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A lot of people claim to know how to bet on sports. Some people claim to get 90% of their picks correct. These people are either completely lucky or or complete liars. The so-called “experts” are still wrong about half of the time. If you aren’t going to do your own research, you should just flip a coin because that will be almost as accurate.
There are a couple of keys to sports betting and they all involve you doing your own work. Don’t listen to the experts, especially the ones that advertise on the Internet or over the radio as being “16 and 3 against the spread” or have their weekly “lock of the year”. If you call or email them, you better be doing it on a burner phone or fake email address because they will never leave you alone.
What do you need to do to better your odds
If you are wagering on sports, you need to have reasonable expectations. In order to make money against the sportsbooks, you will have to win a little more than 55% of your wagers. The 10% juice that is charged for placing a bet is why you have to win more than 50% of the time.
If you do a great job researching your picks and follow my basic advice, you will still be lucky to win more than 65% of your bets. If you are terrible at picking games, it will still be difficult to pick more than 2 out of 3 wrong over the long haul. There is that much unpredictability when it comes to sports betting.
So, what do you need to do to have a better chance of picking the winners?
Know the Sport You are Betting On
If you want to place bets on the NFL, you should have a working knowledge of every NFL team. This includes who the main starters are for each team, both defensively and offensively. You don’t need to know all of the backups, but you need to know what each team’s strength and weaknesses are. This will help you make an informed decision.
If you want to place bets on NCAA college football, you better know the team or teams you are going to bet on very well. I have always found the college game much more difficult because the spreads can range so wildly. There are certain teams, like Alabama and Oregon, that will always run up the score, therefore the spread will be really high.
If you want to bet on the MLB, you need to find a good site that has all of the situational breakdowns. Statistical trends are your best bet to picking winners. This includes how a pitcher pitches at home compared to on the road, if a pitcher plays better during the day or at night, how often a pitcher gets into trouble with pitch count, how often the pitchers struggles with control, and this is just the starting pitchers that I am talking about.
You also need to know trends with batters hitting and slugging percentage, how a player bats against the starting pitcher, and so on. The more information that you can get that support your pick, the better. However, you will still only have a 65% chance since baseball is so random with so many games and certain situations throughout the game will have a big impact on the individual game.
As for other sports like basketball and hockey, recent trends with team offense, team defense, and individual players performances are the most important for picking winners. In basketball, stats like field goal percentage, free throw attempts, and turnovers are important over the past 5 to 10 games played. In hockey, stats like shots on goal, penalties taken, penalties drawn, power play percentage, penalty kill percentage, and scoring chances are important over the past 5 to 10 games that team has played.
Picking Games Selectively
Regardless of which sport you place bets on, you should find the matchups that you like. You can rank the sporting events that are taking place on a given day from most confident to least confident. You can eliminate about half of the games that you don’t have a strong opinion on right away. This will help you concentrate more on a few strategic games that will be played.
Once you have a few games selected, pour through as many of the statistical matchups as you can. You want to look for obvious mismatches that will help you win that selection. There are some situations where a blowout can be predicted. There are other times where a game with a close spread will clearly be in favor of one of the teams.
You should be able to narrow down your selections to between 1 out of every 5 games played. There usually will be a large mismatch that you can take advantage of about 5% of the time. The trick is to find this 5% of games and hit on them.
Part of betting selectively means that you don’t take a lot of chances. You may want to bet on your favorite team, but don’t bet on a lot of long shots. This is especially true with the money line bets. When you lose on these bets, you are giving away money. It is already difficult to not lose money when betting on sports. Betting on these questionable bets is almost like playing a blackjack hand incorrectly; you are giving the house a larger chance of winning.
Bankroll Management
The last part of trying to increase your chances of winning is bankroll management. You should have a bankroll if you are going to gamble in any fashion. The basic rules behind bankroll management are there to try to keep emotion out of the game.
Emotion is always going to be a factor if you don’t have discipline. The times where you will get the most emotional are the situations where you think there is no way that you can lose. Sports betting is full of these situations. This past week, Ohio State beat Northwestern by 10 points. The spread was 7 points and Northwestern had the ball down 4 points to end the game. The traditional crazy game-ending play happened and Ohio State recovered an unlikely fumble in the endzone for a TD with no time remaining. If you bet on Northwestern, you just lost in a heartbreaking fashion. This is where your emotions can get the best of you.
To counteract the emotion, you must have a management scheme in place for your money. I use the following formula when I am losing:
1) I only bet 5% of my bankroll on any one game.
2) I only have 15% of my bankroll in play at any one time.
3) I stop if I have lost more than 15% of my bankroll in a day.
If you put this into practice, you can get over the inevitable bad beats that take a lot of gamblers down. You can win a little bit of money over time, but lose it within one day. It’s called the “I’m due” effect. The only thing due is that you will lose your bankroll really quickly one day. Put your own bankroll management scheme into practice and you will avoid this fate most of the time.