Sports Betting Truth
Betting on sports is one of the favorite hobbies of millions and millions of people. Some gamblers place an occasional wager on their favorite team, and others place dozens of bets every week. Every one of them wants to beat the sportsbooks.
But the sad reality of sports betting is that very few gamblers win. This is the same thing that happens with most forms of gambling, but betting on sports is one of the few gambling activities where you have a realistic chance to win.
Before you get too excited about the chance to be a profitable sports bettor, you need to make sure you understand the sad realities you’re facing.
The Odds Are Stacked Against You. Betting on sports is just like most other gambling activities; it. Sports betting is when a bettor makes a wager on the outcome of a game or on the particulars of an athlete’s performances. But there is more to that explanations above, some people try to talk against betting as a gamble, but betting generally is accepted as hobby that sports.
1 – The Odds Are Stacked Against You
Betting on sports is just like most other gambling activities; it has a built in house edge. This is usually seen as the vig you pay when you place a wager. When you place a winning bet, you get the vig back, but when you lose, you give up the base bet and the vig.
When you have to bet $11 to win $10, the extra $1 is the vig, and $10 is the base wager. When you win, you get your $11 bet back and a $10 profit, but when you lose, you lose your entire $11.
This is the first way the odds are stacked against you, but it’s not the only way. Most of the other sections on this page also include ways the odds are stacked against you. This includes the fact that the people setting the lines are better at it than you and the fact that the sportsbook has a bigger bankroll than you.
The truth is that it’s possible because there are some people who can beat the sportsbooks. But there aren’t many people who can do it on a consistent basis. This is true for every gambling activity that can be beat. A few blackjack players can win in the long run, and a few poker players can win in the long run. But most gamblers lose in the long run.
If you really want to be a winning sports bettor and are willing to work hard at it and put in the time, you can do it. But there’s a reason that most sports bettors are average. It’s because it’s too hard and takes too much work to change.
2 – The People Setting the Lines Are Better Than You
The perfect situation for every sportsbook is setting a line for a game that creates the exact same amount of action on each side of the game. When this happens, the sportsbook locks in a guaranteed profit because they collect vig on all of the losing bets.
A sportsbook sets a line at 7 ½ points and takes $660,000 worth of action, including the vig, on each side of the game. This is a total handle of $1,320,000. After the game, the sportsbook pays out the $660,000 the winners bet and $600,000 of the money the losers bet to the winners. This leaves the other $60,000 as profit.
In other words, on a balanced game, the sportsbook makes roughly 4.5% on their entire handle. This is what makes running a sportsbook so profitable.
In the real world, the sportsbooks rarely have equal action on each side of a game. But the more games they offer, the closer the overall action on each side of games gets to even, as long as they set good lines.
While most sports bettors believe that the lines the sportsbooks set are predictions of the final score, the truth is that the lines are designed based on predicting how much action they can create on each side of a game.
This is one of the main reasons why a few bettors are able to win in the long run. When you can predict the outcome of a game and find lines that don’t agree with the prediction, you can make profitable wagers if you get good enough at handicapping games. This is because what the sportsbooks are trying to accomplish isn’t the same as what you’re trying to accomplish.
Getting back to the people setting the lines; they work at setting good lines on a full time basis. Most sports bettors gamble as a hobby. This makes it almost impossible to get better at setting lines and predicting outcomes than the sportsbooks.
This also should give you a big clue as to what you need to do if you truly want to beat the sportsbooks.
3 – The Sportsbooks Have a Bigger Bankroll
I used to play a card game when I was in college that was fairly simple. A bunch of us got together once a week and played for quarters, but you could win as much as $100 if you knew what you were doing. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the player with the biggest bankroll had an advantage, so I made sure I always brought more money to the game than anyone else.
The sports betting industry works much like this, and the bad news is that the sportsbooks have a bigger bankroll than you. The books also control the size of the bets you can make, so even if you have a huge bankroll, you can only use it within the limits dictated by the sportsbooks.
If you had an unlimited bankroll and could place unlimited wagers, you could double your bet after every loss, and when you won a game, which you can do 50% of the time by flipping a coin, you could lock in a profit.
