World Series Individual Game Odds

Vegas has come out and given the Red Sox a 68.75% chance of winning the World Series.  So I am going to try to reverse engineer the odds of the remaining games as if we didn't know who the pitchers were, just where the games were being played (no advanced handicapping).  What we know is that the Red Sox were a 53.9% favorite in Game #1 and are a 53.4% favorite in Game #2.  Knowing the odds in Game #1 gives me a hint at the odds in Game #5 (assuming 4 man rotations and HFA of 4%), so I am going to subtract 8% from the Game #1 odds and give the Red Sox a 45.9% chance of winning Game #5.  I can do a similar thing with the Game #6 odds, as I can copy the Game #2 odds as that game will be played in the same park.  Now I just need to massage the numbers in games 3,4,5 and 7 in an attempt to make the Red Sox chances of winning come as close to 68.75% as possible.  The game 7 odds will be an 8% difference of the game 3 odds.

Using the nifty spreadsheet that my reader gave me in one of the previous similar exercises I did in the NLCS we come up with the following table of individual game odds needed to have the Red Sox be 68.75% favorites to win the World Series following the Game #1 results.  To take this to the next level you would break down the odds of games three and four by looking at the probably starting pitchers.  Where one of the two games would move up in odds, the other would need to move down.

Game #	Red Sox	Cardinals
Game 1	100.0%	0.0%
Game 2	53.4%	46.6%
Game 3	49.7%	51.2%
Game 4	49.7%	51.2%
Game 5	45.9%	51.2%
Game 6	53.4%	46.6%
Game 7	57.7%	43.2%
Series	68.7%	31.3%

And below is the table that shows the percent chances and odds of each possible result in the World Series.

Result	Chance %	Odds
	68.7%
Red Sox in 4	13.2%	6.58
Red Sox in 5	17.5%	4.70
Red Sox in 6	20.1%	3.98
Red Sox in 7	17.9%	4.59
	31.3%
Cardinals in 4	0.0%	NA
Cardinals in 5	6.4%	14.58
Cardinals in 6	11.8%	7.47
Cardinals in 7	13.1%	6.62