Here’s another one from Chance News (scroll down to “Hot streaks rarely last”), John Gavin refers to an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal by Sam Walker about a guy called Dr. Bob who has a successful football betting record:

YEAR WIN/LOSS/TIE %
1999 49-31-1 61%
2000 47-25-0 65%
2001 35-28-0 56%
2002 49-44-3 53%
2003 46-55-2 46%
2004 55-34-1 62%
2005 51-21-2 71%
2006 45-34-3 57%

Gavin writes,

What separates Mr. Stoll from other professionals, and makes him so frightening to bookmakers, is that he distributes his bets to the public, for a fee. All that pandemonium on Thursdays was no coincidence: that’s the day Mr. Stoll sends an email to his subscribers telling them which college football teams to bet on the following weekend. This makes it very difficult for bookmakers to maintain a balanced book.

His website (http://www.drbobsports.com/) discusses the tools he uses to analyze football games: a mathematical model to project how many points each team was likely to score in a coming matchup. He makes unapologetic use of terms like variances, square roots, binomials and standard distributions. Much of his time is spent making tiny adjustments. If a team lost 12 yards on a running play, he checks the game summary to make sure it wasn’t a botched punt. He compensates for the strength of every team’s opponents. It takes him eight hours just to calculate a rating he invented to measure special teams. Trivial as this seems, Mr. Stoll says the extra work makes his predictions 4% better.

I have nothing to add except that I always think this sort of thing is cool.