I have been intrigued lately with watching the public money. I won’t bore you with all the details of every game and the line, money movements, but I think we have been right on when we have released the other side of the plays the public has been backing, and backing HARD. Some of the action we have even stayed off of, thinking, there has to be a reason for this and the public must have something here. Two, most recent cases have been the USC/OREGON total and last nights total on TROY/FLA ATLANTIC game. We stayed off last night after just not having a great feel for which Troy team would show up. They had gotten blown out the last 2 games, granted vs much superior competition, but blown out nonetheless. But we were watching the total rise, it opened at 50, stuck there for a day, went to 51 and then boom. In a 2 hour span that number went from 51 to 53.5. That caught our eye and when that line closed at 54 if we could have gotten ahold of our members we would have stated to bet the house on the under. What happened? A 30-17 final and the under!!
The same thing occured in the USC/OREGON game except ALL the trends pointed to an under play for us at ATS LOCKS. We had the game pegged at o/u of 55 and when the total rose all the way to 57 we had the time to post our 20 unit winner and everyone went home happy. The public pounded that number all day Saturday figuring it would be a shootout. What our statfox.com trends/stats page showed was USC was 8-20 o/u as favorite, 9-21 o/u in all lined games and 1-13 o/u in lined home games the last 3 seasons.
What we are saying is when handicapping you have to be aware of where the public money is going and not be afraid to go against it. It does go against human nature to go away from what “the crowd” is doing but in gambling it comes to down to this. If you are winning, the “crowd” will follow you!