Hello, Old Friend

Yikes, it's dusty in here.  Just give me a minute to clear the pipes (the stale brown water is nasty).  Ohhh boy...wish I had remembered to toss the milk before I left.  It's going to take a while for that clear out.

Alright, enough house keeping.  It's time to get back to business.  We're bankrupt.  It best to share that type of information in short, abrupt sentences.  While I could go into much detail about this year's effort, I'll keep the autopsy brief.  In an attempt to expand our investment and knowledge pool, Scott and I invited two more analysts to join us.  Initially, this went very well.  We applied the lessons from last year's tough sledding and created what appeared to be a very useful methodology.  Each analyst would rank their 8 favorite games.  The game with the highest rank would be our single ticket game of the week.  The next six games would be split between two three team parlays, bet at lesser amounts.  In essence, we'd hedge the big bet with smaller tickets on longer odds.  What could go wrong?

This system worked well.  So well we decided it was best to fuck with it.  Because we are greedy, we felt that by only using half of the entire betting pool each week, easy money was being left of the table.  Our remedy for this was to start picking from the moneyline, and taking teams getting odds between -270 and -400.  The logic was pretty sound - take a sure thing, and pick up some easy money.  Stringing together singles, I think I called it.  This was sound until Tampa Bay beat New Orleans.  At the time, it wasn't entirely unbelievable.  Tampa was still frisky.  In hindsight, the Universe was sending a very clear message.

While that one loss did not end our run, it did start us down a slippery slope of continuing to tinker with our system until the final week when were trying to see if we tease Icelandic Hockey lines with NFL games.  We were at rock bottom.

Needless to say, another NFL season has passed without Scott and I living our dream of starting with a few bucks and turning that into enough to play Bandon Dunes.  Perhaps the Universe was telling us to stop dicking around and work harder.  If so, the Universe sounds a lot like my wife.