Sports betting have existed for as long as man have. It seems that it is inherit in our nature that we love to want for something for free. Simply placing a bet and hoping that we will double our money. I am here to tell you that there simply is nothing such as a free lunch. You have to work hard if you want to win money, but if you are willing to put in the time to improve your knowledge and skills you might not have to work so hard in the future to be able to make real money at sports betting.
If you are new to betting or have been betting for some time but without much success you might be interested in this article here where we go over the most basic betting strategy for sports bettors. These are rules for how you should treat your bankroll, your mindset and general tips on how and where to find profitable sports bets. Simply reading these tips will not make you a winning sports bettor, but it will make you lose a lot less and guide you in the right direction to the riches.
The general idea of how sports betting works is quite obvious to most that have wagered on anything in their lives: you are offered a set of odds on an event where if you guess correct you will receive your wager back and an amount of money based on the odds that are known when the bet were placed. If you are wrong you lose your wager. Very simple in nature.
What is harder though is to determine how you can win in the long run against the bookmakers that offer these odds. You need to be aware of how they operate and what you need to determine in order to be able to beat them at what they are offering you. We are going to write some articles on how you can analyze bets and find those that are good, but first we need you to take a look at yourself and what you can do in order to give yourself the best chance of winning real money.
This page can probably be summed up the best and most concise by this headline. Be disciplined. You can be the best handicapper that the world has ever seen, but still lose money by practicing bad bankroll management, tilt, be imprecise and worse. So if you want to be the next Billy Walters you need to get the following things in order.
The most important part of any kind of gambling out there. Period. If you cannot manage and properly size your bets in order to not go broke you will inevitably do so. What we mean by this is that you need to expect stretches where your bets will lose. Even if you are doing proper analysis and finding excellent sports bets you must still be ready for the fact that you might experience downswings. I have had stretches of up to 4 months(!) in the red before I could finally pull out, and this were only because I kept following the rules I had set out before on how to size my bets.
I will write a more in-depth article on bankroll management, but for now I will say as much that wagering about 1-3% of your bankroll is considered pretty safe in terms of risk of ruin. In theory you will never go broke if you keep betting a relative amount every time you place a bet as if you keep losing your bets will become smaller. By adhering to these rules, those that you put in place yourself, you are much less likely to go broke.
To continue on the point I talked about when it comes to downswings and bad beats you need to never let anything keep you from losing your focus. Sure, after I lost a huge bet courtesy of the Giants during the Miracle at the New Meadowlands I wanted to throw my TV out the window and fire up a huge bet to chase my losses, but by doing so you are essentially risking your entire bankroll. Being susceptible to tilt makes you easily forget your vows to bankroll management and you might make a huge mistake that will cost you in the long run.
There are plenty of situations where you can go on tilt or not be in 100% focus. You should never be placing wagers when you feel your judgment is off. Examples of this can be when you are angry or frustrated with your bets, when you are drunk, if you are stressed from other aspects of your life and so on. It is very easy to make mistakes and go on tilt when you are not focused, so just take a break and come back when you feel ready. The odds will be there when you get back as well.
Aside from managing money, is off course the very important, when it comes to placing bets the most important thing to keep in mind is to always be looking for the best available odds to you. If you are simply using one bookmaker to place all your wagers you are likely missing out on a lot of potential profit.
To take an example let us assume that you are placing bets on mostly NFL spreads. The odds here are generally 1.90 and you win rate is about 55%. If you would take just 5-10 minutes after you have done your research and analysis and look for the best odds you might find an average of odds of 1.95. If you are placing 1000 wagers a year of $500 per wager you could be looking at an additional profit of $13750. That is almost an increase of 40% in profit for only a little extra work.
For such a professional bettor that has an amazing win rate there is a lot of money to be made, but for us that are doing this mostly for fun and for the mental challenge this additional odds might be the difference between being a winner and a loser. Might this be the simple change that is holding you back? Check our list of the best betting sites to add some to your circle and start shopping lines when you are betting!
I have already touched on this topic, but it needs to be reiterated: even though you are betting on sports for profit, where you are doing proper research, finding good bets and making all the right plays you are still going to experience some bad days, weeks and even months. This is still a game of chance where even if you make the right play statistically, you might still end up the loser on any given bet.
This is why I try to log all of my bets and note those impossible losses I incurred, but I also track the amazing comeback wins I got. You see, we as humans are experts at feeling sorry for ourselves when we experience bad luck, but we quickly forget all the times we were on the other hand of lady lucks charm. Remember that luck evens out in the long run and
In order to win against others that are placing their wagers you need to outsmart them in some way. It doesn’t matter how many games you have watched of Manchester United, there are bound to be plenty of other punters out there that have been watching them even closer and dived deep into the stats accompanied with the team. If you think you can beat guys that are devoting hours upon hours doing research by simply watching a couple a games a week you are (most likely) mistaken.
But there are still hope for you. You can either join them and just do more and/or smarter research or simply think a little outside the box. What I mean by this is that you need to always be thinking about why have an edge AND why no one else is aware of this. For example, if you saw Leicester beating Manchester United a couple of weeks ago and think that United were simply unfortunate and believe they will play better now that van Persie and other players are back then this is a bad edge as this is widely available information. If you on the other hand bet them at the odds of 1.90 against West Bromwich because your model tells you that their scoring distribution (using Poisson) is a lot higher then West Bromwich’s and you give them about 58% chance of winning, then even if this is correct or not this is still a reason to believe that this is not known by every other punter and is likely to be an edge here.
