Since we have no sports to handicap or bet on, it seems like a good time to look into a different aspect of sports gambling. Being able to manage your bankroll account is just as if not more important than the actual games that you bet on.
These are hard facts and lessons learned, not only from my perspective but also from a lot of people reading this article. Emotion plays a big part in decision making and Vegas and book makers know this all to well. That is why I always talk about the perceptions and why the lines are made the way they are. They are made for a reason it isn’t just a bunch of numbers jumbled together, they are numbers set on averages, percentages, win loss records, and the players playing in the match up.
With this being said, it is my job and others like me to be able to decipher the line movements and the money percentages and why they move the way they do in order to beat their books and Vegas. The average bettor will bet on their favorite teams or jump on a game someone says is a “lock” or “guaranteed winner” and I can tell you from years of doing this every day…such a thing doesn’t exist, more so in pro sports where any given team can win on any given day. We can go through and bang these numbers down, but it is irrelevant for an article like this.
Circling back to emotion is where we need to focus on mostly. The highs of winning are just as powerful as the lows as losing, it is the same feeling just the opposite. You can win five games in a row and be riding that high with the” I can’t be beat” feeling and then turn around on the last game of the night and blow up your whole bankroll by a missed field goal or missed free throw. That is why me personally as a sports handicapper like to pay attention to the first game of the day and the last one, or feature games that are hyped by the networks. I also like to look to see which games have the most betting tickets on them, because more likely than not these are the games that will be the sharpest or games that fall right within the Vegas set lines. I have said it before and I will say it again here that those casinos we not built off winners and they understand the public perceptions and why people bet the way they do. This is where terms like “going on tilt” or “bad beats” originated from. There is a science behind it. I don’t run 55-60% on all sports because I play a guessing game, I do it because I understand that there is a philosophy behind it and in order to understand it I have to do it everyday in order to master a craft and to be able to win long term.
A lot of people don’t understand what units are, so I will explain. Units are set amounts that you choose to invest on a bankroll. For example: If you have $1000 in a bank roll and you choose to play every game at $100 you have 10 plays plus or minus the juice on a said wager. Juice is the vig or the interest on a game, so if you are playing a game that is -110 then the -10 is the juice. That is the 10% that a book makes on taking your wager, these numbers vary from game to game and fluctuate on how much money and betting tickets are wagered on one side or the other. This will reflect in your bankroll determining how many plays you will have off your base $1000.
The strategy is this…regardless of how good the bet looks, you set your units at your desired amount and do not deviate from that amount. This can be one in one of two ways, you set your “bet” amount as the unit or you set your ‘to win” amount as the unit. I recommend the latter cause it will keep your bank roll more even in the long run (depending on how much juice that you are playing). A lot of bettors look at sports betting as a get rich quick type scheme but in actuality the more games that you bet in day the more at risk you are at losing back and this rolls back to what I said earlier, this is where the emotion comes into play. It really doesn’t matter what game you are playing at a casino, be it poker, blackjack, or the slots. there is always an emotional element attached to it, this is because money creates that emotion and you have to figure out what decisions to make, at the end of the day you make the final choice and that choice will feed your emotion for the good or possibly even for the bad.
The whole goal to winning in the long run is running a positive ROI or return on investment. I have heard my whole life that no one can beat Vegas in the long run, that is why I work so hard and do the things that I do to be able to break the algorithms and help people feed their emotions in a positive way and help them win and make money. My goal is to try and legitimize what we do as sports handicappers and show that there is a skill for this and it’s not just a guessing game. There is a real skill behind this and I want to help people understand what gambling analytics really is.
*Jack Robinson is the Senior Content Writer at PicksCity.com and Contributing Writer for Inside The Thunder at SI.com who carries a tracked record on all sports and all plays from April of 2018 at 972-788-55 a 55.2% winning percentage via sportsaction.com