How To Be Good At Betting On Sports

Most people who want to place bets on sports are fans to begin with. It isn’t unheard of for a gambler to place some sports bets, especially during big games like the Super Bowl or the NCAA basketball Final Four, but for the most part, sports bettors are sports fans looking to use their knowledge of a game or of a game’s players to earn a little extra cash. Being a fan of a particular sport, a team, a college or professional squad—these are all precursors to placing sports bet. Sports betting is also a way for a fan to get in on the action of the game, with something more than self-respect at stake.

All gambling is mathematics, even games of chance. If you understand the math behind the game, you understand the game and can give yourself an advantage. For many games, like penny slots or poorly placed roulette bets, are so bad that smart bettors earn their advantage by avoiding them altogether. In sports betting, the math is more complicated. Depending on your favorite sport, you may need to think about things like bye weeks, underdogs, quarterback ratings, and injuries with the same fervor other connoisseurs reserve for fancy winces.

The standard vig (fee for the house booking your action) is 10% of whatever you bet. You must bet $110 to win $100, $220 to win $200, and so on. If you win 52.4% of the time, you are something that around 97% of sports bettors are not and that is a long term winner. It will take you 10,000 bets of $110 to win $400 at a success rate of 52.4%. Understand the concept of value. If you don't have this, walk away. Sure you might be. A good record for a sports bettor is any record equal to or larger than 52.4%, because that number or anything higher means you’re not losing money. A 53% winning record, while not impressive on paper, means you’re actually beating the sportsbook and putting money back in your pocket.

10 Simple Strategies for Becoming a Better Sports Bettor 1. Manage Your Bankroll and Create a Unit Size. It’s integral that, as a sports bettor, you decide how much money you’re. Understand Your Risk Tolerance and Goals as a Bettor. Different types of bettors like to make different bets.

So how difficult is sports betting math? The math behind placing a winning bet is fairly complicated, but the way to stay ahead of the bookmaker is rather straightforward. If you collect on 52.4% of your bets, you’ll break even. We’ll have more details on that number later, including why it takes more than 50% wins to break even, but first some general knowledge about sports gambling and the numbers behind it.

Sports Betting Basics

The easiest way to demonstrate the math behind a sports bet is to make up an example. Let’s say you and your buddy walk into a casino, each with $200 burning a hole in your pocket. There’s a big game on tonight, the Cowboys and the Redskins, so you wander into the sportsbook to check up on the latest news about the game. While you’re sitting there, you see the wagering board, with some funny numbers on it. It looks like this:

• 428 Cowboys +175
• 429 Redskins -4 -200 38

Some of this is easy enough to read. The Redskins -4 means the Redskins are favored to win and must do so by at least 5 points for a bet on the ‘Skins to pay out. The next number (-200) is the moneyline, in this case the Redskins are a 2/1 favorite. The last number (38) is the total, the over/under of the expected number of points scored in the game.

More on Placing Sports Bets

Look at that over/under number, in this case 38. If you or your buddy thinks this is going to be a particularly high or low scoring game, based on your knowledge of the team’s offenses and defenses, or information about a hurt player or bad playing conditions, you can place a wager on the total of points scored.

So how is a guy supposed to know how to literally lay down a sports bet? You need to know three things:

#1 – the type of bet you want to make
#2 – the number of the corresponding team you have chosen and
#3 – the amount you wish to wager

Knowing all that beforehand gives the ticket writer the details he needs to write the ticket without having to bend over backwards to process your bet.

Tipping and Sports Betting

We haven’t even gotten to the meat of the sports math yet, and we’re already talking about tipping the staff behind the window? Yep. Here’s why.

If you place two $100 bets, and you win, you’ll collect $440. You should consider leaving a tip around five percent of your winnings. Yes, that’s a $22 tip, but you just made a huge win, and surely you can spring for a twenty-spot for the guy who helped you win it. If you tip around the five percent mark regularly, when you win, you’re way more likely to get free drinks, which is about all you’re going to get comp-wise at the sportsbook.

So, back to the basic math of sports betting. You and your buddy, after much deliberation, decide to each place a $100 bet on your favorite team. What now?

