College Football Week 7 – RIF Test

A quick summary on what this site is about…

First, I do not in any way recommend you ever gamble a single real dollar on any sports betting.  You are responsible for your own behavior.  We are working with pretend dollars.

I am using money management to limit any possible ‘loss’ to a set amount.  For this RIF ( rolling IF bets ) test, I am using a total season stake of $400 – starting with week 6 of the current college football season and ‘risking’ $40 per week.  This prevents the psychological stress of losing the stake early and not being able to enjoy yourself all season long – or supposedly dipping into your bank account for more pretend money.  You shouldn’t do that with real money, so you should follow the same path for pretend moola. IMO LOL.

What is a RIF?  A ‘Rolling IF’ bet is where you start with a base bet – say $10 on a single college football game.  Now you set up a second bet on a different game, but it has an IF condition – this bet depends on your winning the first bet.  If you lose the first, this second bet is ‘no-action’ and does not count at all, it’s ignored.  If your first bet does win, your second bet is active.  You can then do a third RIF bet that is dependent on your winning the second bet, and so on.  I call this a RIF chain since losing at any point breaks the chain at that point and any following bets are no-action.

Why bother with a RIF chain?  Money management is my thought.  If you do straight bets on say 10 games, you have to risk money on each game.  That is grand if you have a few thousand pretend dollars to risk.  What if you only want to risk $400 for the whole season?  One bad week and your stake could be decimated – ruining your enjoyment of the whole season.  For me, setting a limit of how much to risk each week is a balm to my gambling soul.  Being a risk-adverse person, for this year that is $40 per week.  If I luck out and don’t lose the whole stake or even win overall, any leftover $$ can be used for bowl games or saved for next season.  Moderation – I am a grinder person rather than a shoot-for-the-moon type.

 

 

This is a summary of my prediction of 20 games from 55 possible choices, setting up a series of bets where each is dependent on the success of the former games in the series.  This is a group of five games  in each set.  Each set is independent from the other sets.  I start with a bet of $10 and bet less on each successive game.  Using pretend money would be the preferred method!

This is the second trial week for testing a method of RIF (rolling IF) bets where after a base bet is set up, the next bet is contingent on winning the first.  If the first loses, the second and further bets are  ‘no action’ and just drop off with no impact.  You can chain numerous RIF bets in a sequence, one after the other.  On-line sites like 5dimes.eu have full descriptions on the limits of RIF sequences.  The idea appeals to me since it allows possible extended play while helping money management.  RIF is a way for small stake players to make numerous single plays each week and stretch a small playing stake at a lower risk.

You can play for the original base bet plus any winnings accumulated with wins in the RIF series.  One loss and the series stops and any further RIF bets in the series do not count even if you win the games.  My trial preference is to go with a reducing bet on the sequential games in the RIF string and bank the early wins to offset, in part, the probable loss of a lower bet amount on later bets in the series.  For example, I am testing a base bet of $10, followed in order with RIF bets of 8, 6, 4, and 2.  I am setting the series up with a series of games where higher odds games start and progressive lower odds follow.  This way the early games have a 80%+ chance of winning while the last bet in the series would be ~60% winning chance.  As the above table shows, by matching the decreasing dollar amount with decreasing odds, the per game payout stays in the same range for each game.  This is a grind method rather than playing for a single big payoff.

Yeah, the above table is not perfect – putting the bets in one at a time is a test of your organizational skills. LOL   My apologies for the above table – WordPress is not spreadsheet-friendly so I grabbed a print screen of a compressed summary of my spreadsheet from hell.

Last week I ran a rough trial similar to the above group of games.  I played 16 games and won 13 of the 16.  I lost $8.59 of the original $40 stake.  How irritating is that!  The four series went like this.  First set of 4 game RIFs I won all four games for +$6 profit.  The next two series I lost the second game in both for -$12.  The last series I won the first two games and lost the third for -$2.  The three games I lost were by 3, 3, & 1 points – close but not good enough.  In addition five of the games I won were lower in the losing series so they were no action.  Still, if I had been playing four 4-game parlays, the result would have been worse – my one winning parlay would have returned $26 so I would have lost $14 of the $40 played.  This week hopefully will be better.  Since I am playing with a season stake of $400 and only risking $40 per week, I will be able to play all season with the original amount chosen for the stake regardless of what happens each week.

