Here's the latest installment of "Fezzik Fridays", where LVASports.com's handicapping guru tackles a different one of your sports-betting-related questions each week, for the duration of the football season.
This question is typically answered with what I'd call general guidelines and verbal clichés. You'll hear platitudes, such as:
Be disciplined. Specialize. Do your homework. Listen to everyone and follow no one blindly. Employ good money management.
All good advice, but I'm a math guy, and I'm here to give you the real truth. not verbal gobbledyegook.
The Real Truth: Almost every winning sports bettor makes bets that wind up being significantly better than the closing number. Being able to do this is, without question, the best skill you can have and the prime indicator of a winner. Last week, for example, I bet Florida Atlantic -6 on the opening line vs. a North Texas team that was down to its third-string quarterback and third-string center. At LVASports.com I gave out Florida Atlantic -7/-120 as a strong bet (by the time most books began accepting wagers on college totals, the line had gone up to -7 to -7.5). From there, it soared to -10, where it closed at many books. North Texas proceeded to dominate the game and won outright by 4 points.
It would be easy to look at that result and say "what a terrible play on Florida Atlantic," but that's the wrong way to assess it. The point is that prior to the game's kickoff, the sports-betting marketplace endorsed any bet on Florida Atlantic made under -8 as basically the stone cold nuts. Make enough bets like this and you simply have to win.
If you want to determine who knows their stuff, and who doesn't, the way to do it is to evaluate their picks vs. the opening lines each week. If they can't pick investments (teams) whose prices (lines) usually move in their direction, it's extremely unlikely they're winning players. The most successful handicapping service right now, Right Angle Sports, is hitting just under 60% of its totals plays for the year, and not surprisingly, they're also beating the closing numbers on these plays by 3 points.
One caveat. There are big-event games where the public can, and does, bet the wrong side all the way up to post, and your best price is the closing number. While this does happen, it doesn't happen very often and is usually an isolated game that has an easy-to-forecast line move. An example might be Ohio State, which this year is 4-0, both straight-up and against-the-spread. It stands to reason that the public will begin backing these guys each and every week until the Buckeyes fail to cover a game. But in the overwhelming number of cases, you have to look at your weekly portfolio and see that you've gotten the best of the line to consider yourself a player who can profit in this endeavor.
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