To bet on the Redskins using the point spread, your bet is called “laying the points.” For your bet to pay off, the ‘Skins have to win by five or more to cover the spread. Remember, if the ‘Skins win by exactly four, the game is a push, and both sides recoup their bet. Another alternative is called “taking the points” with the Cowboys. That means the Cowboys have to lose by three or less for your bet to win, or if the Cowboys win outright. So you and your buddy go up to place your $100 bet, and you find out that the standard straight bet at any bookie pays 11/10. That means you have to bet $110 if you want to win $100. You and your buddy pay the bookie $110 and sit down with drinks to watch your bets come in.

These are deceptively simple bets. Deceptively because they make it look like the outcome of the football game is like the outcome of picking marbles out of a bag. Put one black marble and two white marbles in a bag, pull one out at random, and there’s your football game. After all, the odds are the same: 2/1 for white.

But we, as sports fans, know that the mathematics of a sporting event is much more complex. Sports bettors deeply involved in their hobby will subscribe to weather bulletins from major cities that take part in their sport, making huge wagering decisions based on a few mph of wind in one direction or another. Then there’s the unknown—does a player get hurt in the first quarter? Does weather become a factor? Is a particular player “in the zone?”

How Do Bookies Make a Profit?

Just as we finish ruminating on the concept of the difficult math at play in the background of major sporting events, we’re going to turn right back towards the simpler side of sports betting. Bookies make a profit because of vigorish. What’s vigorish?

Look at the above example again. You and your buddy each paid $10 to the bookie to place your bet. That’s what the standard 11/10 odds in sports betting are all about. You bet the Cowboys and your buddy bet the Redskins, a total of $220 bet. The sportsbook has to pay back $210 to the winner, leaving a nice $10 profit no matter what happens on the football field. That $10 built-in profit is called the vigorish, and it’s the final monkey wrench in the gears of sports betting.

Obviously, sportsbooks are going to take more than two bets on any game, but this example is for simplicity’s sake. Looking at the total number of bets on different games over the course of a week and adjusting the moneyline and other numbers is another way the bookie makes a profit. Adjusting the odds a tiny percentage point in either direction will affect the balance of beats and make the book more likely to turn a profit no matter what.

Essentially, a bookie is a person who holds on to money from bettors then pays them if they win and keeps their money if they don’t. That’s what the job is boiled down to its essence.

When a bookie sets odds for games, he will build what bookies call an “over round” into his set of odds. Another slang term used for this formula is “the juice.” For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at a boxing match where both contenders are equally talented, of equal stature, etc. Since they both have an equal chance of winning, a casual bet may be even money. You put $20 on one guy; your friend puts $20 on the other. Whichever fighter wins awards the bettor with the total of $40.

Bookies don’t offer even money like friends in a casual betting situation. In the above example, with two evenly matched boxers, a smart bookie will offer 5/6 odds for each. That way, a $10 winning bet would only return $8.30 plus your stake. What does this do for the bookmaker? He can float an equal amount of money on both fighters, winning no matter which fighter actually wins. If they take $1,000 worth of bets on one boxer and $1,000 on the other, the bookie would take in $1,000 but only have to pay out $830, for a guaranteed $170 profit regardless of the outcome.

Bookies look at the weight of their books all the time and adjust odds and other factors to make sure their books balance. Though it isn’t possible to completely balance a book, bookies that go too far out on one side run the risk of losing money, and losing money in gambling is the fastest way to find yourself in another industry. All of these factors are why bookies generally root for the underdog—too many favorites winning in a sport with a short season (such as the NFL) can cause a bookmaker to lose money, while a bunch of upsets (like you generally see in college football) is a guaranteed profit for the bookmaker.

The short answer here is that bookies making money has nothing at all to do with your betting. It is almost unheard of for a single customer to be allowed to place enough bets to sink a single book all on his own. High rollers in sports betting get special privileges in terms of their maximum bet size, but these privileges often change with the bettor’s luck—maximums get raised after the bettor sees big losses and decreased (sharply) when the bettor starts to get lucky.

In short, a sportsbook’s profits aren’t necessarily impacted directly by the way an individual bet is called. Unlike casino games or slot machines, where it’s you against the house, sports bettors fuel the bookmaker’s business and only rarely is an individual bettor betting against the bookie.

Sports Betting Odds

Remember at the beginning when we talked about the magic number necessary to guarantee a break-even week in sports betting? If you read enough about sports betting, you’ll hear this number repeated often: 52.4%. If a bettor can win 52.4% of his bets, he’ll break even. Where does that number come from?