On the other side, the sportsbooks make money off the vig they collect on losing wagers. The books know that on average, 50% of the bets they take lose, so they lock in a long term profit by staying in business long enough for the vig to accumulate. This is where having a big bankroll like the sportsbooks have locks in a long term profit.
The combination of the vig, the ability to set and control lines, the ability to limit betting action, and a considerable bankroll virtually guarantees the profitability of a sportsbook. As a matter of fact, a sportsbook that’s run correctly with a big enough bankroll is one of the most profitable and fail-safe businesses you can be in.
Never underestimate the power of a big bankroll.
4 – Most Winners Are Better Off Working a Regular Job
The sad truth is that most of the gamblers who can beat the sportsbooks are better off working a regular job than trying to make a living betting on sports. The big problem is that you have to find profitable betting opportunities, and you have to be able to bet enough when you find them to make a decent amount of money.
Here’s an example to show why you might be better off working a regular job.
- You learn how to win 53% of your bets against the spread.
- You bet $110 to win $100 on each game, and this makes a long term profit.
Here are the numbers for betting on 100 games.
- Your total cost to bet on 100 games is $11,000.
- You lose 47 games and get no return, and when you win you get back $210.
- You win 53 games, so your total return is $11,130.
- This is a profit of $130, or $1.30 per game you bet on.
If these numbers aren’t depressing, consider how hard it is in reality to find 100 games to bet on. You might think that there are games every day, but you can’t bet on most games with an edge, so you might only have one or two games that can be profitable every day.
Even though this isn’t a safe assumption, let’s say you can bet on 100 games a month. Are you willing to work an entire month to make $130?
In order to make more, you either have to bet more or win a higher percentage of games. You can also find opportunities to pay lower vig, but let’s continue working with the common vig for now.
If you bet $1,100 to win $1,000 on each game, your profit on 100 games is $1,300. This is better, but you still aren’t making anywhere close to good money. You’re also going to find that betting $1,100 per game is more challenging than getting $110 bets down.
In order to get to the point where it might be enough to make a decent living, you need to bet $5,500 per game and find 100 games to bet on every month and maintain a winning percentage of 53%.
Here are the numbers at $5,500 a game winning 53%:
- Your total cost to bet 100 games is $550,000.
- Your return on the 53 games you win is $556,500.
- This is a profit of $6,500.
While this isn’t a bad profit, the truth is that it’s still not a great living. And you’re putting over a half million at risk for a small return.
I’m not showing you these numbers to discourage you, but I do want you to have a realistic idea of how hard it is to make decent money betting on sports. You might believe that you can do better than winning 53% of your games, and I hope you’re right. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you can win a much higher percentage than that.
If you want to run the numbers at 54% and 55% you can, but don’t assume that you can reach these numbers until you’ve done so over thousands of wagers. And any percentage over 55% is unrealistic. It simply isn’t going to happen, so there’s no use considering it.
5 – Numbers Never Tell the Entire Story
Many sports bettors are in constant search of a magic system where they can plug in a bunch of numbers, and the system spits out winning bets. While this would be great, the sad truth is that sports are played by humans, and it’s impossible to accurately predict human behavior.
You can develop a system, usually using a spreadsheet and/or computers and equations to help you make profitable sports betting picks. But relying 100% on this type of system is dangerous. You need to learn how to adjust the output of these types of models based on the human element of sports betting.
This might seem like a common sense example, but gamblers looking for the perfect system seem to ignore this as the number one reason that you have to use the human side of sports betting if you want to win.
You use a computer model to predict the outcome of an upcoming NFL game. Computer models have to use past performance to predict future results, so they have a weakness. Your model predicts that the home team is going to win by 12 points, but on Saturday night before the game, you find out that the star running back is going to miss the game because of injury.
Do you still trust the prediction from your model? It would be a huge mistake to trust the prediction because the star running back’s past performance was used in the model.
You might think that it’s as easy as taking the star running back out of the model and replacing him with the backup, but you can’t predict how the backup is going to perform, because he usually only has a few chances every game.
