The Sports Geek’s Betting Lab: Does Fading the Public Work in the NFL?

Fading the public is a popular sports betting strategy, but does it work? We decided to find out in the Sports Geek’s Betting Lab! We will test this system with real data and real wagers, tracking the results here.

We will target the NFL and use data from our Beat the Geek contest to find out whether betting against consensus picks is a profitable strategy in the long term.

The experiment starts before Week 6 of the NFL campaign and will finish when the regular season is over. You can find the latest results, our methodology, and a full list of picks below.

Fading the Public Betting Experiments Latest Results

The Geek’s Fading the Public Betting Strategy Explained (Methodology)

Each NFL season, we’re running a free NFL Pickem contest with real prizes. Long story short, a bunch of people share their picks on the NFL in pursuit of prizes.

We noticed something interesting, though: the betting picks with the highest consensus among our users often miss. This gave us the idea of using them in a betting experiment.

Each week, we will bet AGAINST picks that were selected by 70%+ of our users by Friday, essentially fading consensus picks.

For the first five games of the NFL season, these picks have won only 23.6%, so let’s see what happens when we bet with real cash!

The rules are simple:

• Bet on the opposite outcome of picks where 70%+ of our users selected one outcome.
• Bet $100 on each pick.
• Use the best odds/line of one of the following betting sites: Lucky Rebel, BetUS, and BetOnline.

Essentially, we’re fading the public and adding some line shopping from the best NFL betting sites to the mix to the mix for the best results!

Full List of Fading the Public Picks

Here is a full list of the games that met our criteria, with the % of people that picked them available in brackets under the first column.