When betting the spread, you get odds of -110. Sometimes, sportsbooks will offer a -105 line as a promotion or to welcome new business. But for the most part, if you’re betting the spread, you’re getting -110.

We draw that 52.4% break even number right out of the odds. -110 is equivalent to 11/10. That means if you bet 21 games, you’d have to win eleven of them and lose ten of them to break completely even. Even at -105, you’d still have to win an astounding 51.2% of the time just to break even.

If you don’t trust the basic math behind this break-even principle, look at another real-world example. Let’s say you get really into sports betting after your Cowboys cream the Redskins and you go home with a nice fat wallet. You then bet on the next 10 Cowboys games, winning six times and losing four times.

That 60% betting record (with the odds of -110 that is traditional for against the spread bets in football) will leave you with a profit of $160. Think about it—your $600 profit from your 6 winning bets minus the $440 you lost on losing bets leaves $160. It took you $1,100 to win $160, meaning you have to bet $6.87 to win $1 on average. So you see the small differences between a 52.4% winning rate and a 60% winning rate—inside those 7.3 percentage points lies hundreds of dollars in profit.

Now imagine instead that you lost one of those six winning bets, leaving you with a 50% betting record. You spent a total of $1,100, won $500, and lost $550. That means overall your 50% record drained your wallet by $50. That’s where the vigorish will get you. Not even winning half the time is good enough to break even in sports betting.

Professional Sports Bettors

Believe it or not, some people really do bet on sports for a living. Maybe they work part time at a sportsbook or in some other marginal job in the casino industry, but there is a group of gamblers who bet on sports for their life’s work. With all the math swirling around in our heads after the last bit of the article, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to do this for a living.

If you know that a 52.4% record will mean you break even, the simplest way to turn sports betting into a career is to bet enough so that a 53% winning record will bring in the kind of money you want to make.

Another example. After your successful Cowboys experiment, you decide to invest $10,000 in sports gambling over the first four months of the following football season. That $10,000 is set aside to win or lose in sportsbooks.

You plan on betting on 160 games during your investment period. You dream of a 55% winning record because your win-loss with a 55% winning record would give you an 88-72 record. That’s an expected profit of +8.8 units. How did we get to that number? To calculate your units, subtract the total of your losses (multiplied by 1.1 to include the vig) from your wins and you’ll get your unit profit.

Sports Betting How To Guide

Placing $460 bets on each of these games, a number pulled from some quick and dirty math about how much you could afford to bet in a single week’s NFL play without blowing your bankroll, would result in a $4,048 profit if you maintain that 55% winning record. Turning $10,000 into $14,048 in just four months is an investment return of 40.48%. I dare you to ask your bank for that kind of return on your savings account.

But that’s all assuming you can pick the winner 55% of the time. Do your research, look into the records of professional sports gamblers. 55%, while not impossible, would place you among the elite sports bettors in the country, if not the world.

Professional sports bettors have to worry about variance more than any other type of gambler. Working against the forces of variance means managing your bankroll over the course of the season to avoid the negative possibilities that could totally empty your wagering account. Professional sports bettors have the time and resources necessary to calculate these variances, and there are even a few pieces of software out there that can help you figure out your ideal bet in the face of negative variance. But the bottom line is that professional sports bettors would dream of having a 55% winning record, simply because it guarantees you’re beating the house.

Pro bettors make their money on bets that sportsbooks offer that give them even the slightest betting advantage. The key to becoming a profitable sports bettor is being able to find advantages, opportunities where the line a book is offering is vulnerable.

This is why many long-term sports bettors are math freaks. Good sports bettors understand statistics, particularly what are called inferential statistics, though any higher math will help when it comes time to place a bet.

Here is what a professional baseball bettor might do in his head. After looking over statistics from MLB (kept religiously by all sorts of bloggers, data archives, and magazines) between the years 2000-2010, he notices a particular statistic pop out. For example: when the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss, that team wins 59% of the time. Good sports bettors can do this sort of math in their head or very quickly on paper. From that bit of information comes a new betting theory—look for game situations that mirror the above example and bet on them. That means he’ll only bet games where the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss. Does he just jump in and start betting based on this back of the napkin math? No way. More statistical analysis is required—he may find that this was a fluke for that particular decade and isn’t a trustworthy statistics, or he may find an even more advantageous bet based on his original theory.

