, but I just can’t see them getting in this year with Phoenix, Lakers, and Golden State above them. So I’m going with the Trailblazers for a $6 risk to potentially win $994. They are definitely within catching distance of Utah and Denver.

They only other team I like on this board is the Rockets, but I already have a position on them for beating their season total wins number of 54.5, which I got in at 10 (last trade was 15 so it’s in the money now).

To recap, here is what I am buying today:

NBA.WEST.HORNETS

NBA.WEST.NUGGETS

NBA.WEST.WARRIORS

NBA.WEST.TRAILBLAZERS

I guess the only thing I really need to do is root against Utah!

Technorati Tags: Sports betting, Nba, Nba futures

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Practical Practices. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.