How to beat the sportsbook.

Winning from a bookmaker – myth or reality?

Most beginners who have just made their first bet traditionally believe that this is impossible, because according to the stats 90 percent of players do lose. Unsophisticated logic tells them: why would bookmakers be engaged in this business if they could easily lose and get into a serious financial trouble?
But, in fact, things are not as bad as it seems. Lack of success in most of the players can be easily explained by the basic ignorance. Having learned a thing or two from the internet (mostly, outdated or incompetent information) and following the advice of “experienced” players on various forums beginners rush headlong to put their newly obtained but rarely accurate knowledge to practice. But what’s the key to success in any business? Sufficient awareness and proper comprehensive approach. And, of course – the real knowledge of the business you are dealing with. You can count on luck, only sitting in front of a slot machine, and even then, it is very doubtful.
Superficial knowledge of betting is the recipe for disaster. So if you decide to make money in this field, first explore all possible information about its rules, tricks and secrets. And don’t pin faith on a variety of sources (after all, the data received from them can be highly controversial), but compare and analyze the facts and form your own conclusions based on them.
As a rule, the unlucky players obey an impulse – either they’ve read or heard something to influence their decision. Of course you can act the same way – but then you will be the one to blame for joining the army of losers. Betting should be primarily based on knowledge, then you need to activate your intuition, resourcefulness and discipline because you can’t create stability out of occasional impulses.
In practice, if you follow these axioms, you can easily win over the bookmaker, but remember to start with sports betting basics.

Foundations of Success

In professional sports betting stable and guaranteed income is based on three fundamental principles: operational management of your assets, competent analysis of all aspects and accurate tracking of each transaction.
Money management or operations management of gaming facilities is an indispensable condition of constant winning. If you do not take this into account, your betting is doomed to fail, and sports bets will bring nothing but loss. Competent money management is necessary for a truly skilled player, because it allows not only to plan, but also to allocate financial flows. If there are no operational funds management, sports betting is more like a chaotic attempt for unsuccessful investment without any further return. Insufficient attention to this fundamental aspect is usually the main mistake betting losers and amateurs make. After all, the professional budget management is the cornerstone of a stable, profitable game.

The next essential aspect is the analysis and the ability to make appropriate conclusions from the information received. They fully determine the success of your bets.

The combination of these two factors and the preservation of analytical information and data on the outcome of your sports betting is basically what the accounting is all about.
It’s not that difficult to follow this scheme as its every aspect is obligatory and interconnected with the rest. Ignoring even one of them makes it impossible for the system to function as a whole, that is, ignoring one component you completely deprive yourself of chances to profit in the long term. Many players have noticed a rule: tomorrow’s loss will be a half greater than today’s win. This pattern is not the Murphy’s law, but the result of neglecting the foundations of professional betting, without which steady progress in income is impossible.

Definition of Initial Capital

Called the bank in a professional language the initial capital is a source of funding the sports bets. Determining the amount you plan to bet at the bookmaker, keep in mind that, firstly, the game is a risk of loss and you are not insured and therefore lending money for making a bet is unwise to say the least. Secondly, always remember that the funds are restricted, and “borrowing” money from yourself (that is, from your own game bank) to spend on unplanned things is not worth it. The initial capital is an emergency supply, used only in the game. It can even be called a long-term investment on which the interest will be accrued (the amount of bets won).
Beginners in betting often don’t attach too much importance to the game bank. Those who play seriously realize all of its advantages. The first and most indisputable advantage is that the player can accurately track how much money he gives and how much he gets. The second advantage is the possibility of self-control necessary not to lose all your money at once. And finally, the third advantage is a chance to recoup in case of loss, without additional finance.
After creating the bank don’t start with attractive bets, opt for the operational management, in other words, develop your own betting system. The ultimate goal of each financing strategy, particularly in this field, is to increase the probability of successful betting and, accordingly, reduce the likelihood of loss or even bankruptcy. The most common schemes used to plan the betting are Flat, Bank Percentage, Kelly Criteria, Fixed Profit, Martingale, Value Betting. There are also many other modifications of the financial strategies mentioned above.

How to Choose a Strategy

There are a few guidelines that will help to minimize risk factors choosing a betting strategy. First of all, the financial strategy should be non-aggressive, in other words, in case you lose, the amount of bet should not grow exponentially. Flat rate or fixed percentage schemes are the optimal strategies. Second of all, it’s very convenient to use strategies that imply analysis – in this case, the calculation of the bet amount allows to predict the probability of your winning (“Kelly”). Another principle is to avoid using Martingale strategies and other tactics based on random coincidence and intended for gambling beginners and those players who are lazy to carry out simple analysis.
It’s also acceptable to make bets at the bookmaker’s office using multiple strategies, but each of them requires its own game bank.

