Overall, it was a roller coaster week with our bets for the week of 02/07-02/13. There were a lot of great lessons learned though. Our first week was not kind to us, period. But this week there was a glimmer of hope, just enough to keep us coming back for more, especially with the perfect 4/4 finish on Sunday's games. I have some opinions of what I learned the most and where I can improve moving forward.

Here is the record this week: 12-10

Additional Bonus Picks: 1-0

Profit with $10 bets everywhere and a $4.20 bonus bet: $41.50

Number of Parlay bets: 0

Record on player props: 10-6

Over player props: 7-4

Under player props: 3-2

Record on game lines or team / game prop bets: 2-4

Downfalls of the week:

• Bad performance in game props

• Jordan Binnington

• Trusting anytime goal scorers to cash in

• Overvaluing past performance against teams for player props

Obviously from the record above, I went 2-4 on game lines and 10-6 on player props. Having played fantasy hockey for over 12 years now, this makes a lot of sense that I would excel with projecting player performance. Betting with game lines are not necessarily out of the question for me, because we were upset twice with match-ups I felt very comfortable with. The Blues were at home against the Devils and Jordan Binnington did us dirty with a terrible 3rd period choke performance. In hindsight, he has been very bad all year, and I should have waited until the goalie starts were confirmed for that game. I mostly assumed it would be Husso on the first game after the all-star break, but it appears the St. Louis coaching staff still preferred Binnington, for whatever reason. Maybe they thought playing against the Devils would give him a shot to correct his numbers and steer his season into a better direction? I've learned my lesson here though. I will not bet the Blues if Binnington has a chance to play. Seattle, who has the 2nd worst road record in the league, went to Anaheim and beat them with a last minute goal in regulation. These two blunders would have reversed the losing record of 2-4 to 4-2 if one or two things from those games didn't occur.

Anytime goal scorers are usually profitable bets, when they hit. However, I think I will pump the brakes on these. After about 3 or 4 bet on, I always seem to miss on these. The only one I hit this week was Patrick Laine, who didn't have a goal until literally the last 2 seconds of the game. That could have finished poorly and we honestly got pretty lucky here. Usually, picking a goalscorer involves really dissecting how the player has been shooting recently with their shot rate, and also looking at recent game performance. Finally, I always at least consider past performance against the same team. However, this could be a bit of a trap if the games aren't very recent, as teams can drastically change from just a single year, or even a couple of months. Think about how certain teams like the Senators reached the conference finals and nearly made it to the Stanley Cup in 2017, and then, they traded all their players away and were a clown show the next season. Montreal this year is another perfect example of this.

Strengths of the week:

• Player Prop Bets

• Overs on Shot Total lines

• Limiting parlay bets (to zero in the case of this week)

• Betting against Montreal

• Great research

Player prop bets worked well, especially playing overs on shot totals including Mitch Marner o2.5, Filip Forsberg o2.5 and Tyler Seguin o2.5. The Mitch Marner line felt especially broken. He logged 4 shots on goal in the 2nd period alone of that game. When looking at shot totals, I always look at the deployment and their previous shot totals in the past 3 games or so. I will continue to look at the shot props for every game and take advantage when I think something is especially broken there. I am weary on anything that is above 3.5 though. For instance, Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust both had a 3.5 shot total line set against New Jersey. While I was tempted, after looking at their recent 10 games against the Devils, I saw a lot of 0s and 1s and 2s in the shot department. This made me back off entirely, but also realize that anything over 3.5 can be very difficult for players not named Auston Matthews or Alex Ovechkin (or Mitch Marner).

Betting against Montreal was genius this week. It really is that simple! Tage Thompson easily banked one point for us against them and even better, Buffalo scored the most amount of goals on Sunday compared to all teams. I would also like to personally thank Jeff Skinner. His four goals resulted in a +750 payout that was our best pick to date featured on Stat Glitchers. I will continue to look at player prop bets whenever Montreal is playing anyone. Even the Hersey Bears would cash in some sweet props on them.