Can My Recommended Picks Change As The Week Goes On?
The pick logic will adjust to new information, and this explains circumstances that will cause your recommended picks to change.
You may wonder if our recommended picks could change. The answer is “Yes.”
Several inputs to our optimal pick algorithms, including game betting odds, public picking trends, and team power ratings, can and do change from day to day. For instance, if a team is a three-point Vegas favorite but injury concerns suddenly arise about one of its star players, in a matter of minutes that team may drop to being only a one-point favorite.
Such information can and occasionally will impact optimal pick recommendations for your pool. Using the same case as an example, if you had generated picks the day before, we may have felt that it wasn’t wise to pick a three-point underdog to pull off an upset in that game. All of a sudden, though, the game is expected to be much closer, and there’s also a good chance that most of your opponents don’t adjust their own picks for the breaking news. The combination of those two factors could now make picking the underdog a very smart risk to take.
Using the Best, Most Current Info Helps With Your Edge
Our system automatically imports, processes, and reacts to data changes like these multiple times a day, and each update cycle can potentially change recommended picks. While we acknowledge that the concept of picks changing after you initially generate them can be a bit unsettling at first, the benefits far outweigh the emotional “costs” for some users. Keep in mind:
Some pools require you to have your picks in by a specific deadline. If you generate picks soon before your pool deadline, you are getting our recommendations based on the most recent data we have. If our recommended picks for you happen to change after your pool deadline, it’s irrelevant. You could not have leveraged the underlying data that caused us to change the recommendation, and none of your opponents benefitted from it either.
Staying on top of breaking news, betting line changes, and shifts in the public perception of teams is important to maintain your maximum edge with your pool picks. It is a huge pain and extremely time consuming to keep up with all this information, but our system does it for you automatically. That’s a significant source of competitive advantage.
A weather analogy
To put this all into a simple analogy, imagine this scenario. The day before a planned day trip to the beach, you check the weather forecast and it says tomorrow is going to be sunny, 80 degrees, with only a 5 percent chance of rain. Sweet.
You wake up the next morning and check the forecast one last time before your planned departure. Which of the following would you rather hear?
- “Wow, things have really changed overnight with a nearby storm system unexpectedly veering off its path, and torrential rains are now expected along the coast. Avoid the beach today!”
- “As a friendly reminder, yesterday we locked our prediction for today’s weather at 80 and sunny. Sure hope it’s right!”
If you can still change your plans, you always want the latest data. If you can’t, then it really doesn’t matter anyway — you’re already committed.
Wait as Long as You Can to Update Your Recommended Picks
At the end of the day, it’s doubtful that a lot of our recommended picks for you are going to change over time. However, you do need to understand that some picks for very close games could easily flip if news breaks or betting lines move, and confidence point values could also shift slightly to moderately.
As a result, what we always recommend is that you wait until as soon as possible before your pick deadline to generate picks (or to update your picks if you’ve already generated them), and then just let it be. You’ve got our most up-to-date analysis, so no need to stress yourself out over what might have changed if your pick deadline was later.
Two final notes:
- If you update your picks after a game included in your pool has already kicked off, in most cases the newly updated picks should keep the pick (and confidence points, if applicable) for that game exactly where it was in your previous set of generated picks. However, there are some “triggers” that cause the past saved pick recommendations to be wiped clean, and an entirely new set of picks to be generated. See our article called “Why Did Your Pick For A Past Game Change?” for more details.
- If you generate picks for the first time, and a game included in your pool has already happened, we will use the final information we had before the kickoff of that game to figure out what our recommended pick and confidence points would have been.