Sports Analytics

Competent analytics of sports events is mandatory for professional sports betting. After all, it determines the success or failure of your bets, and eventually the overall profitability of the game. Really professional analysis is possible only if the player does not just have the information, but is totally competent in the kind of sport chosen for betting. Otherwise there can be no successful analytics. Experienced football fans who know the intricacies and specifics of the sport, can make pretty successful bets on football, if they comply with all the fundamental principles of betting. However they should stay away from betting on basketball if they are not specialists in this field. Professional sports players make only bets in “their” sport. It is an axiom! After all, possessing all the knowledge about one of the betting fields makes it possible to consistently win. Trying to “cover” several kinds of sports, without any knowledge of their specificity is a bad idea.
There’s no point making predictions, trying to get the quantity compromising the quality. It’s better to have fewer predictions with the real implications, rather than numerous predictions based on your intuition. Three-four predictions per hour, confirmed by the analytics and able to bring the gain are much preferable than thirty or forty predictions you have made during this time based only on intuitive perception of events. Even if these predictions come true once due to pure luck, next time they will most likely bring only loss, and attempt to win using such method will only make things worse.
Any analytics, including the sports predictions, is creative business. Therefore you shouldn’t rush and limit the time spent on making them. The acquisition of expertise will accelerate the process itself, bringing no harm to the quality of predictions. As for is the artificial time restrictions – they can result only in futility and, as a consequence, financial loss. That’s why it’s always a bad idea to make predictions in a hurry.

Successful Prediction

Successful prediction is the result of the presence of three indispensable components in a specific sequence.

1. Statistics. Betting statistics is a starting point for sports predictions for both players and bookmakers. Moreover, the latter offer odds for some sports events, based solely on statistics. Therefore, the more accurate and reliable the information, the more likely the success of the prediction. Practice shows that the volume should not be too large, information about 3-4 recent games should be enough. In team sports, not only the information about previous scores matters, players should also take into account the line-up for both past and upcoming games. Statistical analysis allows to more accurately determine the balance of forces, and, consequently, affects the entire sports prediction.
2. Analytics. Proper analysis of basic statistical data determines the probability of success of the sports predictions. The analysis should take into account all factors able to influence the course and the outcome of the game. And above all, the psychological ones, especially the attitude and the atmosphere within the team, how the teams are confident in their abilities and their victory, where the game takes place etc. Also do not forget about the factors that affect the physical condition of players prior to the sporting event – balance and health conditions, as well as injuries suffered shortly before the competition. Indirect factors affecting the outcome of the game are called force majeure. And although they are difficult to predict, the general trend is apparent. For example, in the midst of a dry summer no one will worry about the heavy rainfall to impede the movement of players on the field; however the team members might feel bad if they are not used to the hot climate and the burning sun.

3. Intuition. This is something neither successful player nor the professional sports better can do without. Following your intuition, learning to understand it and making the right conclusions is a pure art. Nevertheless, it’s worth mastering if you aspire to succeed in the bookmaker business. There’s no need to blindly follow the prompts of your inner voice, just take them into account. The more experience you have, the more “productive” your intuition will be, because the accumulated knowledge is not simply absorbed by the human brain, it also writes into the subconscious to pop up in the right moment. You should listen to yourself throughout the whole process of the game, both while making predictions, and selecting the desired game event from the line. Experienced players and professional betters perfectly know how to use their own subconscious. Even when the sporting event seems transparent, and the prediction – extremely simple and clear, do not neglect the opinion of your own inner voice. If it tells you not to bet, then there must be a catch somewhere, and most likely, you will lose. So listen to yourself, because intuition can be really helpful!

Bet Accounting

Betting at a bookmaker’s office should be considered as an investment of money into sport. Therefore the money you give and receive should be recorded. Such process is called game statistics or bet accounting. It allows you not only to have objective information about your financial situation, but also to analyze your mistakes, which led to the loss in order to avoid them in future. Most of the players almost never do this, repeating the same mistakes and not understanding their causes. After analyzing your failure, sorting out what, when and how led to this failure it’s easy to avoid such mistakes in the future and start winning instead of losing, turning into a professional better in the long run. The main task of bet accounting is to spare you from having to try to remember your mistakes in order to analytically define their regularity.

