Wetz Bets 2022
Updates to our betting process
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For those of you who have been following our betting coverage since the beginning of the 2021 WNBA season, you may have noticed that we recently began tweeting out the Wetz Bets once again. Up until that point, U.S. regulated sportsbooks had not offered lines on individual NCAA women’s basketball games, but now that FanDuel and Caesars have finally begun posting them, we’re back at it.
We know a lot of you aren’t interested in our betting content. It’s not for everyone. If you’re in that camp, this piece probably isn’t for you. However, betting can be a great way to grow the game and further the conversations around women’s basketball as well as to attract new fans. Some of the biggest men’s sports leagues have grown significantly thanks in large part to betting markets (see: NFL and NBA), so expanding the options and content in women’s sports will only serve to level the playing field. That’s our goal.
Since I first dipped my toes into the betting world 10 months ago, I have learned quite a bit from those who know far more than I do. Based on some of those tips I have picked up along the way, we’ve decided to make some updates to certain aspects of how we present and track the Wetz Bets. Each of those updates are detailed below, following our record.
NCAAW Records (starting January 21)
Last updated: Games through March 26
Note: All plays were public through February 25, after which we moved to just one or two plays per day posted publicly.
PUBLIC PLAYS
Sides: 316-219, +80.78 units, +16.28%
Totals: 139-108, +25.26 units, +12.47%
Overall: 455-327, +106.04 units, +15.18%
ALL PLAYS
Sides: 411-288, +99.58 units, +15.03%
Totals: 179-142, +27.82 units, +10.14%
Overall: 590-430, +127.40 units, +13.60%
Action Network tracking
If you want to track long-term game-by-game performance, that will be on the Action Network app here. It got tedious last season to type out the details for every bet in one article, and it also got really long by the end of the year. The Action Network app does that work for us, so check it out if you’re interested in the betting record over time. We’ll still keep the overall records above up to date, so it’s just the details for each game that you’ll need to check for there.
Update: starting on February 26, with most plays no longer being public, Action Network will only track the public plays.
Varying unit sizes
Last year, all of my WNBA bets were exactly one unit. A lot of bettors do it this way for simplicity and uniformity, but the disadvantage is that it limits the option to make extra on a play one is more confident in (or vice versa: to minimize the potential losses on a less confident play). For that reason, I’ll be mixing it up going forward. Most plays will still be one unit, but there will be occasional plays of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.5, or even 2 units.
“To win” (mostly)
In betting lingo, “to win” means placing a bet that will win a certain amount and “to risk” means betting that amount of money. While my bets in 2021 were all “to risk” one unit, meaning I placed one unit down, future bets will mostly be “to win” one unit (or however many units the play is, as detailed in the previous section). My default one-unit bet on -110 odds last year was one unit to win 0.91 units, but now it will be 1.1 units to win one unit.
There will be exceptions to this every so often with plus-money plays, which are bets with odds of +100 or longer. Sometimes it makes more sense to still place those bets to risk. A +180 bet, for example, is less likely to win than a standard -110 bet, so we wouldn’t want to place a full unit on it. Placing half a unit to win 0.9 units is cleaner than placing five-ninths of a unit to win one unit. (And technically, it’s impossible to wager five-ninths of a dollar anyway, so those who use a dollar unit would either have to do $0.55 to win $0.99 or $0.56 to win $1.01, which both are sort of messy). When those exceptions come up, that will be specified in the initial tweet of the bet. Which leads us to…
Immediate tweets
Graphics are cool, and it’s always more fun to tweet something that catches the eye. But they also take time to make, and betting lines can move during that time. That’s why we’ll no longer be waiting until a graphic is ready in order to tweet out a bet. Instead, we’ll post our list of bets as soon as possible after they're placed. That has two advantages. First, you will know that we’re being fully transparent and that the line truly was available at the time the bet was placed. Additionally, if you like the the pick, you can still get the same line yourself if you see the tweet(s) soon enough. Each tweet will include a few components:
The Sportsbook
I’ve found that when tailing other bettors (placing a bet because someone you trust made that wager), it’s helpful to know which sportsbook they got their bet at. That saves me some time in having to check every book for the best line, especially if I can be confident that they already did that. I will always look around for the best line before placing a bet (unless it’s a time-sensitive live bet — more on those later), so I’ll post in each tweet which sportsbook I got the line from. If you’re placing these bets yourself, you can go right to that book and be confident that it has the best available line (at least, among books that are legal where I live in Illinois).
The odds
While most bets will be “50-50” bets — against the spread or over/unders for which both sides have odds in the neighborhood of -110 — there are still times when those odds are anywhere from -102 to -120, which can make a big difference. Plus, we’ll be playing some underdog moneylines every now and then. We’ll always post the odds that we got so that you can make informed decisions.
Explanations later…sometimes
Like graphics, explanations take time. And like graphics, explanations aren’t always necessary. A lot of the bets I place are strictly based on our predictive model, so the explanation would simply be “our model said so.” There are times, of course, when there are other factors. For instance, when the Joens sisters missed Iowa State’s game against Texas, the betting line didn’t move after the news came out. I placed a bet on Texas +4.5 even though our model liked Iowa State (our model doesn’t know about player absences for now).
That’s the type of bet for which an explanation might be helpful, so in those circumstances that explanation will come in a follow-up tweet. The most important thing is still getting the original tweet out as soon as possible.
Hashtags
Lastly, we will make sure to use #WetzBets and #GamblingTwitter in each tweet, both for those of you who want to more easily find them and those of you who want to be able to easily avoid them by muting something.
Live bets
After sticking to pregame bets to start off my betting journey, it’s become time to add live in-game bets to the arsenal. I watch quite a few games, and sometimes watching a game can give you a feel for the pulse of the game in a way that the sportsbooks don’t account for. Star player picks up her third foul in the first half? Refs letting them play? Unsustainable early shooting performance? The books don’t typically adjust for that stuff in college women’s basketball as well as they do in other sports, but we can.
Parlays
A parlay bet is a bet on more than one thing happening — sort of a combination of bets — such as South Carolina and NC State to both win when each has a game on the same night. There are times when I like a heavy favorite to win but would rather take the moneyline than risk them letting their foot off the gas at the end of the game and failing to cover the spread. The odds on heavy favorites don’t pay out very well, but if you parlay multiple of them together you can get much better odds. That’s another type of bet I plan to start utilizing.
More quarter/half bets in the WNBA
I placed a few bets last year based on just one quarter or half, but almost all of my bets were on the full game. After noticing some trends, however, expect more of those types of bets to come, especially in the WNBA. I’ll be doing more digging into those trends leading up to the WNBA season, but there was enough last season that it looks like there’s an edge in certain spots.
Daily recaps
You may have already seen some of these for recent slates of college games. Every day, either after the games have ended for the night or the next morning, we’ll post a recap of the Wetz Bets performance for that day on Twitter so you can more easily follow along and track. Plus, you can always come back to this article for our season-long performance recap above.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!
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