Category: Olympics

USA Curling

Puts me on tilt.  It’s amateur hour relative to the other good teams that are playing.  The captain reminds me of a bad poker player bemoaning his bad luck, ignoring the fact that it was the decisions before the last one that caused all of the problems in the first place.  It’s also different playing relative professionals versus the equivalent of me and Darts at the local curling club.  That said, Germany relatively stinks too.  USA/Germany Over 12.5 -140.  Starts at Midnight EST for you night owls.

Olympics

Just covered my Sweden over with Pat with 11:45 to go in the 2nd period.  The 4.5 line was so bad I was immediately suspicious of some kind of fix or other information I wasn’t privy to.  I’ve never seen an NHL line below 5 and Sweden is a medal favorite.

Also won the Men’s Luge Doubles play I posted in the comments last night for another small win.  The two guys who won were 6 for 8 on wins for the season in 2013, winning their first six in a row and basically taking the last two races off.  Seemed good enough to me at -310, though those kind of bets can be dangerous.

No curling plays yet. I’ve been studying the totals for these teams which seem to always bet set at 12.5

UPDATE: 4-2 Sean covers too!

Olympics

Couple of hockey plays.  The first I am the house.  I do not count these towards my YTD.

Sweden/Czech over 4.5 -125 @ 12.5 (I am the Under)

Louis seems to have stumbled upon a flaw in The Matrix with this line but we will see what happens.

Sidney Crosby high goal scorer 13/2 @ 9  Ovechkin is the favorite @ 5/1 but he’s been nicked up recently so we’ll go with The Kid.  We pushed last night on our Clemson play.  It took the 2 teams 50 minutes to crack 130 and a lot of that has to do with Clemson’s defense, which is up amongst the best this year.  Clemson/Notre Dame was one of only 2 college games last night without an O/U.  I think the idea is that if Vegas put out a number it seriously believed in it would have been like 110.5 and they would have gotten raped on a weird result like the one that happened.  Vegas, not so much a step ahead, as always covering its ass.

MTD : ——–

YTD -42.07

Side Note, Lorenzen is obviously a Chunky Monkey.  But I argue that the football acts as an optical illusion.  If he was an O-Line Man, you would not look twice.  The second he gets the ball hiked to him he instantly gains 45 pounds.

 

Over Czech

Small play today on Czech Rep v Sweden Men’s Hockey Over 5.5 (-105).

I also have Jared Lorenzen over 3.5 hot dogs today on his couch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHdivRyIVTA

Olympic Hockey Preview

Just scored a free Olympic bet from Bovada for betting (too much) money on the Super Bowl.  We had Seattle (like most of America I’d assume) and so did Lou’s dad.  The game wasn’t even close, and the oddsmakers were spot on having Peyton Manning throw a pick at -180 to as high as -230 (disclaimer: we took the juice).

We will choose hockey, as I just don’t know enough about Johnny Weir’s figure skating form to make an opinion about that.

I think Canada is the most talented team in the tournament.  I just don’t think their goaltending (Price starts, Luongo is backup) is good enough.

Russia will find a way to fuck it up.  They always do.  Plus, they are properly hedged with the Russian mafia in any order.  Ovechkin will probably win Golden Goal.

I will be rooting hard for the USA; we have the best goaltending (Quick, Miller) but unfortunately in these “open” Euro rinks, they lack the skaters on the outside to create opportunities to score.  There are also more penalties called in Olympic play, not good for the physical (read: “slower”) teams.  Also, I still don’t know why Okposo didn’t make the team.

Sweden is sneaky good.  Lundquist won a Gold back in Torino, proving once more that he’s a capable and clutch goalie against all teams not named, “The Boston Bruins”.  I’d probably be more bullish if they didn’t lose Franzen.

The Swiss could actually make it out of their group.  That’s a good prop bet.

The Czechs have 4 good lines.  They also have 2 40 year olds who didn’t play defense in their primes (Nedved, Jagr), nevermind now, skittish goaltending…… and Tomas “Olay” Kaberle.  We will be hammering their individual overs.  They’ll score goals, though.

I think the Czechs do however make the final 4….and we can then hedge if they do.  So Czechs at 10-to-1 it is.

2014 Olympic Ice Hockey – Mens Gold Medal 
4:00a
Canada
Russia
Sweden
USA
Czech Republic
Finland
Switzerland
Slovakia
Norway
Latvia
Austria
Slovenia

Olympic Links

All Olympics, all the time.

First, a fascinating look at scalping tickets at the winter games.

Olympic ticketing has its set process. Organizers generally sell seats as far ahead of the Games as they can, slowly releasing batches for the premier events first — in order to maximize cash flow in the years leading up to the festival. Pools of seats are then made available to citizens of the host nation, and anything that’s left goes to general sale nine to 12 months before the Opening Ceremony. So the Games are usually either “sold out” or “95 percent booked.” It only takes one visit to the Olympics to know that this type of news is all useless misnomer that should be completely ignored.

Apolo Ohno – Old Person?

Why Scandanavian countries aren’t any good at figure skating.

A majority of Canada’s hockey players are left handed. I don’t know hockey well enough to say, but maybe there’s a strategic advantage in being left handed, like in baseball, creating a self selection bias toward those players.

Roughly 60 percent of the Easton hockey sticks sold in Canada are for left-handed shots, Mountain said. In the United States, he said, about 60 percent of sticks sold are for right-handed shots. Figures over the years from other manufacturers have put the ratio discrepancy between the two countries as high as 70 to 30.

The difference even trickles over into golf, where the swing is not unlike that of a slap shot. According to the Professional Golfers Association, 7 percent of Canadian golfers play left-handed, which is proportionally more than any other nationality. The reason is probably that Canadians pick up a hockey stick first and are therefore imprinted by the time they take up golf. Especially if they are from Quebec, where hockey players are even more left-handed than players in the rest of Canada.

Oddly, British Columbia — sometimes said to be the most American-like of the Canadian provinces — skews the other way. “The rest of the country goes 2 to 1 in favor of left sticks, but it’s reversed in B.C.,” said Marc Poirier, a customer service representative who handles Canadian orders for Warrior Sticks.

Europeans also tend to be left-handed shooters. The International Ice Hockey Federation does not keep figures by European nationality, the communications director Szymon Szemberg said. But, he said, lefty shooters have predominated. “For long spells, the great Soviet teams of the ’80s never had a player who shot right,” Szemberg said.

Boston.com has a kickass photo blog for the Olympics so far.

As if curling wasn’t cool enough, the US curling team has it’s own condom.

Lastly, what’s better than a women’s hockey brawl in an Olympic qualifier? Don’t miss the score.