#SportsBetting #BettingTips #SportsStats #BettingStrategies
If you’ve ever dabbled in the world of sports betting, you’ve probably faced the frustrating reality that it’s not as easy as it seems. Despite the wealth of information available in the form of stats and trends, successful sports betting remains a challenge for many. But why is that the case? Let’s dive into the reasons why sports betting is so hard to be successful in when stats and trends are readily available to the public.
###The Influence of Emotions
One of the key reasons why sports betting is difficult to be successful in is the influence of emotions.
🔹 Example: You may have a strong emotional attachment to a particular team, causing you to bet with your heart rather than your head.
###The Role of Probability
Another factor that contributes to the difficulty of successful sports betting is the role of probability.
🔹 Example: Even with all the stats and trends available, there’s always an element of unpredictability in sports that can sway the outcome of a game.
###The Impact of Public Knowledge
While it’s true that stats and trends are readily available to the public, it’s important to consider the impact of public knowledge on sports betting success.
🔹 Example: When everyone has access to the same information, it becomes harder to find an edge or advantage over other bettors.
###The Challenge of Consistency
Successful sports betting requires a high level of consistency, which can be difficult to achieve.
🔹 Example: Even if you have a winning streak, maintaining that level of success over the long term is incredibly challenging.
###The Influence of External Factors
External factors, such as injuries, weather conditions, and other unforeseen circumstances, can significantly impact the outcome of sports events.
🔹 Example: No amount of stats and trends can fully account for these unpredictable external factors.
###The Role of Discipline and Strategy
Success in sports betting requires a disciplined approach and a well-thought-out strategy.
🔹 Example: Without a solid plan in place, it’s easy to make impulsive bets based on emotion or gut instinct, rather than informed decision-making.
###The Importance of Risk Management
Managing risk is a crucial aspect of sports betting, and one that many struggle to master.
🔹 Example: Without a clear understanding of risk management, it’s easy to make overly risky bets that can quickly deplete your bankroll.
###The Impact of Bookmakers
Bookmakers play a significant role in the difficulty of successful sports betting, as they have the advantage of setting the odds in their favor.
🔹 Example: Even if you have a strong grasp of stats and trends, the odds set by bookmakers can make it challenging to find value in your bets.
###Conclusion
In conclusion, while stats and trends are undoubtedly valuable tools in sports betting, there are numerous factors that contribute to the difficulty of being successful in this endeavor. Emotions, probability, public knowledge, external factors, discipline, risk management, and the influence of bookmakers all play a role in the challenge of successful sports betting. By understanding and addressing these challenges, bettors can work towards improving their chances of success in the complex world of sports betting. Remember, success in sports betting takes time, effort, and a willingness to learn from both wins and losses. With the right approach, it is possible to navigate the difficulties and find success in the world of sports betting. Good luck!
Because the oddsmakers set the stakes according to those stats and trends. If you bet on the favorites your return will be very low.
So to make a lot of money sports betting you either have to bet a ton of money on the favorite, or bet on underdogs, both are risky.
The first issue is the bookie or casino is taking a cut from every bet, so if you win 50.1% of your bets you still lose money. Even with stats you never have all the information a player may not be listed as injured but may still have some effects from a previous injury. Humans tend to be unpredictable and teams need, in some cases 50 of them in sync. Humans have thoughts and feelings that can affect playing, play calling and officiating. Past outcomes are never a guarantee of future outcomes. Sometimes the ball just doesn’t bounce your way.
Specifically because stats and trends are readily available to the public.
Sports betting isn’t you against the bookie. Sports betting is you against every other bettor.
When a bookie takes in bets, they adjust their odds for future bets. This way, they can have bets balanced between all outcomes. A bookie is making money *no matter who wins*.
Here’s how this works:
1. I offer odds of 1:1 for outcome A and outcome B
2. All the early bets are on outcome A. For future bets, I’ll make outcome A less valuable and increase the value of outcome B.
3. Now future bettors think outcome B is more attractive, so they bet on it.
There’s math behind it, but the overall jist is the bookie wants any outcome to result in paying out about 90% of what was bet. That way, they get 10% no matter what.
Now that you understand how this works, you see the bookie doesn’t care who wins. You aren’t trying to beat him, you’re trying to beat every other person who bets with him, because his odds already reflect what they think.
