My Sports Betting Strategy
In the beginning of this article, I have to clarify that the reason that sports betting is regarded as gambling is that people think profiting from sports betting is reaping without sowing, but I beg a differ. For those of whom looks forward a long term profitable sports bettor, they have to "reap" by analyzing sports teams, referee information, handicap statistics, and also private database building and updating.
Sports betting, as one kind of rational investments, consists of three parts of personal capacity: 50% handicapping power, 20% luck, and 30% mentality. The element that a sports bettor cannot control is luck, but if you have 40% handicapping power and 20% mentality with 0% luck, you can still be a 60% winning rate sports bettor. In my opinion, to have a strong mentality through the whole season, there are two key points: pregame handicapping, and bankroll controlling.
Since the first one is too complicated, and hard to drive, I am going to talk about the second one. Bankroll controlling contains three parts: disposable income investment ratio, daily betting amount ratio, and single wager amount ratio. Here is my bankroll controlling ratios: I invest 30% of my disposable income every month, and my daily betting amount is 20% of the sports betting account balance, and I bet four to five games per day in average. Therefore, suppose my monthly disposable income is $4000, then I invest $1200 to the sports betting account. Assume this is my first month of the season, my daily betting amount is supposed to be around $240, and my single wager amount should around $50-60. Now what if the sports betting account balance is increasing while the bettor is good enough to have a profitable season? I think raising the betting amount is necessary but has to be very slowly. The stability of unit amount is essential in sports betting. My motto is "You may double your unit amount only if you tripled your account balance".
Now let's talk about private database as I mentioned in the first paragraph. There are a lot of sports betting database on the Internet. Why we still have to build our own private database? First, public database is too shallow for pro sports bettors. Second, if a bettor has the access to a database, then what do you think about the banker? The answer is obvious. Hence, a private database is very necessary for a pro handicapper, but how? Private database styles are very diverse, but a key point need to be aware. For an example, in MLB regular season, there are 2430 games in 6 months. If your private database takes all these games, it will be a normal distributed database which means it has no value for a handicapper. Now consider this, if you break the database into several intervals, the sub-database will be more referable than the whole database. The key point of breaking the database is to be sensitive enough to sense the late redundant data, and the sense needs experience and reflections.
As the last part of the article, I want to talk about parley strategy. A lot of handicappers regard parley as some kind of Lottery, but I have another point of view. If you are a parley player, that does not mean you have to be loser, you can still make profit if you have the right strategy. To maintain long term profitable, a parley player has to know how to reverse bet. Let me give you an example:
Ex.1:
| Event Time | Event | Selection | Odds |
| Mar. 31 13:00 | A@B | A | +110 |
| Mar. 31 14:00 | C@D | C | +123 |
| Mar. 31 15:00 | E@F | F | -110 |
| Mar.31 16:00 | G@H | G | -144 |
| Mar. 31 17:00 | I@J | J | -122 |
5@1, $100 to win $2657.67
As the chart shown, if the parley is a 5 game parley. When and how to reverse bet? First we need to figure out when. The equation of calculating the reverse bet is: (game amount)/2+1, so in this case, the reverse betting starts at 5/2+1=3.5≈4, the fourth game G@H. Second is how. If you have already lost the first three games, then it is pointless to reverse bet, but if you passed or your team is leading in the game, you need reverse betting only if the fourth game is available for live betting (parley player do need to open their account in a live betting featured website). Now assume you have already passed the first three games already, and you bet $100 in this parley. Now you need to reverse bet H. Suppose this is MLB parley, the live betting return rate for MLB is usually 91.5% which means the initial odds for H will be +101. So the reverse bet at H should be $100 so that you can get your parley cost back if you lost the fourth game. Now suppose you passed the fourth game, too. Now you lost your $100 in the reverse bet, but you have a potential 2657.67 profit. Now how much you need to reverse bet the fifth game in order to maximize your profit in this parley? The equation is: (Potential profit+Parley Cost-previous reverse bet loss)/(reverse bet odds). In this case: (2657.67+100-100)/I's odds. Now let's calculate I's odds in live betting 91.5% return rate, I's odds should be -103. Hence the reverse bet for the last game in this parley will be 2657.67/1.97=1348.4 dollars. The potential profit is $1108 no matter J wins or not. Now let's keep looking at MLB parley strategy, the first example shows the very basic reverse bet strategy, but we can utilize some live betting odds fluctuation pattern to maximize our potential profit further. We know that if I does not score in Top of the first, the odds will raise. If I's live betting initial odds is -103, after scoreless top 1, the odds normally will raise to +105. The potential profit will increase from 1108 to 1161 which means 153 dollars more.
