The 10 golden rules to make you a better sports gambler
Welcome to our guide for newcomers to the sports betting and horse racing betting arenas. With wagering on sports and racing opening up across the United States and elsewhere, many novice gamblers are turning their hand to trying to turn a profit for the first time. This article is designed to give you a fighting chance; a kind of sports betting 101, if you like.
We make no guarantees that this guide will turn you into a winning gambler immediately. That is impossible; if it were so easy to back winners at sports and racing we would not be writing these articles and sportsbook operators would not be turning over vast sums of money and making enough of a profit to make their enterprises hugely worthwhile.
What we will do is impart some hard-earned truths learnt by World Gambling List operatives over many years of betting (sometimes winning, most often treading water and sometimes losing) on sports and horse racing.
We will give you guidance on how to maximise your chances of winning; what types of bets to avoid (usually the very ones the sports betting sites want you to embrace); an overview of the betting landscape so you know where you should be placing your bets; and more.
We will also dispel some myths about how pro gamblers operate and look at how some others succeed in what can be a tough game. It’s not all 10-1 winners at Churchill Downs and picking the winner of the Super Bowl before the season begins.
We have broken our article down into 10 sections for simplicity. We may well add further to these 10 and they are not graded by importance, though we have always found No.1 (Do not chase your losses) to be the most essential, especially if you too often find yourself losing more than you can afford. It is one of the simplest rules to follow but also one that many find tests their discipline constantly.
But each section should include something you can take away and apply to your dalliance into the world of racing and sports gambling. Good luck!
Here are our 10 golden rules for betting on sports and racing.
1 Do not chase your losses.
Over the years this has become something of a golden rule for many sports betting and racing punters simply because it makes so much sense.
Let us give you an example of what we mean by chasing your losses. Let’s say you are betting on a Canadian Football League match, and you think the Montreal Alouettes are the best bet of the weekend against the Ottawa Redblacks, so you place your maximum amount of units on the Alouettes at the money line … and lose. Of course, you are annoyed. So you think you’ll get square betting on the next match that comes along, whatever it may be. Sometimes you get lucky and you recoup your earlier loss but, really, you are not betting smart. All of a sudden you go from losing on one match for which you have studied hard to losing a similar amount on a couple more matches about which you really don’t have much idea.
Patience is the cheapest thing in racing and the least used. – Bart Cummings
Even the best gamblers in the world do not win every day, but they DO ACCEPT THE LOSSES and wait patiently for the next day or next match or race meeting in which they have found a value wager. The great Australian philosopher James Bartholomew Cummings once said: “Patience is the cheapest thing in racing and the least used.” He was, of course, a legendary horse trainer, too, and he was talking about placing his horses to advantage and not rushing their campaigns, but that quote can equally apply to sports wagering. You need an extraordinary amount of patience and self-control to make money betting on sports. An acquaintance of ours, a fine judge of horseflesh, recognised the issue when he said: “My biggest problem is I HATE coming out square on any given day – [humans are] mentally wired to lose or win!!”. Be patient, there is always next week.
2 All about odds.
If you are a newcomer to sports or racing betting, one of the first things you need to get your head around is how the odds work. Not knowing exactly what the odds mean is akin to playing poker without knowing the poker hand ranking order. Depending on where you are, betting sites will display odds in one of three formats: moneyline (American); decimal; or fractional, which is the old-fashioned odds format. The good news is you don’t really need to be across all three, as most major betting sites will give you the option of changing how you can see the odds. You can read a more detailed explanation of the three odds formats, and a handy conversion table.
It’s important that you shop around among safe sportsbooks and betting sites to secure the best possible return should your bet be successful. A tiny percentage can make a big difference in the long run, especially if you are taking a scientific approach to wagering. Many of the biggest bettors in the world are more mathematician than gurus of sports and racing. Sure, they buy or glean important data about the sports they are betting on, but their real secret is turning over vast sums of money so that even a tiny percentage in their favour overall will make them enormous sums of money every year.
And that should dispel one of the great myths about winning on sports and racing betting. There is a glamourised version of how a professional gambler should operate (thanks largely to Hollywood), whereby the said gambler takes down bookies by relentlessly making correct selections all while chomping on a cigar and celebrating with champagne before jetting off to the next exotic destination. The reality is far more clinical.