It’s built from the ground up by people who design game and tech systems for casinos to be a trap. It’s also nearly entirely focused on getting people into it as first time users who have no financial means to keep themselves out of trouble.
Because everybody involved in sports betting has access to same information. The other bettors have access, and the oddsmakers at sports books definitely have access to all the information, adjust the odds accordingly.
It’s simple enough. Sports are played on grass not on paper. All the stats in the world cannot tell you what the result of any competitive sport will be only what they have been. Trends, streaks, form are all temporary. You can’t ride them forever. And there’s no way to account for the bolt of lightning. Just think back to the beginning of the NFL season when all the smart money was on Aaron Rodgers transforming the fortunes of the Jets. Out for the season after just one play as predicted by absolutely nobody.
A lot of people are getting into the math of it all, but for me it comes down to a simple fact–if a bet had a good chance of making you money, they wouldn’t offer it. Good financial decisions don’t need advertisements
Others have talked a lot about the match of being a bookie, which is a big part of it. But there is a second side to it, that of the gambler.
Nate Silver of 538 has a book out there called ‘the signal and the noise’ which goes into this, but parsing a lot of information is really hard. For example- for the next game of Sportsball, you can access the historical performance of the team, projected windspeed, star ballman’s favorite color and 99 other stats that could be relevant in an instance. So, which do you take into account?
Some answers are obvious- the Champions are likely going to beat the Underdogs. So making that bet doesn’t win you very much money. What you really want is to figure out when the Underdogs will have an upset. But you have to be certain enough that you don’t throw away all your money on risky bets.
Now, it can be done. A few years ago, John Oliver did a segment on sports betting which talked about the few people legitimately making a lot of money on it. But you have to be very lucky or very good to make sense of all the data consistently.
Because they set lines in sports where it looks good to the average bettor. Say a player averages 36 points per game against a certain team, his over under might be 35.5 or something like that. It’s meant to be a coin flip
People are talking a lot about the betting side, and those comments are right and applicable. But I want to mention the statistical side. This relates mainly to football, though there are nuances to it that translate to those sports as well.
Take last week’s AFC Championship game as a good example. Patrick Mahomes has played in a grand total of 97 career regular season games and 16 career postseason games (before that game). Lamar Jackson is similar at 86 career regular season games and for him just 5 career postseason games (before that game).
For both, that is a decent amount of starts in NFL terms. In statistical terms though, it’s really hard to determine meaningful trends versus statistical outliers. Especially when you factor in things like the rainy weather for that game. Now we are talking about just a couple dozen games each, and it becomes even harder to try to spot trends for each offense. As we have seen throughout the season, other players on the roster can greatly impact how well Mahomes and Jackson play. Mahomes’s receivers had a much higher drop rate this year than previous years. In a rainy game, you might expect that to continue, but it didn’t really on Sunday.
Even with all the amounts of data out there, there isn’t really enough to draw meaningful statistical models for accurate game by game predictions especially with how that translates to the final score to be useful in betting.
As I heard one pro gambler say, you have to win something like 55% of the time to make it really worthwhile. That is very hard to sustain when everybody has good information, unless you’re doing something really special or have some inside information.
You can be successful but it takes a lot of smarts. I won’t repeat all the great information in this thread about how sportsbooks operate to make sure they are always making money but understanding that is key.
The best way to make money long term is finding value. This usually means you have a set of data you refine that spits out approx. totals and spreads. Where you will find the majority of the value is right as lines are posted. If you wait to bet right before kickoff and the line is Packers +3, that means the market thinks the Packers should be within 3 points of the opponent. If your data says that they should be +5 then at that point you are getting bad value and should not bet.
Where you find that value is placing bets right as lines are released, based on your data. If the line drops as Packers +7 and your data shows +5 then you bet that value. The market will take it to +3 but it doesn’t matter because you have the better line.
Finding and betting this value, coupled with avoiding parlays, will mean you need to hit ~56% (math could be off a % or two) of your bets to make money assuming you are betting -110 odds.
The reason is that all of the sportsbooks have extremely advanced prediction models based on all of the available stats, and 99.9% of people are not able to create anything similar because these companies have millions of dollars and a large staff creating and updating these models for them. Also, because their models are so good, they set the odds so that they are not favorable to bettor.