What is the preponderance over the bookmaker? In a nutshell – it is the “price” or cost of your game, the amount of gain or loss on each hundred of monetary units of a bet. The number of bets you won does not reflect the real picture of your winning or losing to the bookmaker, while the preponderance shows it with an up to one tenth of a percent accuracy.

Let’s consider the following example. One player has 80 percent of winning bets, while the other – only 45 percent. It seems simple and clear – the first one has the profit. But in fact, he bet at 1.2 coefficient. The second bets at a 2.3 coefficient. If we calculate the preponderance over the first player (80% * 1.2-1 = 0.96-1 =- 0.04), we get -4%, the second player gets 3.5%. This means that the first player loses four monetary units out of each hundred to the bookmaker, and the second, by contrast, wins 3.5% at a much lower percentage of winning bets.

In the same way the preponderance can be calculated by each player, determining the average percentage of their success by using the bet accounting. First, add up the positive and negative numbers in the table (the “Balance” field). Then summarize the numbers in the table’s “Coefficient” field, divide the resulting sum by the total number of bets. The final result will be an average coefficient of one bet. The final procedure is to insert numbers into the general formula: X * K-1 =%, where X is the percentage of winning bets and K is the average bet coefficient. The latter figure obtained after mathematical calculations, will be an objective reflection of the success of your game.

An experienced and knowledgeable sports player always regularly checks his preponderance to be able to assess the real situation and adjust the tactics, if necessary. If you “focus on the journey, not the destination” and don’t seek profit, but rather the good statistics of the winning predictions, the calculation of margin is not necessary – it can only frustrate you, like the first player from the above example.

Achieving the Goal

If your goal is to make a profit by playing at the bookmaker’s, then all the tips highlighted down below will help you to achieve it. But the most important thing you should do yourself is to firmly follow that path. You’ll need a lot of effort and diligence to acquire the necessary experience and skills, and only the self-discipline can help you get the desired result. Playing with a bookmaker is a business. And like any other business, it requires order, organization and systematic approach. You won’t see much progress without patience. Many players do not reach their goals because they start to think that the effort is not worth the profit. However, revenues start to grow in proportion to the skill and experience; of course they won’t come straight away. It’s much easier to periodically look for “appropriate” sports events, make simple predictions and sometimes win bets. Only such methods will never result in a stable income.
To make betting a constant source of income you’ll need to start with discipline. Well-trained will won’t allow you to relax and will help to maintain a systematic approach to business even when you’re not focused, tired and in theory, could afford to relax, distract and miss one or several important aspects, relying on chance. Too many players “fall out of the race” abating some of the mandatory rules that we were just talking about. This results in reduction of winning bets, losses, and the thoughts that the system is “not working”. No intuition is able to do what discipline and organization does – create and maintain a successful profit earning strategy.
Oftentimes, betting becomes boring in the long run. Even when you are winning the brain gets tired and requires rest or the change of activity. Such condition is temporary and is called the player’s crisis. In order not to reach that limit of mental exhaustion, the game should necessarily be alternated with rest. Discipline does not mean self-torturing. Set small, achievable goals and allow yourself to relax for a while after you win. For example, you decided to increase the bank by 20 percent. And if after achieving that figure you still have the strength and desire to play, nevertheless take a short break. Give yourself a break from the constant stress, do something else or just do nothing. The time spent on vacation will return a hundredfold – with a surge of energy, a new desire to play and “refreshed” brain and intuition. And after you restore your powers, you’ll be able to fully dedicate yourself to the game with tons of energy.

Control Your Bets

Laziness and lack of discipline are the true reasons why players can not achieve success.
According to the Internet surveys, only one third of betters carry out bet accounting and control.
If you bet just to entertain yourself, certainly you don’t need any accounting, but if you’re an economical type of player – you can always know not only the overall financial performance, but also analyze your bets as to their types (outcome, total, live events, etc.) and specific championships, teams, players. As a result, you’ll understand a lot and you will see, for example, which options go better and which ones go worse, you will define the aspects you need to pay more attention to, find and correct your mistakes, perhaps even abandon one or another approach? What to do? First of all, take time to record the data after making bets and checking the results. It’s up to you, where you record them.
Control over your actions always makes you realize how competent you are in a specific sport or a specific team and whether you’re on the right path. It will help you to learn your strengths and weaknesses much faster. Only self-control, accounting and discipline will make you a successful player. There’s no other way!

Player VS Bookmaker