Spotting A Successful Sports Bettor Articles | Gambling

By: Richard Bleuze

Spotting A Successful Sports Bettor

How can you tell if someone is a successful sports bettor?  You can do it by listening to the guy. If you're a good cook, and this guy says he bakes biscuits at 250 degrees, you know this guy doesn't know biscuits from baloney.  Sooner or later, phonies always give themselves away.

Well, it's no different with sports betting.  Full time sports bettors can spot a non-expert very quickly. The most obvious giveaway is that phonies tend to make outrageous claims.  If  a guy tells you he wins 65% of his pointspread bets, offer to lay 11 to his 10 that he won't win 65% of his next 20 or so bets.  That's the closest you'll ever come to getting a 'lock' bet. (Better have an honest third party hold the money, though.)   

Another dead giveaway concerns money management.  Pseudo-experts usually think they can use the size of their bets as some sort of pry-bar; - that is, they are convinced they can make more money than they deserve by using a progressive betting scheme.  Usually,these progressive betting schemes seem to make perfect sense on paper.  You're probably already at least somewhat familiar with two such ideas, the so-called "Kelly criterion" and the "star system."

But this article is about handicapping techniques and the differences between the way winners and losers handicap ball games.

There are only three general ways to handicap a football, basketball, hockey or baseball game:

        1. Get a hunch, bet a bunch
        2. Use stats from recent games in some sort of mathematical formula
        3. Judge the motivational and psychological factors affecting the teams

Most recreational bettors use only the first method, and we can dismiss them  without taking the time talking about it. Most of the time, they lose their bets.

More serious gamblers usually use either the second method (stats) or the third method (motivations).

There are lots of statistical handicappers.   A psychologist might say that hard core statisticians have a need for the solid feel of the predictions which their mathematical formulas produce.  In a strange way, the use of a mathematical formula can relieve users of the responsibility of losing. Mathematical formulas can also relieve handicappers of the obligation to think for themselves; - to make judgments.  Many statisticians don't trust judgments.  They want solid evidence in black-and-white.  They refuse to consider things like revenge, injuries, emotional letdowns, or other non-mathematical evidence.  The ethereal, intangible quality of such subjective considerations seems to make them uncomfortable.

Subjective handicappers are the psychologists among us.  These sports bettors see a basketball or baseball game as a highly emotional affair, usually won by the team best prepared on a psychological level.  They are convinced that whichever team is most motivated figures to cover the pointspread.  Their forecasts come from such factors as 'must-win' situations, revenge, intra-team squabbling, player holdouts, injuries, all manner of outside distractions or other emotional and subjective considerations that cannot be defined by numbers.  So far as these sports bettors are concerned, stats are merely a reflection of past subjective factors.  A hard core subjectivist can be contemptuous of the unbending, dictatorial aspects of mathematical systems.

So who's right, - statisticians or psychologists?

Well, they both are, part of the time.

Which brings us to to a fourth group of handicappers, and I have never met a successful sports bettor who was not part of this last group.  These guys use both mathematical factors (stats) and psychological factors (virtually everything but stats) to handicap a sports game.

That's not nearly as easy as it may sound.  People are predisposed to be either a statistician or a psychologist.  Very few people can be both at the same time.  Most people find it extremely difficult - even impossible - to mix mathematical formulas with judgmental considerations.

These sports bettors in this fourth group will tell you that different parts of the season call for different ratios of importance between objective and subjective factors.

That's an incredibly important thing to remember.  Why?  Doesn't it make sense that a team will (and should!) practice what they're worst at doing?

During preseason, high-scoring teams can be low-scoring teams, low-scoring teams can be high-scoring teams.  Everything can seem topsy-turvy in preseason to a statistician.   However, it's not topsy-turvy to a subjective handicapper who knows a team's weaknesses and who knows the coach's goals.

After all, everybody's top priority is a shot at the Championship.  Everybody's motivations peak. Every game is sudden death.  Forget about revenge.  Forget about jealousy.  Forget about all the other motivations you've learned to watch for during playoffs; statisticians can make a killing.

But that, too, isn't quite as simple as it sounds.  There are pitfalls when comparing stats. For example, when two teams have similar stats, check their recent opponents . If one team clearly played tougher opponents, that's significant.

In short, if you can establish which team in any playoff game truly has the best stats - remembering to account for their level of competition - you won't go far wrong by betting on them.  

In short, a successful bettor tends to avoid hard, fast rules concerning stats and/or motivations and/or anything else involved in forming his opinions.  He strives to stay open to all aspects of what might affect the outcome of a game.  Most losers become fixated on one aspect of a sport, such as a baseball pitcher's ERA.