Comments are welcome – you can also message me thru Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/david.mckee.733

Warning!!!  Like all other posters everywhere, I DO NOT recommend anyone to ever gamble ANY amount ANY where at ANY time.  You are responsible for your own actions.

10/13/2017 Update:

Have been analyzing Pi-Rate’s Parlay choices for week 7.  Here are my ideas on how those games could be played as RIFs.  Sorry about the image size, I am hoping you can expand to see the whole image.  Getting a spreadsheet into WordPress is beyond my abilities. Actually this is a compressed summary – lots of columns hidden.

 

The ordering of the games is key to the payout sequence.  In the above image, it is the calculated payout highlighted in green that is crucial to the success of the RIF chain.  A loss on the first game throws away all the remaining bets.

I tried in my week 7 to start with the safest games first tiering down to riskier plays – all within the same RIF chain.  This can cause a risk of capital down into the 2nd&3rd games.  On the Pi-Rate example above, I am playing a mid-risk game first (Temple and San Diego).  With a high enough bet, the payout is big enough to cover the bet of the 2nd game.  The accumulating payout is used on down the RIF chain to cover the later bets.  My concept is to risk my stake dollars on the first game and then place bets using only the winnings of later games – as far down the chain as I can keep winning.  I believe 5dimes (off-shore gaming) allows RIF chains up to 15 bets.

In my spreadsheet I can move games up or down, moving the moneylines around changing the sequence of risk.  I also look at the accumulated payout and adjust the next bet in sequence to be at or lower than that accumulated payout.  The whole process is much easier to do than to explain!

Anyway, my end result places my stake at risk only for the first game in the RIF chain.  the following bets are played with the profit of previous wins.  If I lose, the chain stops and any games after are ‘no-action’ and drop off unplayed.  The big risk is that first game.  I have to play enough $$ at a risk to give a big enough payout to cover additional games in the chain.  I could also put $$ at risk over two or more games up front – a choice I will look at depending on the odds available on the games selected – each week will be different.  Right now, I plan to bump up my initial first-game risk and play with winnings on all the games after the 1st.  Each RIF chain of games will make or break on the first game – my choice!

Some tidbits on the above image…  To determine which games to play, I use a subset of Todd Beck’s website thepredictiontracker.com  (TPT) where he collates the sports picks of some 60 different providers.  Pi-Rate always seems to be in my weekly selection of experts so their opinions are given serious consideration.  I like to pick games where the minimum and maximum predictions from TPT both pick the same team (above coded green).  TPT calculates a predicted winner percentage – helpful.  I also use OddsShark for power ranking calcs.  Clean Up Hitter has a summary of data for each game that is also helpful.  Mushing all this info together, I rank the games in order of my confidence of who will win.  The process is for my playing pickem games with confidence points on Yahoo and OfficeFootballPool.com.  I grind through all this and then can pick a subset of the 55ish games to use on this pretend RIF betting idea.

It takes me about a day a week to mush this together, but hey, I’m retired and this is fun!!  Good luck on your picking!!!

Week 7 Grand Result!!

Oh boy….  Many favorites lost this week.  Actually, I came out well in my confidence pickem leagues – even went up in standings.  In the six Yahoo leagues I am now 1st, 2,2,3,4 &9th.  But picking for the RIF test – not good!  Risked $40 and lost $26.44, winning only 4 of 19 games.  I picked the winner for 8 more games, but they were ‘no-action’ in the RIF chains ( coded blue in the image ).  My version of the PiRate parlays lost also.  They played S Carolina but I went with Tenn and lost that game too.  Well, week 7 is mostly a bust, but my money management of only risking $40 per week has me down $35.03 ( $8.59 & $26.44 ) from the $80 played so far.  I have $40 to try again next week – if the better ranked teams can actually DO better next week the results should be better.  We will see!

Pi-Rate chose S. Carolina…  but I liked Tennessee better – wrong!  So many favored teams went down in flames and took us down with them.  Next week!…..