2018, The Sports Year That Ruined Gematria

People will recall for quite some time that the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl this February.

The NBA playoffs are already a proven disappointment.  A casual new observer may wonder how I make that claim if reviewing my posts about Denim Davis Decodes. After all, he can still have correctly picked the Rockets beating the Cavaliers in the finals.  If there’s any cosmic justice the Warriors or Celtics will play for the title, or both.  Even without that he’s already comitted three of the major sins of those trying to predict sports with gematria.

1). He’s insisted on predicting on a game by game basis.  Not a good idea.  It’s much better off to just pick the finalists and a champ and go from there.  The Celtics making it to the ECF has already clunked his bracket.

2). His final four was loaded with three favorites- Houston, Golden State and Cleveland.  Big deal.  Where’s the gematria on the FTFM blog supporting the Sixers making the playoffs?  Any dumbass can pick the favorites once the playoff teams are set.

3). The new one.  It already happened once before with the Cavs-Pacers series.  Now it’s two more strikes.  If you look at his blog, he has now picked all four teams to win.  “Whoever wins tonight’s scripted game four will advance” and other similar bullshit comments.  I’m not surprised in the slightest since the “oh they flipped the script” thing is an easy out.

Enough basketball.  I only brought it up because I wanted to emphasize the Sixers that nobody chirped about until it became obvious that they were one of the better teams in the East.  Add that to the Eagles that nobody saw coming preseason and it shows that I’m a huge Philly fan and....no, wait.  I can’t stand Philly and their obnoxious battery throwing fans because every single one of them is evil and to save money the City should have a public execution of a welfare recipient every day and sell tickets to see it!

The real gem in the sports clunk fest is the Las Vegas Golden Knights.  And somebody posted a comment that allows me the opportunity to share my research.

This comment suggest a grim perspective of rampant fraud and collusion in the sports betting world.  Although there is fraud the industry is regulated and this is a typical unfounded claim with no evidence.  “Well obviously this is my thinking cap so it must be right”. Although the idea of somebody walking up to a bookie with a suitcase full of $50,000 and walking away with $25 million is great for a Hollywood movie, that’s not the way sports betting works.

A common misconception is that the odds are Las Vegas guessing who is going to win.  Instead the odds are a self correcting number to encourage an equal amount of wagers on both teams.  If a lot of money starts pouring in for one team the odds are adjusted accordingly.  The “house always wins” because of the vigorish or their cut.  A good analogy is horse racing where the payoffs are based on the pool of bets wagered by everyone.  The underhorse wins, somebody has a lucky day but they are actually being paid by all the people that wagered on other ponies.  A clearer example is poker  (although not a better example).  You win a hand, you don’t get all the pot, the House gets their cut or “rake”.  The losers still pay the winners, and the house always wins.

Specifically to the Knights I found this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/nhl-playoffs-2018-if-golden-knights-win-the-stanley-cup-vegas-sportsbooks-are-big-losers/amp/

If you look at the fully story from that link and other sources the odds were less than 500-1 to start, then self corrected to encourage betting.  The largest wager here - $400.  And a dozen chump change bets, probably just for grins.  Certainly nobody mortgaged the house looking for a multi million dollar payoff.  Over a few months the odds dropped to 200-1.  As time marched on the self correction got to 9-2 by the time the story ended.

Now the correction is not immediate, so Vegas would prefer the Knights to lose in the finals, but overall the process always holds true, about equal money on both teams.  So the general public certainly didn’t think the Knights would make it this far.  And now to gematria.

Of course nobody said a word about it preseason.  The only consistent pseudo-prediction was a vague, “looks like a Canadian team” line that Winnipeg losing shot down.  Of the four major US sports, hockey sucks the most for gematria because the scoring is so low.  Gematria has failed miserably this year and will never, ever be able to predict the next Knights style improbable playoff run.

For the most part they just use the last line of defense* in this situation.  Just don’t talk about it and hope nobody notices.  Unfortunately hockey is under the “all sports are rigged” umbrella and some attention is paid to it instead of completely ignoring it.

*I guess actually second to last.  Somebody may try to get away with outright lying.