Take Australian leviathan Zeljko Ranogajec, widely considered to be the world’s biggest gambler. He does not even need to win overall to make money, thanks to rebates on losing bets earned for bringing his sizeable business to certain operators and jurisdictions. He and his business partners turn over billions of dollars every year, mainly on racing, and win a tiny percentage along the way, which equates to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, all but guaranteed. Nice work if you can get it, but it just shows the power of the percentages, no matter how tiny they may be. Ranogajec and team are, of course, highly skilled mathematicians. Their early days were spent counting cards at casinos and winning Keno jackpots.
3 Bet what you can afford to lose, and have a staking plan!
Another friend who likes a wager had a sensible approach when visiting land-based casinos. Tony Z, a great and wise man, would go in with $200 and walk out once he had either turned that $200 into $500 or into zero. Sure, that’s not as exciting as turning the $200 into $10,000 but Tony Z’s method gave him a far better chance of being in front in the long term than by letting the winnings ride and upping the bets until the inevitable cold streak arrives. This is just another example of the discipline required to become a winning player. You need to set clear guidelines about what you are going to achieve in any betting session and then stick to that plan. Far too many times your humble correspondent has struck a good win, only to get carried away and rapidly hand back a good chunk of those winnings. This is what the sportsbooks expect punters to do and it is one of the key reasons most gamblers don’t come out in front in the long run. They have a good win, then start to bet a little recklessly. On the odd occasion, this reckless approach can pay off, but more often than not you will end up kicking yourself for letting the bookmaker off the hook by donating back your precious winnings. In much the same way as you should not chase your losses (see rule one), you should also protect your winnings and walk away and reassess. A staking plan will help. See our article on sports betting staking plans for some idea about how they can work.
4 Shop around for the best odds.
There is one factor about many betting companies that you should take into account: many use third parties such as European giant Sportsradar to provide markets for all sorts of sports and racing. This is why you will see such similarity in pricing in so many of the major markets offered by the big bookies. We like the idea of being able to shop around for the best odds on any given match or horse race, so that is not always ideal. Sometimes you can find smaller, local bookmakers that are operating more as bookies should be, having much more fluid odds. It’s worth investigating to discover, for example, whether a bookmaker in South Africa is offering better odds on local horse racing than one of the majors. Again we come back to that all-important maxim that tiny percentages in your favour can make all the difference. Also be aware that some big sportsbooks as a matter of course will have worse odds than their rivals. This comes down to the percentages at which they set their markets (ie, the take-out or the vigorish if you like). Some bookies will display market percentages but if you plan to be a long-term player, you need to learn how to assess that yourself so you can choose where to bet for the best odds. You will find many odds comparison sites on the web and quickly discover which operators are taking a greater percentage for themselves.
5 Cut through the mass of betting markets.
If you visit a sports betting site and click on, say, a NBA match, you will often find hundreds of markets for that single game. It’s our firm belief that 90 per cent of these markets should be ignored, as they are little more than novelty bets. You need to exercise good judgment here and ask yourself: do you really have any idea about which team will score first points in the final quarter, for example, or another such prop bet. The sportsbooks will throw so many markets at you but unless you can find an edge in some of the more obscure offerings, the main ones will always be the way to go. You should avoid the novelty markets that rely on luck, and stick with the ones you know and can make an informed opinion about. Professional gamblers are not betting into markets with huge percentages in favour of the sportsbook. They are seeking an edge with their knowledge of the main markets. Stay in your lane.
6 Keep track of your betting.
If you are betting with a staking plan in place you will have a good handle on how far in front or behind you are for a given period. But you should also record your bets so you can examine where you are winning and, more importantly, where you are not. If for example you are a consistent loser on basketball but a winner on tennis, common sense will tell you to go with your strengths. Of course these things can be streaky, but keeping track of your results can help you make some incisive self-assessment. A keen AFL punter I am acquainted with regards himself as an expert on the Australian rules game, but his results would suggest he is better off sticking to horse racing. Maybe he has fallen victim to a common problem faced by many sports bettors: you are blinded by your emotions with regards to your team and also teams for which you have a lifelong dislike. Often it makes more sense to wager on a sport where you don’t have too much of an emotional connection so you can make all your plays with eyes wide open. Alternatively, you generally know your most beloved team better than any other. So check your results around betting on games involving your team and see where you fall. Let the black and white (and hopefully not red) figures be the boss on whether you should be betting on these games or not.
