The Money Pick
Armed with the Base Picks from us, you can do pretty good. You’ll probably end up in the top half or quarter of the standings each week. For overall standings, base picks will give you the best chance to be near the top, and have a decent chance of winning the entire season. But there’s a couple of problems: 1. The base picks aren’t always going to be right, and 2. You’re not the only one who can get base picks. So what now?
The answer is to be a little bit different from what everyone else is picking. But only a little bit; deviate too much from the Base Picks and you’re just asking for trouble. You’ll get a lower score and still not win. So which games should I pick outside of Base Picks? You’re in luck, we’ll tell you: those are our Money Picks.
Money picks are teams where almost no one is picking them to win but have a higher chance of winning than people are giving them credit for. They don’t win as often as a Base Pick team would, in fact most only win 20-40% of the time. But when they do, the impact is great… you’ve got a ton of points while the rest of the suckers in the league got zero.
Here’s an example of a games table with Money Picks:
Table available for Premium Members
We’ve color coded the Money Picks in the chart. The Money Picks are ones where you want to pick differently than the Base Picks.
The green ones are the teams that will give you the highest risk/reward. They’re the ones where the least percentage of people are picking them. Yellow is next riskiest, and blue is the least. How risky you want to go is going to depend on how big and how good your league is, and if you want to try to win a week or try to win the overall season. To be clear, the Money Picks are a bit of a gamble. If you’re playing to win the whole season instead of the weekly prize, you want to take less risk. If you want to win the weekly prize, or if you’re near the end and you’re losing anyway, go hard on Money Picks.
[Why you should go all-in on the money pick. CPP reader @Ironclad ran an extensive computer model]
So what picks would I make based off this table? When I go with a Money Pick, I usually go all-in. DAL has a 37% chance of winning this week, but only 10% of the public has picked them. I’d go DAL over PHI for 16 points, and the rest Base Picks. But you can adjust based off how much risk you want to take. You can take DAL for less points, or take LAC (blue pick) for more points to make yourself different from the crowd. You’ll need to get a feel for how much risk you want to take. See our Step-By-Step Guide if you want some more details on how to make these picks.
There you go! Base Picks will get you close, Money Picks will get you over. Our Premium Membership will get you base picks and money picks
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