Pro sports bettors also keep near-obsessive records of their bets. Obviously, no edge in sports betting lasts longer than a single game. Taking proper records will also help you test theories, like the above one about left-handed pitchers and losses. Without taking good records, no sports bettor’s bankroll will last very long.

What Is a Good Record for Sports Bettors

So, at the end of the day, what could you call a “good” record for a sports bettor? Most casual gamblers looking into sports betting see a pro advertising his 1100-900 record and shake their head a little. How could such an abysmal record be something to be proud of? That’s a 55% winning percentage, and it indicates to those in the know that this bettor is actually turning a profit placing bets on sports.

A good record for a sports bettor is any record equal to or larger than 52.4%, because that number or anything higher means you’re not losing money. A 53% winning record, while not impressive on paper, means you’re actually beating the sportsbook and putting money back in your pocket. Ask your friends that play the slots or play online poker how often they end up putting money back in their pocket.

A -110 wager, standard for spread bets in the NFL, gives the house a built-in advantage of 10%. It means that even if you do win, and you line up to collect your $100, some sucker behind you just spent $10 to hand the casino $100.

A good record for sports bettors is any record that ensures they at least break-even. If you bet 16 games this NFL season and you won 9 and lost 7, you probably made money. And taking money away from a casino is always something to be proud of.

Other Advanced Sports Betting Strategy Articles:
» Future Betting Strategy
» NFL Bye Week Betting Strategy
» Parlay Betting Strategy

Sports Betting Break Even Video:

How To Be Good At Betting On Sports

In the video above I go over the break even % for sports betting, and we take a look at the difference between hitting 52% and 53%. I also quickly show the amounts of profits you can expect if you can hit 55% consistently.

If you feel like your life is in dire need of a constant, mentally exhausting challenge, perhaps betting sports professionally will satisfy your needs. First, you need to understand a few numbers. One, the top sports bettors in the world don’t win even 60% of the time. They top out around 58 or 59. So right off the bat, you already know that this is going to incur quite a bit of failure, and failure leads to stress. Loss of money leads to stress. In this case, one happens because of the other. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is a very, very stressful job. Betting sports full time is not as easy, fun, or glamorous as it may seem.

Work Required and Success Rates

The standard vig (fee for the house booking your action) is 10% of whatever you bet. You must bet $110 to win $100, $220 to win $200, and so on. If you win 52.4% of the time, you are something that around 97% of sports bettors are not and that is a long term winner. It will take you 10,000 bets of $110 to win $400 at a success rate of 52.4%. Not exactly golden, but hey, it is better than being down $200,000 and losing your job because of it. There are too many stories that end up this way. So how much do you want to make? If you want to make $40,000, you’ll have to make 1,000 bets a year, averaging $110,000 a bet, and succeed 52.4% of the time. You don’t want to be risking more than 2-3% of your bankroll on each bet. And that’s playing it hard.

Really, 1% is the safe way to go. But even if you do 3% each bet, you still need over $3.3 million to do this prudently. Yes I’m obviously taking this to quite an extreme. But it’s important, so let’s recap. If you want to make $40,000 a year, you need to do something that 97% of the people trying, can’t, and you must do it 1,000 times a year, and you must risk $110,000 every time. That is nearly 2.75 bets a day every day. That means you have to pretty much be an expert in every sport. May I remind you that this is if you are exclusively playing the games where the vig is -110. If you’re ever laying more or less than -110, then this will affect how often you need to succeed.

55% seems to be the going win rate that will put you in the clear to make money you can live off of. We were talking millions before as a sufficient bankroll on the extreme sides, but you are going to need a lot of money either way. I would say at least $100,000. You are going to have to be able to weather the storm for a lot of failure. You are too likely to just go broke if you can’t cover a long stretch of losing that wasn’t necessarily your fault. Even if you lower your bet sizes, you run the risk of not being able to win enough to live off of even if you’re winning. If you had $220,000 and won 55% of the time placing 300 bets a year of $2,200, you will win $33,000, or about $635 a week. The $2,200 bet is considered 1 unit of your bankroll. $635 is less than 29% of what you’re risking on each individual bet. And your net goal per week should be 1 unit.

