It’s day two of our Fanduel boost review and Fanduel has blessed us with three separate boosted opportunities for Friday night NBA action. All degenerates rejoice as there may be an opportunity for us to make some money tonight. But first, let’s talk about last night.
How about that start to the boost review? Mullar’s Army (AKA me) are off to a 1-0 start in our documented gambling campaign. How many sharps do you know who are undefeated? I mean if this keeps up for too long the house is going to shut us down. I kid, I kid. But seriously, I think the boosts really could be a money making opportunity if we pick our spots correctly. There’s a reason why they limit the max bet to $50, they don’t want Mullar’s Army taking them to the cleaners.
I’ll be keeping a record of how we’re doing on boosts I’m taking, as well as the overall boosts for the ones I decline. As for today’s boosts, as mentioned before, we have three separate opportunities.
My mouth is watering with excitement at the thought of three delicious boosts but right off the bat they hit us with a first basket boost. First basket boosts could be fun because of the pure adrenaline rush of having your bet decided in the first 30 seconds of the game but personally I’m not a fan. Let’s run some numbers to see if this even makes any sense. I don’t know if there’s a perfect science to finding the probability of this trio netting the first basket but I’ll take the average points per game of all the starters on each team and see what the percentage of points is for Porzingas, Brown and Irving to calculate what I think is a pretty solid reference point.
Based on the average points per game amongst the starters our trio of Kristaps, Brown and Kyrie are only averaging 68.4 points out of 184.5 total points per game from the 10 starters (based on most starts for each team this year). That comes out to a whopping 37.1% of the total points, making this a misleading boost. The implied odds at +150 are a 40% hit rate, so it’s not too far off but still this bet is not providing a true boosted opportunity that we were hoping for, so I will not be recommending this for Mullar’s Army. We’re 0-1 so far.
Next up, we got Jayson Tatum to record a double double or Luka Doncic to record a triple double. Before I get into the stats, look at this seamlessly inserted chart. I’m going to pat myself on the back because clearly I know what I’m doing here. Anyway, I’m going to hone in on more recent games to see how our boys have been playing lately. Taytum has 4 double doubles in 11 games in February and 6 in 15 games in January for a total of 38.46% over this two month stretch. Luka has 2 triple doubles in 12 games in February and 3 triple doubles in 10 games in January, giving him 5 triple doubles in his last 22 games (22.73%).
Alright Mullar’s Army I have a confession to make. I’m not 100% sure what the math is here. As your fearless leader I can admit when I don’t know something. Socrates would actually commend me for being so brave as to say so. I’ll show my work and you can decide for yourself if you reach the same conclusion but I think what you do is take Taytum’s chance of NOT getting a double double at 61.54% and multiply it by Luka’s chance to NOT get a triple double at 77.28%. That gives us 47.56%, which I think is the chance of this bet NOT hitting so if we flip it around we have a 52.44% chance of winning this bet.
Honestly, that’s just based on the last two months of games anyway, which is an arbitrary way to do the analysis and certainly has at least 5% variability, but regardless I don’t see this one as worth betting on. The +100 odds seem fair for a normal bet but there is really not much of a boost here as I think the odds of it hitting are about 50/50. That makes us 0-2 so far 🙁
That leaves us with only one boost remaining. Giannis, Lilliard and DeRozan to score 80+ points in tonight’s Bulls-Bucks game. It seems like a tall task but that trio averages 77.9 points per game this season. That gets us within whiskers of the 80 points needed, so the original odds of +110 are maybe a little low but don’t seem too unreasonable.
At +200 the implied odds of the bet hitting are 33.33% and I think the true odds are definitely above that based on how close these guys are to that on average.
Conclusion:
Despite Fanduel offering three boosts, only one is truly a boost worth considering. The point of using boosts is to take back some of the edge the house usually holds, and the first two betting options do not give us an opportunity to do that. The third option is still probably slightly less than 50% likely but the boosted odds of +200 provide good enough value where I do recommend betting it. Come on Mullar’s Army, let’s see if we can get to 2-0 (and up 3 units!) on the year with another boosted victory!