But betting strategies add structure and give you the illusion of logic in your approach to betting. They force you to study teams and players instead of offering up alibis for wild, superstitious tendencies. They help you dodge potholes and encourage reasonable bankroll management.
Better-odds bets on golfers to finish in the top 10 or even top 20 might be more lucky-disposition-proof than outrights, but they’re no sure thing.
Money management
If you want to be a good sports bettor, you have to do your homework, look at run statistics and weather forecasts, know everything there is to know about the sport you are betting on – and possess a large body of knowledge for pretty much every sport. Now, of course, different sports invite different betting strategies. For games such as baseball or American football, you do a lot of number-crunching, analysing team (or player) statistics or accounting for certain weather parameters. In other disciplines, you have more or less punting strategies, where you have to use rather mystifying statistical maths, such as the potent Kelly Criterion, to help you size your bets.
Intelligent betting systems count heavily on discipline and a well-defined bankroll management system. For example, it’s important that you always stake a certain percentage of your bankroll each time you bet, win or lose, to ensure you won’t be overexposing yourself and squandering your betting capital early. Intelligent bettors often use progression betting strategies where they increase their bet size after wins, or decrease it after losses.
Odds
Odds form the core of any betting plan; they are the ratio of the number of times a wager wins versus the times it loses, and can be expressed as decimal, fractional or moneyline odds. Understanding how they work will improve your betting prowess.
No one says the calculation is completely accurate, of course. Sports betting odds are influenced by the way the public perceives the odds, by team or individual performance reports and injury updates but also by equalisers, such as how the market responds (ie, how bettors react) and the general response (if betting – for or against teams or individuals – creates a response, that can change the odds).
Developing a profitable betting strategy requires that you win more bets than you lose. The strategies you adopt have to be determined by an evaluation of your risk and goal criteria, your bank roll and by how much you can afford to lose, as well as intensive research on the teams or players (ie. retention of statistics or trends).
Matchups
Betting on sports introduces a whole new vocabulary, with male-dominated words such as line, mark, handicap, draw, incident, freak, bookmaker, boots, CD, nag, and pitch – all familiar terms to avid punters that have encroached into my everyday language – including, surprisingly, the built-in computer bet-tracker of my dayspring alarm clock, a feature that wasn’t necessary three years ago, but certainly is now. While having knowledge about the sport itself is useful – particularly when it comes to handicaps – there are other factors at play, starting with the all-important matchup: who is playing against whom, who has the top or best player, how do they fare on a particular day (batsman strike to medium pace bowling), how old are they, what is their previous experience and did they play in the last match, are they injured or vulnerable, have they been involved in head-to-head play recently, are they regularly in the side, and so it goes on, a cascade of questions that bursts out of the dedicated betting program when I select a game. There’s more to it than meets the eye in terms of gathering betting information: I have to find out how each bet was decided using fixed odds regression, as well as the associated implied probability figures. There’s also a mathematical function that determines the relative power of each cricketer. A key piece of everyday language I had to research and acquire was point spread (aka x.5): the number of points by which the winning team must outscore their opponent to be declared the victor, with one team gaining points before the match, or in American baseball, points being factored into wagers only over a certain number of innings. You’d be impressed to know about my skills in understanding (and then imitating) betting terms like show, foolscap, picket fence, average, washout, tag, on the board, twice around, cut, turf, line, giveaway, hunt, mark, mug, nuts, advantage, chalk, crossfire, drip, draw, freak, goodie, guts, heat, straight, hero – and virtually any other card game or sport played by humans, involving an ink-on-dead-mouse-skin ball, a leather sphere, bat, racket, javelin, archery bow; someone sailing or gliding or flying or skiing or surfing for fun or money; or of course, in a hurried lascivious entanglement of the whole body. No filter, no barrier.
Betting lines
Sports betting success requires a portfolio of approaches that, in concert, minimise your losses and maximise your wins. An example of such an approach is line shopping – that is, comparing odds across sportsbooks.
Betting lines are different day by day, even hour by hour, as the public weighs in on the action, and new information influences the bettors. If, for example, a lot of bettors are taking one side in a game, the online betting lines can move to try to balance up action at what’s called ‘fading the public’ – giving you an advantage in these betting markets.
Good readers of the line can recognise opportunities for ‘middling’: taking bets on both sides of a game, in order to profit handsomely.
Arbitrage
I found a reliable betting system to be crucial in order to survive the ‘random’ nature of the sporting world in the period surrounding a wager. In most instances, success or failure rides on just one play; an interception or failed conversion that can sap your bankroll of cash, or a lucky fumble or a key penalty call that sends you flying out to the black. It isn’t just overbetting that can crush you in such a system; reckless urges can plague every stage of the process. Access to a great deal of information about the teams involved (from current season statistics to injury reports, career and head-to-head histories, etc) can help. You also need to keep a detailed record of the games, wins and losses.
Exploiting arbitrage requires knowledge about the setting of odds plus knowledge of matters unique to each individual market, such as whether a baseball park favours batters or pitchers depending on the weather; or teams with propensities and weaknesses whose conjunction might significantly impact the outcome of a game – what we call ‘directional’ betting.