It takes many hours of regular research, to find where edges possibly exist. I just told you that 52.4% is what you need to do to barely break above even. What happens if you bet on a game where the true odds were one team was going to win 51% of the time and the other was 49%? That means long term, this is a losing play. The sportsbooks make their lines so that this is how things will result as often as they can. But they are human so they are not perfect, that is why edges exist.

There are so many different elements to be aware of. Things like who is injured, what the weather is like, how the side you like has been doing lately against what schedule don’t even scratch the surface of the kinds of intricate and very mathematically complex things you need to always be researching. The said bits of information make up a couple grains of sand on the bench in the sports handicapping scene. Sports betting is a moving target of a game of being able to understand which elements are relevant and it varies on a game by game basis. It is never the same thing over and over again. How could it be? Almost everybody is losing!

How To Be Good At Betting On Sports Gambling

Illusions

I know it must sound like I’m completely against sports betting and presenting arguments as to why you shouldn’t do it, but the truth is I’m just talking about what actually goes on. If you think you can take on all of these things and still prevail, go for it. But there are reasons barely anyone can turn even the slightest profit at it. There are hazards everywhere. It’s not just the vig you have to overcome.

One hazard is just being able to ignore your passion to watch. People really love sports. They love it so much it gives them false beliefs they are able to predict the outcome, and just love to have action at all. How much you are entertained by a game has nothing to do with matching up what will happen with the spread, and if it’s even worth the payout. You may think you really see what’s going on, but how can you know you do? You are already aware that if hardly anyone is winning, then how can sports betting be as easy as it seems? It takes a lot of success over a large sample of time to determine you have in fact developed the ability to find edges.

Winning is such a monstrous thrill. You feel the emotions with the players and anyone else who has been sweating it out with you. You can get a little heater going and win 7 or 8 bets in a row. You think, okay I got this. Except that is almost like saying if you successfully ran a red light without getting pulled over a bunch of times in a row, then you are now a wizard on knowing which red lights to run and which ones to stop at. Betting sports blindly is like trying to run a red light. You are not aware of the oncoming traffic from the left or the right. You are not aware if a cop is nearby watching. This is simply an ill-advised unsafe decision. That’s why we have red lights in the first place, to protect us from getting hurt. That’s why you use caution and put lots of time and thought into each bet, to protect yourself from burning money.

It is a hidden illusion for many bettors that you have put your work in, but really you have not. You went into the sportsbook and saw a line that looked appealing to you, for whatever reason. You text your friend you like it. He says he likes it too. You go to the window and bet. If it was that easy, why is it that 97% of the bettors lose? Many bets take place just like this example.

Maybe you did put in a lot of research. What if it was the wrong research and you lose anyway? People love to rationalize and say they were unlucky. Doesn’t matter if it’s because they have a problem or if it is just their ego insisting they really knew what they were doing. Either way it makes things very easy to continue. After all, you know that even the top bettors are going to have to incur a losing. You convince yourself it is too hard to see if you’re making inaccurate picks, or if you really are just getting unlucky. These illusions keeps people going for a long time. Sooner or later, they just have to, and you finally realize it was them all along.

Then there’s The Sure Thing. I capitalized it because people think this is also a possibility. A lock. A can’t miss. The thing about professional or college sports is the difference between the two teams is so small. It is very underrated as to how small it is. If you are watching the best team in the NFL play the worst team, you feel like there’s no way they can lose. If the superior team plays the way they can play football, yeah they’ll probably win a huge percentage of the time. What if they play badly? If you play badly against another team full of freak athletes, all of whom are also professional football players, the supposed dominant team is at a high risk of getting beat. You will not just show up and win because you are better. You still have to do your job right, and not everybody always does this. You can’t completely prevent the other team from just having a great game either. That happens too. That is why there is upsets. And that is why when you play the moneyline in games that have a huge favorite, you are going to have to lay a lot of odds on them just to be the victor.

Betting $800 to win $100 doesn’t sound very appealing. When you win 6 of those in a row then finally the upset hits, you’ll understand why. The edges are not found easily. Think of it as being a detective. You can’t just show up to the crime scene and know who the culprits are based on what’s on the surface. You have to look well beneath to understand what’s really going on, and it just takes time.

I wish you the best if you take this on as a full time career. I can only imagine it first developed as hey, what could be better than making a living from my hobby? It’s doable. People do it. Humans have shown themselves to be capable of nearly anything. Just understand at all times this requires a near infinite amount of discipline and diligence.