First Quarter NHL Betting Preview

A summary of what worked and failed in the first quarter of the last 4 seasons.

Welcome to my First Quarter Betting Preview, which outlines the most successful wagers in the first quarter of the last 4 seasons (all summed together) which typically ends around American Thanksgiving. My Week One Betting Preview (coming tomorrow) will be longer (currently at 1,700 words). This preview is mostly a presentation of stat graphics but there will be some discussion (sorry, there’s more discussion than originally planned). Obviously, every week one game also counts towards the first quarter, so there will be some correlation between these graphics and those coming tomorrow.

The biggest commonality between the two is home favorites, which will be elaborated tomorrow, but it’s already looking like there has been a price increase for home favorites. Surely sportsbooks do their own “weekly preview” to see what cost them the most money in previous seasons. I have recorded all the betting lines for every game since October 2019 (recording a wager for each) and have completed extensive analysis of past results. It’s actually pretty common for past profit vectors to get nerfed in the future, and strategies which produced strong results in past seasons can suddenly cease being profitable.

Draft Kings has lines up for 32 of the first 34 games, and we’ll dig deeper into those prices tomorrow. I’ve begun logging my own bets, but won’t be using any algorithms to inform my choices. Usually, it’s around the 2nd or 3rd week when there’s a sufficient sample of games to start using my over/under algorithm. Not long after that, my line value algorithms will go into use. Until then, I’m flying blind. Well not entirely blind, there is the benefit of historical hindsight guiding some of my decisions. They say those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Well, I’m keenly aware of the past and want successes repeated.

Before we go any further, it’s time for my obligatory *DISCLAIMER* it needs be noted that I’m not betting with real money. These are all fictional wagers in a spreadsheet. My mission is to engage in a mass betting campaign, picking a winner of every single game, every over/under, because it provides a complete dataset for macroeconomic analysis, which can be shared with you, shedding light on what worked and what failed. I’m also tracking the results of betting every outcome, to help me (and you) uncover previously unknown or newly emerging profit vectors. What started as a thought experiment has evolved into much more.

If you’d like to read more about the first 3 years of this thought experiment, I actually wrote a 330-page book outlining the results from every angle. It’s ostensibly a journal of my experience; breaking it down by team, by category, by strategy, by season. There is plenty of useful information for bettors of all skill levels. It covers pre-pandemic, peak-pandemic, post-pandemic. What worked, what failed. Lessons learned, market trends, team-by-team analysis. What impact did the pandemic have on hockey betting? The market differences between these 3 seasons are discussed at length, and there's a lot to talk about. To read more, visit the Amazon store.

My blog has been moved to Substack this season and I’ll be repeatedly encouraging everyone to sign-up for a free subscription to alleviate my dependence on Twitter for traffic. I’m concerned that Elon will follow through on his threat to charge everyone for Twitter and ostensibly destroy his own company. I wouldn’t put anything past him at this point, and I’ve got too many eggs in that basket. Subscribers receive an email notification each time a new post is published, and even if Twitter stays free, the algorithm likes to hide Tweets with links so you don’t leave.

I’m planning some additional perks for subscribers in the form of an email newsletter (you’ll have the option to decline if my weekly content is sufficient to satisfy your appetite for betting information). The bonus emails will be more betting than fantasy hockey, and each subscriber will have the option to decline either betting or fantasy email content. Any group emails will be sent as blind carbon copies, so you won’t see each other’s email addresses. I’ll be sending out a welcome email to all subscribers in the next few days.

If you’re looking at my betting results from the previous 4 first quarters, you’re going to see the fingerprints of my greatest success story of the last 4 years, my “big short” of the 2021/22 Arizona Coyotes. The returns of that lucrative run were stacked heavily in the first quarter before the lines were fully nerfed later in the season. That team was clearly aggressively tanking, and they didn’t win a game until November 6. I tried repeating the same strategy with the 2022/23 Chicago Blackhawks, also visibly tanking, but they won more games, exceeding expectations early in the schedule, making them my least profitable team that first quarter.

The other problem with those Blackhawks is that the sportsbooks wised up on the tanking and came into the season charging higher prices on Chicago than they charged for Arizona one year earlier. They were waiting for me to rinse and repeat, the Hawks won a few games, and my planned “big short” was abandoned. The good news is that my strategy was abandoned early enough that my Q1 Chicago losses were only 1/3 of my previous Q1 Arizona profits, so I’m still ahead historically on my tanking team big shorts. I’ll be reporting on how well history is repeating in my weekly Betting Reports, but I’ll elaborate on that tomorrow.

There was no over/under algorithm used in my first quarter bets from 2021/22, introducing my first version in December of that season. The following campaign, an O/U algorithm was introduced by week 3, leading to a good quarter betting both overs unders, with each cracking my top 5 bets from past Q1s (unders producing a better return). Under 5.5 and over 6.5 were the two worst over/under bets of Q1. Scroll further down and you’ll see a graphic that outlines which wagers those winnings came from, broken down by each betting total.

The stat graphics below were generated from my “Summary” worksheet that will be used for both my weekly previews and reports, using data from both the current and past seasons. I can actually take any sample of games (including all 4833 in my database), then I just press a button (with a macro for you Excell enthusiasts) that sorts everything into the summaries you see below (which here is all first quarter games from the last 4 years, 1141 in total). Also note that the “overall” results were obtained by betting $100 on every outcome and adding them up. Enjoy!

Underdogs were a terrible first quarter wager in 2021 and 2022, but did generate a profit on the moneyline in 2022/23. Dogs -1.5 goals did have 2 good weeks around Halloween last season but were exceptionally atrocious in 2021 and 2022.

Note to self: The Vancouver Canucks have started poorly in 3 of the last 4 seasons while Ottawa has started all 4 awful. We’ll see if Rick Tocchet and the Sens upward momentum buck that trend this year.

Come back tomorrow for more! Subscribe and you won’t miss a thing all season.