All right guys and gals I wasn’t sure if we would get there but alas I have a 2025 NBA Playoff Betting Journal for you.

It was a great year on the prediction front as well as bolstering culture and operations here at SportsEthos but truth be told I’m still getting clobbered by Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as excited as ever with my progress and because everybody here is so gung ho on doing things the right way I’ve never been more supported. There has been a lot of improvement and when combined with the organizational growth I’m hopeful that I can get back to 100%, or at least finally get rid of all the anchors.

Last year was my first year not dominating the postseason and it had to happen at some point. I’ll definitely wear it. If you know you know.

This year I’m not exactly excited about the slate. That said, we have angles and therefore angles we shall take. And while I am not exactly excited about the slate I am pretty happy with our position here. I feel like we have a solid foundation to launch from and hopefully the aggregate fade of teams that I don’t think will win helps us leverage our positions enough to make this more exciting overall!

(Last Year’s Playoff Betting Journal link: Here)

***SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE LATEST PLAYS AND JOURNAL ENTRIES***

Last Updated April 18, 11:23 p.m. 

To set this article up — this journal is my playoff betting journey, minus the game to game plays. So futures bets and series bets. It’s the type of thing that might have a different strategy from year to year. But before we dive into strategy let’s quickly acknowledge that playing a postseason in this manner is a constantly changing chessboard. Investing in the teams that you like and having early success, especially on underdogs that the public hasn’t caught up on yet, can give you ways to hedge into guaranteed profit or even leverage the guaranteed returns into huge upside in future plays.

Let’s talk a bit about how I am handling units and overall strategy. Typically units mean whatever your standard bet is. Here, we set a target number of units to bet over the course of the entire postseason and ultimately set a total budget for what we’re willing to put up for the entire playoffs. Because we could either experience an accelerated betting strategy as the playoffs progress — one where we want to hit the gas on how much cash we put in the furnace, or conversely one where small bets actually make more sense, whether in profit or loss scenarios, we have to remain flexible on that front.

Below you will see a loose framework and target unit distribution for each stage of the playoffs. Any team that we’re not investing in pre-flop I have listed as ‘out’ off to the right side. Basically if any of those teams keeps advancing toward an outcome, we’re going to have to hedge and otherwise recover later on down the road, probably at a loss.

In the chart below you will see that I have 500 units I am targeting to play and 200 of them going in pre-flop on futures. Another 225 units will be planned for the rest of the journal on futures plays, and 75 units for some series betting which I’ve found to be a pretty low volume marketplace.  Down at the bottom I show this distribution of what I’m targeting to play in each stage of the playoffs, as well as the series plays, and then I show you at the bottom what the total investment would be based on the size of unit you’re playing. We’ll jot down the new bets as we go. Again, this is a journal of what I will be playing.

I recommend to set a total budget for what you’re willing to put up for the entire playoffs and then divide that by 500 to get your per-unit play.

I’ve also shown what the ROI for your total investment would be in a segment (i.e. Finals futures, West futures, etc.) based on how much your units are worth ($1, $5, $10, $25).

I will update this journal throughout the playoffs and try to be as explanatory as possible but be warned the document can get kind of long and fairly messy. Apologies in advance and best of luck to all of us!

PRE-PLAYOFFS ANALYSIS

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