For example, if they are pretty certain “team A” is going to win a game, they are not going to give you even odds (even odds would be if you bet $100, you win $100) if “team A” wins. Instead, they might give you odds where if you bet $100, you only win say $20. Conversely, if you bet $100 on “team B” you may win say $300, but there is a low chance of that happening. They set the odds so that either you have the opportunity to win a lot, but a very low chance of it actually happening, or you have a high chance of winning, but the payout is very small relative to what you bet. Either way, they make money.
There are people who are very successful at sport betting, but there are so few of them because you have to do a ton of research and have a very disciplined betting strategy, which most people don’t.
It’s not hard. At least not if you have three things. Money, Time and a good theory. I know a few guys that have turned it into a job that makes them some great money because of it.
The vig. Most bets have a 10% service fee just to place the bet. If you look next to a bat and see -110 that means that to win $100 you need to pay 110. Now you have to win 55% of the time just to break even.
It’s all priced in. People smarter than you, with bigger financial incentives set the payout rates so that they never lose money on the big scale.
some other people have answered this well, but there are some other elements. people are greedy and books know it. A lot of successful sports betters only make straight bets, no parlays and they make bets based on value. They essentially hedge the market. Casual people get suckered into the boosted odds of parlays, especially when you factor in books. a casual person doesn’t want to bet $100 to win $90.
also. trends only apply to a series of events, not single events. Just because the Lakers are scoring 130 a night doesn’t guarantee they score 130 tonight.
Fans also don’t know how to use stats. Ie. last time player A played team B he scored 55, but they don’t realize they acquired player B since then. They don’t dig in enough to know things like player A when defended by player B over 20 games has never scored more than 20 points.
And, like anything that is built on a market…….the market makes your advantage disappear. You never know more than the collective market. For the most part, everything you think you know about a bet has already been factored in.
casinos and sportbettingsites also ban you if you win too much, so u have to create new accounts in your friends names which can be frustrating
Because stats only shows trends over a period of time. But if you’re betting for one game, the odds of every game change. Players are human and some days, though the stats say they should win, those players don’t always bring their A game
Others have gotten it right. A bit of background, I’m in the early stages of a commission to build a sports handicapping and bet advice system. I will focus purely on casinos and other regulated sports betting.
As you noted all the statistics are available, but we have sources for deeper information.
The naive solution is to assume that the statistics lead to the odds, because they determine who wins.
What this ignores is that the casino also cares about the bets being placed. A great example of this is the Superbowl. With Taylor Swift on one side the bets will shift because “Swifties gonna Swifty”. The casino has to balance the popularity boost against the actual odds.
So let’s take a very simplified example. Flipping a fair coin. Edge up is a replay. In a perfectly rational bet, the sides would split 50-50, and the casino would offer 1.8x on a win, keeping a guaranteed return.
But what happens when one side is really popular (Swifties gonna Swifty) and suddenly there is $8 on heads for every $1 on tails? Well half the time the casino would be out A LOT of money.
So the casino adjusts the odds with that popularity in mind. The goal is to offer a higher return to the smart bets. Change the payouts to 1.2x for heads, and 2.2x for tails and smart money shows up to cover the bets.
This is the first hard thing, which side has the popularity advantage? It’s clear.in the Superbowl but usually it is not as clear.
The second reason it is so hard is people try to win big. Ask any sports bettor and they’ll gladly tell you about the day they got a 200x return by playing a parlay and beat the house. Those are not sustainable, so everyone that tries will eventually fall to average (in statistics this is reversion to the mean).
If you take a different approach and don’t fall into the gambling but instead sports betting like a statistician, you can reliably make about 2-3% a day. This sounds like nothing to brag about but over the course of each year you’ll double your money. But this requires an iron will to do things like not bet on the Superbowl because those returns are below the risk threshold.
Because the house sets up the parameters of how bets work. If a team has a high chance of winning, you’ll only get a small payout. The ratio of that payout is correlated to the frequency of which a team in that scenario will win or lose.
So let’s say all the available data suggests that a certain team will win 90% of the time. If betting was designed to be completely fair, the odds would be set that you get back 10% more than what you bet if you win. But it’s slightly skewed so that you will only get like 5-8% more than what you bet. This makes it so that if you bet exactly as the odds suggest, you’ll lose a slight margin over time. That margin is what guarantees the house makes a profit overtime, even if underdogs occasionally win.