7 Find useful strategy resources and put some effort into your betting.
The successful pros spend many hours each week delving deeply into the sports and racing markets to try to find value plays. They make informed decisions; you will not see a professional betting on every race at a race meeting. Instead they will have assessed the fields and odds themselves (or paid an expert assessor) to find where they should be placing their bets. It’s hard work but can be rewarding if you get it right. The resources may include the many betting sites that tip on games, but you need to cut through and find the ones which are giving selections based on sound analysis, not just making random tips to entice you to their websites. Read back over their recent articles to find out if they are on the money or not. But in the end, you must make your own decisions. If you have a lot of friends who are also betting the same games or races, they will all have an opinion on who will win. And if you go to the race track you are sure to come across plenty of people who will tell you that such and such is a lock in the third race at Churchill Downs. You need to examine the results of pundits and assess who knows what they are talking about and who is just filling up airtime with sound bites. There are endless form guides for racing, but again it can be overwhelming and the only thing worse than having not enough information is having too much!
8 What are the most trusted operators to gamble with for horse racing and sports betting?
This is a near impossible question to answer and will really depend on where you are in the world when it comes to placing bets. In countries with restrictive wagering rules, you may be forced to wager with offshore betting operators. This can be a murky area and you should read several bookie reviews from a reputable information site before signing up to join a sportsbook operating outside the laws of your country. They may be simple to join and deposit money into, but when it comes time to pay you winnings it suddenly may not seem to be so easy. That is why we always advocate joining a bookmaker or sportsbook licensed to service your jurisdiction. You can’t go far wrong with the major worldwide bookies such as bet365, William Hill, Ladbrokes, Unibet and so on. But there are hundreds of options in most regulated jurisdictions so it’s important to find the ones that cater best to your needs. For horse punters in Australia who like to wager on the popular Jockey Challenge, for example, niche player TopSport’s offering (TopSport review) is head and shoulders above that of its rivals in the space.
9 Take advantage of promotional offers
Many sports betting sites will give you lucrative offers to match your initial deposit at their site. We do not promote such offers as in some jurisdictions (Australia in particular) that is against the laws put in place ostensibly to protect vulnerable gamblers. Nonetheless, many sportsbooks offer such deals and also offer bonuses to customers such as boosted odds on certain matches or races. But when assessing these offers it’s important to remember that some of them come with conditions so onerous as to make the initial offer close to worthless. It’s not much good to you if to see any return on your money you need to turn to bonus balance over 10 times! So make sure you read the fine print attached to any offers, and find the ones that are not too restrictive for your needs. So yes, you should take note of any promotional offers but at the same time they should not necessarily be the deciding factor in choosing a reputable bookmaker to deal with. Another potential pitfall is that if you simply hop from bookmaker to bookmaker using only promotional benefits to increase your chance of winning, you will quickly be banned from many bookies. They do not take kindly to punters simply soaking up any enticements. It can work for a while but it not a long-term prospect.
10 Don’t be afraid to take a break
This is often overlooked when talking about how to win at sports gambling. But it should definitely be front of mind. On occasion you will simply run into a cold streak and sometimes it is best not to try to simply ride it out. Walk away, take a break for a few days or weeks and come back refreshed, focused and ready to go again. The matches and races will still be there waiting for you. You need to find your own pace and not simply be dictated to by the endless options for wagering online. Bet when it suits you only. It’s no use getting on a bad streak and trying to find winners while you are as jumpy as a longtail cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Patience is your friend. On a personal note, a skilful casino player once advised me to walk away from a blackjack table whenever you lose three hands in a row, regardless of the status of your pile of chips. I have always found that to be sound advice indeed. This is the sports betting equivalent to being able to recognise when you are on tilt in poker. As Kenny Rogers famously sang: “Know when to walk away, know when to run.”