Sports Betting
  
 

Sports betting requires dedication, perseverance, and the willingness to spend long hours analyzing team strengths and weaknesses, past performance and anything else that might affect their play on any given game day. Oh yeah, a little insider information couldn't hurt!

"But wait!" you say. "I'm a huge Football (Basketball, Baseball, Hockey, Tennis, NASCAR, Golf, Jacks, Tiddledywinks) fan. I follow my favorite team passionately, and it adds to the excitement of watching the game to have some action down on them." This is very admirable and is bound to lose you money over the long run. If you are going to bet sports successfully, you must put aside emotion (team loyalty being one of the strongest emotions I know of) and rely on science.

I have, in the past, fallen into the trap of betting on my favorite team and, like everyone I know, have lost considerable sums by letting my loyalties get in the way. This is personal experience (and pain) talking here, and the best advice I can give you is: If you can't remove yourself from the emotional aspects of handicapping your "home" team, DON'T BET THAT GAME! EVER!

That being said, let's get started by explaining the generalities of sports betting, how the Sports Book arrives at their line, how you should arrive at yours, and how to capitalize on the difference.

Editors Note
I have recently Found a handicapper in Las Vegas who is willing to guarantee his picks of professional Football and Basketball teams against the spread. I haven't as yet had a chance to try his service but this appears to be that elusive "no loose" situation. You can find him by following this link: Guaranteed Sports Picks!
If you try this service please mention that you found the link at Gamblers Aid and let me know how it goes. I will give him a "test run" soon and will update this note as soon as I have real results to report (this may take several weeks, those of you who know me know that I don't give anything my personal approval until I have thoroughly tested it).

   
 
"Vig"what is it and what does it mean to you
    
 

Vig, or Vigorish is, in simple terms, the bookmakers profit. To understand this concept, you have to understand the bookmaker's aim in setting his line.

In a perfect world, for the bookmaker, all the action on a given game would be equal. Even amounts of money bet on both Team A and on Team B will cancel themselves out (Team A wins, therefore the money bet on Team B pays the winners who bet on Team A). So where does the bookmaker make his profit? From the vigorish. The vigorish is the difference between what you bet and what you are paid for a winner, typically 10%. If you want to bet on, for instance, the Pittsburgh Steelers to beat the Miami Dolphins, you must lay $110 to win $100. This means that you give the bookmaker $110 and, if you win, he gives you back $210. Your friend Dave, on the other hand, gave the same bookmaker $110 on the Dolphins, he lost (better him than you). $100 of Dave's loss goes to pay you, and the bookmaker keeps the $10 difference for his profit. This $10 (5% of the total action) is the vigorish. Yeah, I know it's a simplistic explanation, but you have to admit that it gets the point across.

    
 
The Bookmaker's Line
   
 
This brings us to the bookmaker's line. It's the bookmaker's job not to publish a line that necessarily reflects the chances of any one team in a given competition, but one that will bring in equal action on both sides of a given bet. Remember, the bookmaker isn't a gambler, he's a business man collecting a fee (the vig) for his services (just like the casino does on table games). How he does this is to arrive at a "true" line (we'll discuss this one later) and then adjust it to even out the action. For example, the Detroit Lions are a heavily bet team (now we're getting back to a combination of emotion and geography (Detroit is a traditionally heavy betting part of the country)) while the Denver Broncos are not (no strong tradition of illegal bookmaking in the area, therefore not the habitual base of "home team" bettors). If in our example the "true" line is Detroit +14 over Denver (the team with the smaller built-in bettor base), the bookmaker might adjust the line to Detroit +21 over Denver, or more. This is done strictly to attract more action on the Denver side of the bet. Our job, as winning bettors, is to spot this overlay and jump on it!
    
 
The True Line
    
 
How do we go about spotting the overlays that come up in the bookmaker's line? By determining what the "true" line should be and comparing it with the bookmaker's line. Simple, huh? Well... There are almost as many "systems" for arriving at "the line" as there are sports bettors. The ones that make sense start out by arriving at the median projected score for each team and adjusting for known injuries, past performance against the opposing team (this can really get dicey in sports where the teams may only meet once in a season, and there have been substantial changes in personnel and/or coaching between meetings), home field advantage (or is it disadvantage?), team psychology, weather (only applies to sports played outdoors, well usually), the phases of the moon, the Chinese Calendar (I actually saw a system once that gave the Detroit Lions an additional touchdown for any game played in the "Year Of The Lion"). As you can see, it can get really convoluted. I, for one favor a simple approach, and then only on sports that I follow well enough to be able to make a few educated decisions. For the other sports, I favor finding someone who A) follows that sport closely and B) is a superior handicapper and asking his opinion. For example, I know almost nothing about NCAA football. Added to this, I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn enough to allow me to make intelligent handicapping decisions, but I have a friend — Duncan Bronson who lives for college football, is an exceptional handicapper. Duncan has me winning a lot of money this season and has contributed greatly to this site, so I feel I owe him (and you) this mention (Thank you, Duncan).
    
 
Median or Mean
    
 

The proper way to arrive at a starting point for your line is to calculate the median score that each team should be expected to achieve for a given contest. You do this by simply listing all past scores by the team in question and comparing them to find the central point. This should not be confused with adding the scores and dividing by the number of games sampled which will give you the mean (average) score expected. Mean scores can be very misleading and should not be relied on! For example:

If you have logged 10 games with scores of 4, 3, 6, 2, 3, 3, 4, 11, 3, and 4, you have a total of 43 points. The mean score is 4.3, but the median is only 3.5 points!

The median number is the point that half of the games played are over and half under, this provides a much truer sampling than the mean of the same games. That 0.8 point discrepancy we just showed you can so weight your eventual line as to make the difference between setting your line as a winner or an overlay — the difference between winning and losing.

    
 
Adjustments
    
 
Ah yes, adjustments to your line. This is the big difference between handicapping systems, and the part that I feel least competent to advise you on. You see, it varies from situation to situation, from sport to sport and from team to team. I, for one, have never found a definitive solution where I could advise. For example: "In Football, the home team should receive 4 points, just for being the home team" (whatever you do, don't use that one as I pulled it out of the air). If the home team should even receive an advantage is dependent on their home vs away record, the opponents' away vs home record and the past records of the two teams in head to head competition. This of course doesn't take into account the other important variables, injuries and the respective teams' mental attitudes to mention only two.
    
 
For this reason, I don't feel qualified to give you advice on adjusting for variables. There are, of course, many who disagree with me, quite a number of whom have written books on the subject, and many of which are available in our Bookstore. As always, I advocate learning everything that you can before betting any serious money. A few of the more educational books that I've found are: The Caesars Palace, Sports Book of Betting, Gambling Times Guide to Football Handicapping, and John Patrick's Sports Betting: Proven Winning Systems for Football, Basketball, and Baseball. I hope these are as helpful to you as they have been to me.
    
       
 

Attention Sports Bettors!