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The fundamental principles behind successful sports gambling

Steve Larson - 11/02/08

Betting on sports - especially if it's your favorite sport we're talking about - is always a fun and attractive way to possibly make some extra money, right? There's not a lot to it either, if you're a fan of that sport you probably know a lot about the teams involved and the specifics of the game. If you're a recreational bettor, you might find the above statements comforting, and to a certain degree: true. The truth about recreational sports betting is however, that the overwhelming majority of people involved in this activity lose money over the long-run. It's not like they're pathological losers or that they are destroying their lives. They just find it pretty much impossible to make constant money on their small-time hobby.

In order to generate some consistent money, or - why not - make a living betting on sports, there are a few concepts you need to come to grips with first.

Regular bets on one side or the other of a point spread are usually negative expected value bets. This is why your average bettor will never be able to squeeze juice out of them in the long-run. Why do they carry negative EV? Because you risk more money on them than you hope to win. On your $1 bet, you get a return of 95 cents (if you do win) because the 5 missing cents find their way into the bookmaker's purse as vig.

It may not seem like much, but over the long-run the tiny vig makes it impossible for you to win. You don't like to play a game in which you're not even allowed to win, do you? In this case, the mathematical odds are the ones forbidding you to get paid, at least as long as you do nothing to change the odds.

What can you do? Quite a few things. Let's take a look at how the whole operation works from the bookmaker's perspective.

In order to be able to pay all winners out with the money lost by the losers (and to keep the vig), the bookmaker needs to "balance" match-ups. A balanced game has an approximately equal number of bettors on both its sides. The bookie can balance games by moving his line around, to make one or the other side look more attractive at any given time. Under normal circumstances the bookmaker is after the vig. A perfectly balanced game is pretty much impossible to achieve, but if it's close enough, the bookmaker can cover the eventual bets from the vig and still have plenty left over as profit. Sometimes (favorites playing on the road is a relevant example in this respect), the crowd of recreational bettors known as squares, flock to one side of the bet, and the bookmaker has to induce some serious value to the other side in an attempt to balance. The influx of money on the favorite is called square money. That is where the hidden value surfaces. As the book overcompensates for the square money, the other side of the bet offers some serious value for sharps. That is what you need to find and exploit. Never bet with the masses, try instead to seek the value on the other side.

Another source of value in sports betting comes from less popular types of bets. The over - under on the totals is a good example here. Often, there are clear tendencies regarding the total score of a game, and not exploiting that would be a sin for a savvy sports bettor. Given the fact that these types of bets are less popular with the crowd, the bookmaker will have less money riding on them, and because of that, he'll spend less time squeezing the juice from them.

Keeping with the idea: unpopular games carry such value in just about every kind of bet offered on them.

Don't play poker without rakeback. Creating positive EV is actually possible without a rakeback deal, but the bigger the EV the better. In poker there you can never get enough of things such as positive EV and hourly rate.