Having supported myself solely through sportsbetting (mostly on NFL
football) for about a decade, and during that time interacting with a
lot of folks on both sides of the counter who helped me learn what it
takes to win, I can make several suggestions to the person serious about
making money betting on sports:
1. Bet with your head, not your heart.
There are reasons-cold, hard, dry, dull, mathematical, boring, logical
reasons-for or against any bet you could make. A good way to lose is to
let your emotions sway you from such reasons.
Don't bet on a
team because you grew up rooting for them. Don't bet a game because it's
televised. Don't bet more on Monday Night Football because you want to
catch back what you lost over the weekend (or because you want to go for
the big kill after a winning weekend). Don't hedge a bet because you
have a psychological preference for safety. Don't bet a game because you
haven't found anything to bet all day and it's getting late and you
really wanted to gamble today. Don't bet a "teaser" just because it's a
"fun" way to bet. Etc., etc.
If that kills it for you because it
sounds too much like a job, then accept that you're a "recreational"
bettor, and not destined to make money at this.
2. Learn math.
Simple addition, multiplication, division, fractions, percentages,
etc. will handle a lot of what you need to do. But the more knowledge
you have of probability and statistics and more advanced areas like
that, the more you'll find it opening up new opportunities for you and
enabling you to better exploit existing opportunities.
3. Realize that it takes money to make money.
A lot of the factors I'll talk about below are easier to do the more
money you have. People with $100,000 to invest in sportsbetting can
pursue a lot more strategies a lot more effectively than people with
$1,000 to invest.
4. Have as many sportsbetting accounts as you can handle.
If you're playing with the neighborhood bookie, making all your bets
with just one person or shop, that eliminates or lessens almost all the
ways you can make money sportsbetting. So I'm assuming you have legal
access to online sportsbooks. If so, don't pick one or two and put all
your action in there. Pick ten or twenty or thirty. (When you're playing
online, it's not unrealistic to manage that many. It's not like we're
talking about running around on foot to dozens of Vegas sportsbooks in
person.)
5. Be careful to use only the safest sportsbooks.
Don't open an account at a sportsbook just because you got a mailer in
your mailbox, or a spam e-mail, or saw a banner ad, or saw a link in an
online article. Go to the various sportsbetting forums online and
research which places people recommend. Then research them further
through
Google
or other means, looking to see if you can find anyone claiming them to
be a scam or pulling anything underhanded. Call them and make sure
you're comfortable with them before committing. After you join, keep
your eyes open for further news on the forums and elsewhere so you can
get out if it sounds like people are having bad experiences with them.
This is a largely unregulated area. So you have to do a lot more
homework. There's no "Well I'm sure they wouldn't let them operate if
they weren't on the level," or "I'm sure they wouldn't let them
advertise if they were crooks." Sportsbooks range from legitimate
companies roughly as safe as "conventional" big name businesses, to the
equivalent of Nigerian e-mail scams, and everything in between.
6. Shop lines and shop odds.
The more accounts you have, the more you can shop. Don't make a bet at
-4.5 when -4 is available. Don't make a bet at -120 when -115 is
available. (-120 means the odds are such that you have to risk $120 to
win $100; -115 means the odds are such that you have to risk $115 to win
$100.) Often the difference is slight, but those pennies add up.
7. Learn how to scalp and middle.
If you have multiple accounts funded, you can sometimes come upon
opportunities to play both sides of a bet at different places. So maybe
you can get -3 on one team at one sportsbook and +4 on their opponent at
another. (That's a "middle.") Or maybe you can get +180 on one team at
one sportsbook and -175 on their opponent at another. (That's a
"scalp.")
In effect, scalps and middles reverse the house edge to put you in the position of advantage.
8. Take bonuses.
Most online sportsbooks offer incentives and perks of various kinds to
get business. The most common is a sign-up bonus on your initial
deposit. A 20% sign-up bonus, for instance, means if you send them
$1,000, instead of depositing $1,000 in your account, they'll deposit
$1,200.
You can also sometimes get bonuses for subsequent
deposits if you happen to lose your whole balance, referral bonuses for
other customers who sign up that you recommended, and more.
