Working Backwards from Gold Medal Odds: Head-to-Head Hockey Odds

by Hawerchuk on Feb 23, 2010 9:00 AM EST

I'm going to do things a little differently today. Usually we figure out how good we think various teams are, and then simulate a season or a tournament to determine their odds of winning. But we can also work backwards - if we know each team's odds of winning the tournament, we can use the simulation to figure out how good each team is, and use that to determine their odds of winning various head-to-head matchups.

First, the odds of winning overall: Betbrain.com has aggregated a significant number of betting sites' odds for who's going to win the gold medal in hockey. After removing the bookie's profit from the odds, we get the following predictions for the gold:

[As of 9 PM ET, 2/22/09]

	Gold Win%
Canada	29
Russia	21.8
USA	17.6
Sweden	14.2
Czech	7.02
Finland	6.44
Slovakia	3.22
Switzerland	0.61
Germany	0.13
Belarus	0.14
Latvia	0.13
Norway	0.073

Assuming those odds are roughly correct, we can work backwards to figure out how often we'll see each matchup in the final:

Tough	Easy	Pct Final
CAN	USA	18.2
RUS	USA	14.9
SWE	USA	11.6
CAN	FIN	8.8
CAN	CZE	8.5
RUS	FIN	7.1
RUS	CZE	7.1
SWE	FIN	5.4
SWE	CZE	5.4
SVK	USA	3.2
SVK	FIN	1.6
SVK	CZE	1.5
CAN	SUI	1.5
RUS	SUI	1.2
SWE	SUI	0.9

And also how often each team makes the Gold Medal game:

Team	Pct Final
USA	48.2
CAN	37.8
RUS	30.9
SWE	23.9
FIN	23.0
CZE	22.6
SVK	6.7
SUI	3.9
BLR	1.4
LAT	1.0
GER	0.4
NOR	0.2

And of course we can find the head-to-head odds for some marquee quarter-final and semi-final games:

Round	Favorite	Win %	Underdog
QF	CAN	54	RUS
QF	SWE	63	SVK
QF	CZE	56	FIN
QF	USA	83	SUI
SF	CAN	63	SWE
SF	RUS	59	SWE
SF	CAN	75	SVK
SF	RUS	71	SVK
SF	USA	56	CZE
SF	USA	62	FIN

And for the finals:

Favorite	Win %	Underdog
CAN	66	USA
RUS	62	USA
SWE	53	USA
USA	61	SVK

CAN	76	FIN
CAN	71	CZE
RUS	72	FIN
RUS	67	CZE
SWE	65	FIN
SWE	59	CZE
SVK	51	FIN
CZE	55	SVK

Let's just say that the people who have money riding on this game ain't givin' the US no respect - the combined odds imply a money line of +200 for the US if they come up against Canada in the finals. Just to put that in perspective, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been a +200 or more underdog just twice this season, against Washington and Pittsburgh. Toronto was on the road in both games and was playing back-to-back games and they had Vesa Toskala playing.

Think about that: take last year's Stanley Cup winner and put them up against the worst team in the league, coming off a game the night before, with the worst goaltender in the NHL starting in goal for them. And that's how much of a slaughter the bettors think a Canada-USA final will be.

I think somebody's trying to either limit the number of Canada bets so that they won't lose money if Canada wins...Or they're trying to sucker Canadians into placing bad bets. But that's just me, maybe Canada really is that much better than the US.

Tweet Comment 1 comment | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

Curious how you...

reached that conclusion. I ran what seems to be a different method (determining the KRACH ratings that would yield those winning percentages), and got an even worse result—USA would be a +265 underdog against Canada and +190 against Russia!

“I think somebody’s trying to either limit the number of Canada bets so that they won’t lose money if Canada wins” This is what bookies normally do. The way I often phrase it is: “The line isn’t a prediction of the result. It’s a prediction of where the betting public will come down.” And there are quite a few reasons to expect USA supporters to be underrepresented in the portion of the betting public shown on those Internet sites. I suspect that if you included them (say, by adding Las Vegas sportsbook quotes into the mix), you’d get a truer representation.

by silverpie on Feb 23, 2010 1:54 PM EST reply actions