Finding an Edge on PrizePicks MMA

Hey everyone,

For the last few months, I’ve been posting a few of my favorite weekly selections on MyPrizePicks.com, a fantasy site that allows you to select Over/Under on certain player projections. I’ve had a fair number of people ask for more in-depth content on the subject, so I decided to explain my thought process a bit further below.

If you haven’t checked out PrizePicks yet be sure to give them a look, use the PrizePicks promo code MMA50 for a 50 percent deposit bonus.

Editor’s Note: Head to PrizePicks now for a FREE entry and a 50% match instantly on your first deposit up to $1,000!

——-

The difficulty with Mixed Martial Arts projections is that it’s considered to be a binary sport, meaning a fighter will either win or lose. When we create projections, the goal is to determine what the average score would be over x amount of trials, for example, if the fight was run 1,000 times.

While those projections will generally lead to a number between 65-75 points for favorites, a single trial isn’t overwhelmingly likely to fall into that range. And it’s the same with underdogs, though a typical projection will be in the 40-50 range, fighters who lose will rarely score that high.

This is important to understand when selecting Overs and Unders, because the No. 1 driving factor of the final score will be whether that fighter wins or loses.

Selecting Unders

PrizePicks only gives out 12 options per week for MMA, and the vast majority of them will be favorites. It’s often very easy to cross off the majority of Under selections, because as favorites, the most likely path to an Under is a loss.

As much as I’d like to see a 75 point projection and hit the Under, if that fighter wins, there’s a very strong chance they’ll top 70-80 points and the edge in that case is very small. Especially when we’re dealing with fighters who are -150, -170, -200, we’re simply not getting a good deal by selecting the Under, considering the fighter has a 60-70 percent chance to win, according to Vegas.

Assuming we’re given favorites to choose from, the only time I will consider an Under is when the fighter is projected in the upper 80s or 90s and I feel their chances of finishing the fight and wrestling in volume are minimal.

To explain further, we’re not going to find a big edge by selecting the Under on favorites we think will lose. However, we can find an edge on the Under with favorites who may be projected high based on their betting line, but don’t score well from a fantasy perspective.

Finishing the fight will essentially yield you 90-100 points at minimum, so if I’m selecting an Under, I want to be confident that the fighter won’t get a finish. I also prefer not to target wrestlers, because even in a decision, wrestlers have the ability to rack up takedowns and reach that 100 point mark.

Example

A good example of an Under selection I recommended from this past week at UFC St. Petersburg was Antonina Shevchenko, who was projected at 87 fantasy points. According her betting line of -280, she had an implied win percentage of 73.69 percent.

However, Shevchenko doesn’t typically wrestle and wasn’t likely to finish the fight. Her ITD (inside the distance) line was +362 (21.65%) compared to her win by decision line of -129 (56.33%). Based on those numbers, I felt pretty good about Shevchenko NOT winning inside the distance.

Shevchenko was also not expected to wrestle in this matchup, as she was facing a more experienced opponent whose strength is grappling.

What this means is that her fantasy total was likely to be decided by the number of significant strikes she landed. Given that you score 30 points in a decision win, without wrestling, Shevchenko would have needed to land 115 significant strikes in 15 minutes to top that number.

In her UFC debut, she only landed 66 significant strikes and a fair projection for significant strikes in this matchup would have been in the range of 70-90.

Fortunately the Under did hit in this case, but results aside, I felt there was an edge because Shevchenko had the ability to both lose or win by decision, and either scenario would have likely fallen below 87 points.

Selecting Overs

Selecting Overs is far less limiting in the sense that we expect most of the favorites to win, and the majority of winners will top their projection.

Still, it’s important that we use Vegas data to help determine where the biggest edges lie. If we’re focusing on Overs with a favorite who’s -110, -120 or -130, our edge is going to be slim. Even if they’re extremely likely to hit the Over in a win, I don’t love focusing on favorites with a 50-55 percent chance to win, according to Vegas.

I’ll tend to focus on favorites north of the -150 mark, a 60 percent implied winning percentage, and ideally ones who are even more likely to win than that. I want to be fairly confident that my fighter will win if I am selecting the Over, so in theory, the higher the win percentage, the better.

Wrestling potential and finishing potential are the other two key aspects when selecting Overs.

Wrestlers tend to score well because you are awarded five points for a takedown, three points for advancing position and it leads to finishing opportunities on the mat. Even poor wrestlers are likely to top the 80 point mark in a win.

Finishers are even better, though they are often less predictive. Earning a finish will yield you 90-100 points or more, which will top almost any projection, and it’s key to focus on ITD lines when applicable.

Example

One of the Overs I selected this past weekend was Islam Makhachev at 80 points. It wasn’t a low projection, but Makhachev was -290 to win and +150 to win ITD, and he’s a grappling-dependent fighter.

Makhachev has landed 4.33 takedowns per 15 minutes in his UFC career, and with those come advances and finishing potential. He’s earned five UFC wins, scoring 105, 102, 113, 87 and 110 points. To me, the biggest hurdle with this projection was Makhachev actually earning the win, but the betting line suggested he was nearly 75 percent likely to do so, and his ability to score fantasy points was clear.

This projection ultimately did not hit, Makhachev was still able to land four takedowns in the matchup but only advanced position twice and landed 14 significant strikes. He still earned the win, but his opponent was able to limit the offensive production far better than I had anticipated.

The other Over I recommended was Michal Oleksiejczuk at 70.2 fantasy points, and this one was entirely based on the Vegas metrics. Oleksiejczuk was -220 to win (68.75%) in a matchup that was -470 (82.45%) to end in a finish. Even in a decision, topping 70.2 fantasy points is not very difficult, but Oleksiejczuk was -141 to win ITD (58.51%) which would have easily topped the projection.

Fortunately this Over did come through, Oleksiejczuk won by knockout in the first round and scored 124 points.

Bankroll Management

Potentially even more so than a traditional fantasy site, bankroll management is absolutely key on PrizePicks. In theory, there’s a 50 percent chance of each fighter hitting the Over or the Under in a given matchup and we therefore have a 25 percent chance of selecting 2/2 correctly, and a 12.5 percent chance of hitting 3/3.

Using the strategies above, I do believe we can find an edge, and that’s the ultimate goal. But finding an edge doesn’t mean our odds increase from 25 percent to 85 percent. Even with an edge, MMA is such a high-variance sport and our goal should always remain to earn a profit over the long term.

That makes managing your bankroll properly one of, if not the most important aspect in daily fantasy sports.

About the Author

bbbomb
Brett Appley (bbbomb)

One of the top MMA minds in the DFS industry, Brett Appley a.k.a bbbomb has been writing his weekly “Beat Down” article for RotoGrinders since the sport launched on DraftKings in 2015. Brett has earned multiple Top 10 rankings in MMA since that time and has taken down a handful of tournaments as well.