Don't get too caught up in the "free money" and lose sight of whether
these are places you'd want to play for other reasons (safety, good
betting opportunities), but bonuses can be a nice boost to one's bottom
line.
Some bonuses are of more complicated types, such as a
"free play" instead of cash. Be sure to research how to use any such
bonus, because there can be big differences in its value (that wouldn't
be obvious to a beginner) depending on how you use it.
9. Don't buy "picks."
Total waste of money. Total scam. Success as a tout is all about marketing, not handicapping. Don't get caught up in that.
If you absolutely have to follow someone else's picks rather than do
your own work, there are no shortage of handicappers on the
sportsbetting forums who share their picks with each other and the
public for free just because they enjoy this activity or it boosts their
ego for people to see them pick winners. On average they're as good or
better than the people trying to sell you their picks.
10. Research, crunch numbers.
For example, learn more than the betting public about how much a
team's roster was helped by free agency or the draft, or how likely it
is their injured starters will be able to play in their next game.
Learn whether it's better to take +7 at -110 odds, or +6.5 at even
money. (Depends on how often games land right on 7. Find out.)
I
knew a bettor who made a fortune betting "in game" or "in progress"
wagers. (These are bets a few shops offer where you can continue betting
throughout a game as the odds change.) How? He spent thousands of hours
compiling meticulously detailed charts to match every game situation.
For example, let's say an
NBA
team is playing at home and is favored by 5. There are currently 7
minutes left in the 3rd quarter and they are up by 2. They are about to
in bound the ball from center court. He could tell you in the history of
the NBA, what percentage of the time a team falling under that
description in precisely those circumstances went on to win by more than
5. (Which he could then adjust for unique circumstances like if a key
player was injured during the game or was in foul trouble.)
How
well do you think he did against the average bettor operating at the
level of "I really like the Knicks here. They have the momentum; I think
they're going to pull away"? Which would you rather be?
11. Look for obscure angles other people don't know about.
Years ago I remember a bettor who made a lot of money on golf telling
me that a certain golf tournament has a tradition of making the pin
placements particularly difficult on Day 4. So he'd look for shops
offering props on individual golfer scores on that day, and bet the Over
(remember, in golf low scores are better than high scores) on all of
them.
When
NASCAR
first became a big sport, neither the betting public nor the oddsmakers
were all that knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the sport. For
awhile, they grossly underestimated the importance of the qualifying
rounds. Drivers that qualified with the highest speeds barely had their
odds adjusted for the race itself, whereas in reality their likelihood
of doing well increased a lot more than that. So savvy bettors who knew
that cashed in.
You want a really obscure one? I knew a bettor
who found out awhile back that every season Shaquille O'Neal would
dedicate a game to his grandmother on her birthday, and he would almost
always put up big numbers that day. So each season, whatever game was
played on or closest to that date, this guy would go to sportsbooks that
put up basketball props, and he'd bet the Over on O'Neal points and
rebounds and such, and he'd make a nice chunk of change.
How the
heck would a person know about something like these? Well, when you
treat this as your job, and you spend hours every day reading
newspapers, reading websites, talking to other successful gamblers,
etc., you find little nuggets.
12. Learn about all the non-conventional bet types.
There are times parlays are more advantageous than straight bets. Same
with teasers. There are times it might make more sense to bet a half or
a quarter than a whole game. Occasionally (rarely) it's to your
advantageous to move the line by "buying points." And so on.
Find out what those occasions are and why.
If you limit yourself to making straight bets on whole games like 90% of gamblers, you'll miss all this.
13. Disregard all betting "systems" that purport to give you an edge by how you alter bet size.
You simply cannot overcome (or even change) a house edge against you
by how you order your bets. (This is true of casino games like craps or
roulette as well.) Any system of "double up after a loss, then start
over at a win," or "bet one unit until you win at least three in a row,
then bet 2 units until you lose two in a row, then bet one unit," or
whatever is mathematical garbage. Period.
OK, we'll stop at a lucky 13.
Good luck with your wagering. But better yet, bet smart and let the luck take care of itself over the long run.