Injuries aren’t the only thing that makes a pure statistical model dangerous. One of the most important things to consider when betting on baseball is the starting pitcher for each team. If the starting pitcher for one team is starting on short rest or threw a bunch of extra pitches in his last start, he might not perform as well in his next start.
You should build sports betting models to help you become more profitable. But you should always use your brain power to make adjustments if you want to have the best chance to win on a consistent basis.
6 – A Monkey Is as Good as the Average Sports Bettor
I realize that this sounds harsh, but the truth is that a monkey is just as good at picking winners as the average sports bettor. Once you get an understanding of how sports betting works, you can see that this is true.
Each game is offered with a line of some sort. Most games are bet using a spread, or an against the spread bet. This means that one team is favored and they give points to the other team.
You have to bet on one team to win, and you either give or receive points. This means that you either win or lose. Everyone else who bets on the same game picks a side, and they either win or lose. The action on each side of any individual game might not be balanced, but if you look at all of the bets on all of the games that have ever been bet on, the action is very close to balanced.
When you consider that overall the action is basically balanced on each side of games, and understand that bettors either win or lose, you can see how the average sports bettor wins 50% of the time. This also means that you can throw darts to make picks or flip a coin to make picks and end up close to winning 50% of the time in the long run.
This also means that you can use a monkey to make sports betting picks and it’s going to win close to 50% of the time.
Of course, your goal is to produce results that are better than average, and this is possible. But if you want to be a better than average sports bettor, you have to start doing things differently than average sports bettors. I cover this more in the next section, but the only way to stop getting average results is to stop doing average things.
If you aren’t willing to start doing things differently, you might as well let a monkey make your picks. Or even better, you should probably stop betting on sports.
If you could place all of your bets without paying a fee, like the vig, you could break even betting on sports. But the problem is that most opportunities to place sports bets have a vig. The vig makes it, so you lose money in the long run if you only pick winners half of the time.
If you can’t figure out how to win close to 53% of your bets against the spread, you’re going to lose money as a sports bettor.
7 – Being a Profitable Sports Bettor Is Hard
If you haven’t figured it out by reading everything else on this page, the fact is that being a profitable sports bettor is hard. It might be the hardest thing you ever try to do. It’s not that it can’t be done, because some gamblers are able to do it.
But if you factor in everything that’s working against you and all of the time and hard work that’s required to start winning, I can’t blame you if you decide that it’s just not worth it. You can stop worrying so much about handicapping games and working at being better and start betting on your favorite teams and let the chips fall where they may.
You can make random bets and have some winning days and some losing days, and pick games as well as most bettors. In the long run, you’re going to lose money, but if you keep your bets at a reasonable level, you won’t lose too much and some weeks you’re going to get lucky and end up ahead.
If you seriously want to be a winning sports bettor, you have to keep the things you learned on this page in mind. How are you going to overcome the bankroll disadvantage, find enough good games to bet on, and get enough action down on games to make it worth your while?
When you can develop good answers to these questions, you can start working towards building your skills. You’re going to have to outwork the sportsbooks if you want to win, but you can do it. Start handicapping every game on the schedule every day and track your results.
Act like you have to place a bet on every game on the schedule, and make pretend bets on paper. Try to spot patterns in both the games and your handicapping, to learn from your mistakes and hopefully identify ways you can make more profitable wagers.
You can also start looking for ways to make bets with a reduced vig. This is one of the best ways to improve your results because your cost of placing bets goes down. If you can place some bets with no vig, it’s the same as winning a higher percentage of your bets.
Winning sports bettors find every way possible to improve their income. They work on their handicapping skills, shop for the best lines, find opportunities to place bets with reduced or no vig, and are always looking for easy to get more money down on games where they should have an advantage.
Conclusion
Now you know the sad realities of betting on sports, have you decided to keep trying to win or have you decided to be happy with being an average sports bettor? It’s not for me to say which is the right answer, but at least now you know how hard winning is and what you need to do if you want to turn the tables on the sportsbooks. No matter which way you decide to go, I wish you the best of luck.