The Professional Versus Amateur Sports Bettor
An introduction on how to transition from an amateur losing player to a professional winning player.
If I had to sum up what distinguishes a professional sports bettor from an amateur in a single sentence, it would be this:
A professional bettor will bet on any side of any market for the right price, and will only bet when a market offers a favorable price.
This may sound obvious, and maybe even no more descriptive than what you might expect out of a dictionary definition for “professional sports bettor.” However, when you contrast this with the ways most sports bettors approach betting, whether it’s the media they consume, the strategies they employ, or the tools they use, it becomes clear most people don’t actually approach sports betting this way. A couple of examples:
-Take the standard article of sports betting media: the staff picks/ betting analysis/recommended plays, where the author provides some combination of statistics, background, and information about a game concluding with which bet to take. Providing analysis and picking a bet is all well and good, but the majority of these articles don’t provide a crucial piece of information: the price at which they would not bet their side, i.e. the implied fair market line. Market prices change constantly, so without knowing when not to bet, the authors are not providing all the necessary information on what market circumstances will make their bet profitable. There is no “for the right price” component of these articles.
-The other most popular price-insensitive approach to betting typically involves some type of betting system, typically built around some specific game circumstances (certain weather conditions, how teams play after a bye/back-to-back/etc.) and evaluated on how these system bets perform against the spread, or ATS. These ATS systems don’t provide any information on if a bet is still expected to be profitable if the market line changes: it will treat a -7, -3, and +3 line as the exact same. This price insensitivity is why most of these systems end up not turning a profit: they are not able to articulate what the exact boundary is for when a bet is and is not expected to be profitable.
-Many of these articles/systems contain some type of reasoning for why they might like a certain team to win or why they have a preference for one side of the over/under line, usually relating to specific players (this quarterback has been playing well, this defense will struggle, etc.) If you expect a team to cover because their quarterback will play well, why are you not targeting quarterback prop markets that are more of a direct match for your beliefs, and may offer more favorable prices than the overall game line? Where is the analysis for which markets are the best ones to target for your predicted outcomes, and what their corresponding fair prices are? The best professional bettors are keenly aware of every price in every market, and which ones will provide the maximal return on their investment and target them accordingly.
-One critical way those bettors find those markets is to have an open account at as many sportsbooks that will accept their bets and place their bets at the sportsbook that offers them the best price of all the other books, commonly known as line shopping. This is far more critical to most professional bettors’ success than the models, insights, or plays they are able to devise: only executing on those insights at the best price possible across the entire sports betting market. The popularity of parlays is a leading indicator for how often most sports bettors are doing the exact opposite: placing all their bets at a single book, while getting worse expected prices than if they had bet each bet individually. These bets are long-term losers in over 99% of cases, steering users away from seeking out the best prices across all books and having them place bets with much higher vig than standalone bets, eating into their long-term ROI.
Why are most bettors using so many of these losing strategies? Part of it is education: recent sports betting legalization means there are still a lot of inexperienced bettors out there who aren’t familiar with the best ways to maximize their opportunities for profit. A big reason why we’re starting this newsletter is to help some of those new bettors understand how to improve their sports betting approach. But even for the bettors who have some idea of what they should be doing, implementing these best practices on their own can be a lot of work. Developing intuition around at what price to bet your beliefs for a single market (spread/totals/props) can take a long time, developing them for all markets takes even longer. Scanning every market across all books to find the best lines can be incredibly time consuming; even the best currently available line shopping tools aren’t all that easy to use and put a high burden on the people using them. Understanding how one of your beliefs correlates to other beliefs and other markets is very difficult without developing your own mathematical models.
Fortunately, sports betting legalization has spurred a wave of innovation for both sportsbooks and sports bettors, building on all kinds of new technology from the last decade (advanced modeling/AI techniques, cloud computing, etc.) In the next couple months, we’ll be rolling out our own tools that utilize all of these advancements, but before we do, we’ll explore what it really means to be a winning sports bettor: how to gauge expectations, developing strategies for finding profitable bets, and being uncompromising in maximizing your returns at all times. We believe that anyone who is willing to put in the work to understand how to become a winning bettor can do so in the next couple years, and we’re excited to build the tools that will allow them to do so.