It was like being at Cedar Point this week at WinTheTrophy. We had an early favorite, jdavis, who took a commanding lead with almost 3,000 chips, and, frankly, we thought he would coast to an easy victory. Not to be my friends. Not to be. jdavis kept the hammer down and went for broke and, well, he kinda did (go broke). jdavis fell slow then fast. And just as we all thought STEELERROB was going to take his first weekly championship, Shizzy comes from behind on Sunday to take the coveted Overall Champion Trophy. Nicely done Shizzy.

This week’s top three include:

1. Shizzy 1,964
2. STEELERROB 1,528
3. jpan06 1,190

Honorable mentions for this week:
1. verypink 14-7 (63%)
2. jacktjl 25-18 (53%)
3. kizzyle who earned the highest BetIQ (10.0) on the Overall Genius Ladder

Rumor has it that Co-Founder, cscairns, missed another huge payoff 8-way parlay by one game. Tough luck. Good luck this week and let’s see if someone can break 3,000.

I begrudgingly congratulate brian for being the overall chips leader in last week’s Weekly Leaderboard competition (Sep 14 to Sep 20). He won with a measly 1,897 chips on 32 bets. The next closest competitor was Matt2503 with 1,260 chips. Lucky for brian I missed an 8-way parlay by one game that would have propelled me to the top. Unfortunately, the Lions didn’t beat the Vikings.

Congrats to LordHatton for being the overall chips leader in last week’s Weekly Leaderboard competition (Sep 7 to Sep 13). He vanquished his enemies with ease by raking in 4,393 chips on 165 bets. The next closest competitor was d3v1n with 2,400 chips. d3v1n hit a spectacular 4-way parlay early in the week that shot him into first place, but was overcome by LordHatton’s barrage of no-lose picks. Unfortunately for d3v1n, he’ll be coveting LordHatton’s shiny Overall Champion Trophy for at least another week.

Other weekly notables:

jdavis hit an 8-way parlay!

ai3theansr went 14-0-0.

KellRawLive picked 71% out of his 62 bets correctly.

Dishonorable mentions:

brian, co-founder of WinTheTrophy, managed to maintain his negative overall BetIQ (-2.0).

sean, developer of the site, decided to keep brian company – his BetIQ currently stands at -1.7. So weak.

Not being a big sports fan, I found WinTheTrophy to be interesting in a different way: I wanted to see if there was a simple set of rules one can follow to consistently win more than what was bet. After a week or two of trying different strategies, I realized the following observations:

• On average, no one knows the future. That is, if you were to randomly bet on all the teams, your winning percentage will be close to 50%.
• If the above point is true, you should bet more on the team in a given game with the largest payout.
• However, you must make sure you gain the advantage of statistical significance: bet on as many teams as possible in a given day.
• As you win, continue betting on other teams the next day to take advantage of "compounding interest": the more chips you gain, the more you can bet on the following day (until your chip count is reset the following week).
• This strategy has a weakness of being very naive: you might not want to bet against a team with a perfect winning record playing a team with a "perfect" losing record, for example. However, even with this weakness, this strategy has on average won twice the amount that I bet for a given week. 

After seven weeks of betting, I stopped because I became bored with the copious amount of clicking required to play using my particular strategy (i.e., as many bets as possible on high-payout picks). (Again, I’m not a big sports fan.) However, if (when?) WinTheTrophy offers rule-based betting (or bots, as they’re usually known), I plan on taking advantage of them.

After some tough losses in Vegas, I’ve come to learn that objectivity is central to picking winners, but I’ve also learned that subjectivity (or gut) plays a strangely vital role as well. If I had a $100 for every time I’ve heard or said – “I knew it. I knew it!” – I would be very rich. So sports wagering is like anything in life: you can get lucky a few times but it is those who consistently do their homework that win in the long-run. The fundamental difference between just guessing and becoming a student of the game is that the student learns to see the subtleties and to interpret the miniscule and to find an edge where others see nothing but open sky. It is knowing the players, the coaches, the ownership, the trends, the obstacles, the weather, the zeitgeist, the time, the alignment of the stars, and a multitude of other factors that are accumulated, synthesized, weighed, and finally deduced into a selection that is either a winner or a loser. Simple and pure. You either got it right or you got it wrong, or worse: you pushed. And here in the United States, no one likes to be a loser at anything – ever.