How an Overtime Loss Affects PickLogic

On a comment to yesterday's blog post, a reader questioned whether losing a game in overtime would affect the next selection—and he's absolutely right:  it most certainly does.

In fact, the impetus of yesterday's blog post ("This is Why We Don't Gamble on Sports") was to discuss how Sunday's loss was going to affect Tuesday's selection, and we got so riled up (!) that we neglected to discuss that issue.

So...how does an overtime loss affect the picking methodology? Well, keeping in mind that PickLogic is picking games in an primary effort to avoid long losing streaks, it has little choice but to treat a game like that as a "win" in the whole scheme of things (in which it selected an "UNDER", and the game went UNDER in regulation—but went OVER as a result of an overtime period).

Since the best selection on the board was selected for Sunday, and it went under the total in the normal 40 minutes of playing time, there's no guarantee that the system won't quickly follow that "loss" up with a five-game losing streak (which, combined with these two losses already, would be rather monumental).

Unfortunately for those of us following PickLogic with our investment dollars, the system HAS to assume it "won," and start the betting amount on the next pick from a base level. As a result, we have little choice but to take our net loss (of 1.37 percent from the two losses since the last win on Friday) and move on.

As a result, you'll note that Tuesday's selection (the UNDER in the Chicago/Memphis game) has a reduced betting level.

(While this is the first game in quite awhile that we've had that lost because of an overtime period, it's worth noting that we've had three occasions in the last 18 months whereby PickLogic ended up winning an "OVER" game specifically because the game went to overtime. After a win, of course, bets revert to a base level, so the same dilemma doesn't come up in those situations.)

Tom D (the poster of that comment), thanks for the note!