NHL Betting Strategy - Betting the NHL playoffs
Professor MJ’s
Sports Betting Strategies
NHL – How To Bet the NHL Playoffs
1. Introduction
I wanted to verify whether I could find a profitable strategy for the NHL playoffs based on the following assumption: the public tends to overreact to recent results.
For example, if a given team won the first game of the series but lost the next three, should we bet on them since most of the public will probably overreact to the outcome of the past three games?
For the sake of this article, the “higher seed” means the team that owns home-ice advantage. Games 1-2-5-7 are played at the higher seed’s arena, while games 3-4-6 are played at the lower seed’s home.
Throughout the article, HS means "Higher Seed", whereas LS means "Lower Seed."
The data includes a total of 708 games, which corresponds to all NHL playoff games between the 2007/2008 and 2015/2016 seasons. I have decided to take out the 2012/2013 playoff games because the lockout shortened the season, which may have had an impact on how things went and I did not want to introduce a potential bias in the data.
A word of caution before we jump into the main content: several findings below seem promising, but we often end up with fairly small sample sizes so you should take it into consideration before betting your house based on the results presented here. I’m not saying the results are worthless either, but please keep this fact in mind.
2. Results
Let's kick off the analysis by betting on all higher seeds (HS) and all lower seeds (LS) in Game #x of the series.
We break down the results by the “current series status.”
For example, betting Game #3...
- When the higher seed is leading 2-0;
- When the series is tied 1-1;
- When the lower seed is up 2-0.
2.1 Betting Game #2 of the Series
Several studies have shown that it is best, generally speaking, to bet road underdogs as opposed to any of the other three possibilities (home underdogs, home favorites, road favorites). You lose less money, on average, by betting road underdogs.
Still, I certainly did not expect to find a POSITIVE profit simply by betting the lower seed in Game #2 of all 120 series in the dataset!!
The ROI is twice better when the lower seed won the first game, which goes against my initial hypothesis that people overreact to recent games.
2.2 Betting Game #3 of the Series
The only profitable strategy occurs when betting the higher seed in series which are tied at one game apiece.
The rationale might be that the higher seed puts more effort and energy in such games because of the danger of falling down 2-1 with the next game being played on the road again, whereas they could be complacent when leading 2-0.
But then, shouldn’t they be playing with desperation when trailing the series 2-0? Perhaps their confidence is gone and the lower seed plays with passion in front of their home fans after winning the first two games of the series on the road. Who knows?
I can’t say I would be very confident about betting the higher seed every time the series is tied 1-1 because I trust a lot more strategies that follow my initial intuition.
2.3 Betting Game #4 of the Series
I absolutely love what I’m seeing here, wow!!!
At the very beginning I said I wanted to verify if we should bet against the grain by taking the team that has struggled the most recently.
In this case, when the higher seed leads the series 3-0 we find a positive profit from betting the lower seed, while when the lower seed leads the series 3-0 we make money by betting the higher seed.
I could not have drawn it any better than this!
2.4 Betting Game #5 of the Series
Oh my God… It gets even better! Once again, things go in the exact direction I was looking for.
If we had bet on the lower seed every single time it trailed the series 3-1 over the past 9 seasons (except the 2012/2013 season), we would have made an unbelievable 53.7% ROI!! As mentioned earlier, the sample size (38) is fairly small so we are probably overperforming: the true ROI is likely to be smaller, but signs are strong that it is a viable strategy.
Now, if you had bet all higher seeds when trailing the series 3-1, you would have made a 17.4% ROI, which is still nice! I’m impressed by the 16-7 record in such circumstances.
2.5 Betting Game #6 of the Series
The numbers in the table above indicate to bet the lower seed when trailing the series 3-2. That goes in accordance with the initial hypothesis, too.
2.6 Potential winning betting strategies
At this point, let’s recap all 8 winning strategies found thus far:
- Strategy 1 = Game #2: bet the lower seed when trailing the series 1-0
- Strategy 2 = Game #2: bet the lower seed when leading the series 1-0
- Strategy 3 = Game #3: bet the higher seed when the series is tied 1-1
- Strategy 4 = Game #4: bet the lower seed when trailing the series 3-0
- Strategy 5 = Game #4: bet the higher seed when trailing the series 3-0
- Strategy 6 = Game #5: bet the lower seed when trailing the series 3-1
- Strategy 7 = Game #5: bet the higher seed when trailing the series 3-1
- Strategy 8 = Game #6: bet the lower seed when trailing the series 3-2
3. Specific Paths
What if we break down the results into specific “paths”? Uh?!? What do I mean by a “path”?
Consider the case where the higher seed leads the series 3-2. We just saw that it is a good strategy to bet the lower seed in Game #6.
Now, is it even more profitable if the lower seed won the first two games and then lost the next three, i.e. with the following path: LS, LS, HS, HS, HS? According to my intuition, it should be because the public might overreact to the outcome of the past three meetings.
Let’s revisit some of the cases above to see what happens.
We cannot run this type of analysis on strategies 1-2-4-5 described above because there is only one possible path. For example, the higher seed leading the series 3-0 can only happen in the following way: HS, HS, HS.
Accordingly, we’ll revisit strategies 3-6-7-8 in more details.
3.1 Betting the Higher Seed When the Series is Tied 1-1
Exactly what I was hoping for: We make much more money by betting the higher seed when it lost its previous game.
As a matter of fact, we don’t seem to be making any money at all when it is coming off a win.
3.2 Betting the Lower Seed When Down 1-3 in the Series
Still based on the reasoning that people put too much emphasis on recent results, we would expect to be making more money when the lower seed lost the past three games.
Despite the pretty small sample sizes, that’s what we observe here as the highest ROI occurs for this specific path (87.1% ROI).
However, I believe the main thing to remember from the table above is we are making money no matter what the path was.
3.3 Betting the Higher Seed When Down 1-3 in the Series
We witness a similar pattern as the previous case: All four possible paths lead to positive returns.
3.4 Betting the Lower Seed When Down 2-3 in the Series
Again, I’m thrilled with the results since they are in accordance with the initial intuition. Remember we are betting the lower seed, so we expect to make more money when the most recent games went to the higher seed.
When the higher seed won the last two games, betting the lower seed led to a 7-3 record with a +$4.23 profit (ROI = 42.3%).
When the higher seed won the last game, betting the lower seed led to an 18-9 record with an +$8.03 profit (ROI = 29.7%).
Finally, when the lower seed won the last game we expect to make LESS money, which is exactly what happened: 9-12 record with a -$3.84 profit (ROI = -18.3%).
So the final word here is to bet the lower seed when trailing the series 3-2, but only if it is coming off a loss.
4. Conclusion
Let’s summarize the way we should approach the NHL playoffs from a betting perspective:
5. How Did This Betting System Do in Recent Years?
I mentioned at the very beginning of this article that the data used in the present study concerned the 2007/08 to 2015/16 NHL seasons (excluding the lockout 2012/13 season).
How did the strategy perform since then?
Here is the answer:
The system described in this article has done very well over the past four NHL postseason!
6. YouTube Channel
I hope you appreciated this analysis whose objective is to make you a winner during the Stanley Cup playoffs!
Check out my sports betting YouTube channel to get:
- Free picks across many sports (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, College Basketball, etc) ;
- Valuable betting lessons;
- Winning betting systems.
Here is the link to this great YouTube channel, I hope to see you there!
Professor MJ