The only real way to be successful is to have insights into the sport that aren’t reflected in the odds. Basically, you have to smarter than the experts that form the odds, or the betting public that shifts those odds over time.
This is why people with statistical and computer expertise like fantasy betting. You’re playing against other players, not the house, so all you have to do is outsmart the people in your league. In the large online leagues, people who are good as calculating statistics make computer programs that give them their picks. The programs do far more statistical analysis than a layperson would so they usually win. For this reason, the profits for the big open fantasy leagues are heavily concentrated towards a small percentage of people.
it’s pretty simple. the bookie wants equal action on both sides. a smart bookie / casino doesn’t gamble, they make a small transaction fee “vig” on every bet. that is why the odds or betting line changes. to entice bettors and equalize the total bets on each side/outcome. the line on a football game is essentially a gauge of public perception of how two teams compare…the higher the line/spread the more one team is favored, thus helping draw bettors to gamble on the underdog.
it can be fun to guess the lines before Vegas releases them.
the only way to really improve your odds is if you have information that isn’t public. like if a key player has an injury.
To summarise what others have tried to explain at length, sports/ racing betting and how to be successful at it has nothing to do with picking the bet most likely to win, say team A beats team B, but is all about math and probability.
Even simpler, payout odds of winning a bet are for the most part worse than the true odds of the bet winning.
In the long run, if you bet on the ‘favourite’ team of every sporting match in a season, you will likely be net negative in your results.
EIL5: I will flip a coin. Before I do, I’ll offer you a one dollar bet. If you pick heads and it’s heads, you’ll get two dollars. If it’s tails and you pick talks I’ll give you two dollars. You pick heads.
I now have one dollar, and potentially owe you two dollars.
I approach someone else and offer them the chance to bet too. But I’m worried, cause if they pick heads as well and the flip is heads, I’ll only have two dollars collected, but I’ll owe four dollars. I don’t want that to happen. So this new person I approach I offer them the same bet, but only if they pick tails.
Now I have collected a total of two dollars and whether it’s heads or tails, I only owe a maximum of two dollars. No matter what happens, I won’t lose any money.
Now, repeat the exercise again. Except the first offer is a dollar bet to win 1.90 instead of a dollar. Now at the end, I’ll have collected two dollars and I’ll owe only 1.90. I’ve mad ten cents! (5% profit)
Now you take this to sports. Same thing. A dollar to win a 1.90. Let’s say you have two teams. One is a really good team, one is a really bad team. That really good team is immediately the first pick from my potential bettors. When I approach the second bettor, I say you can pick the winner, but if you pick the team the first bettor picked, I’m only paying you if they win by more than one point (1.5 point favorite). Now if the second bettor has chosen the really good team, I only pay the second bettor if the score is say 12-10 with the really good team winning.
But let’s say the really good team typically wins by 5 points, but I don’t know that. I’ll have to keep finding bettors and keep upping the points by one each time, until someone chooses the other team. So what happens is when I say the good team has to win by 6, all of a sudden I have bettors choosing both the good team and the bad team (cause when the bad team loses, but only by 5 or less, they win the bet). I’ve found what the market considers the matchup to be at! And as long as I balance my bets out, I take my sliver of profit on each one, I the gambler come out ahead.
The problem for you as the gambler is that because this hypothesis of the potential matchup has been tested against so many people, it’s normally pretty accurate, to the point where effectively, it’s a coin flip. You can choose one way to bet or the other, but the wisdom of the crowds has made it a coin flip’s chance to win.
And you normally win as many of those as you lose.
because the odds are never in your favor. For example, if we bet on a coin flip you would be betting $100 to win $90. So if you flip two coins and win 1 lose 1, you win +$90 then lose -$100, for a net -$10
Aside from the bookie always getting their cut, there is the hot hand fallacy. Trends and stats are helpful for making educated guesses, but the performance of a team or athlete in Thursday’s game is not determined by how they played on the previous ten nights. Trends always fluctuate, streaks always come to an end, players have off nights. You just never really know what could happen.
It’s like flipping a coin 100 times. If you get 99% heads in a row, that doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to get heads on the last one, it is still 50/50
Successfully for who? Cus I’m sure it’s successful for the casino and or online sites…
Another thing people are missing is that if you actually do win, sports books limit you, basically not let you place more than $1 on any bet. They only take money from people who lose. So it’s not really a fair and open game