Why do we love sports betting? It’s simple, fun, and it gives us an opportunity to make some money!

1. How To Bet Sports Online
2. How To Make Sports Bet
3. How To Sports Bet
4. How To Do Sports Bets
5. How To Make Good Sports Bets Against

You see, we have 90+ of the best sports handicappers in the world on our site. Most of them offer a daily free pick, so you can see for yourself just what they bring to the table. They are smart guys who recommend looking for value and finding good sports to place wagers. You have to be able to tell the difference between the two if you are going to succeed in sports betting. If you are constantly researching these pointless stats, you might be great for conversation, but you’re going to be a lousy sports bettor. Additionally, make sure your.

Beginners shouldn’t rush off to start placing wagers just yet though. You see, as simple as sports betting is, it’s not exactly easy to get everything right when you’re just starting out.

If you approach sports betting in the wrong way, it’s unlikely that you’ll enjoy it at all. You certainly won’t be on the right path towards making a profit.

We’re not saying this to STOP you from betting on sports. Far from it. We just want you to be prepared, and have the best chance of making money.

This is a never-ending debate in the sports betting community, extending all the way from internet forums to the most successful sharps in sports betting history. Our best advice? Get comfortable with the different advantages and disadvantages of hedging a bet, and apply this knowledge to your own bets. The suitability of hedges vary based on. To make good money, you have to win more than 60%. Doesn't sound that great but it is hard to win that often and all the time. Betting 550/game will win you 500/game at normal odds. If you bet 10 games/week and win 6/10, you will win 800/week. Follow me on twitter - this video I go over 4 basic sports betting strategies that when implemented will make you b.

Our hope is that by reading this article you will be able to form as many good habits from the onset as possible. Below are our 20 top sports betting tips for beginners. That’s right, we said TWENTY. There’s plenty to learn whether you are a complete novice or whether you just need a little refresher.

Please note that you should follow ALL of these betting tips regardless of what your ultimate goals are. They’ll help to ensure that you have lots of fun, and they’ll give you a good foundation to work from if your aim is to win money consistently.

Here’s a quick overview of all our sports betting tips before we dive into the detail.

• Trust Us
• Set Achievable Objectives
• Learn All the Basics
• Set a Budget & Use a Staking Plan
• Be Selective
• Place Your Wagers Online
• Understand the Concept of Value
• Learn Some Simple Betting Strategies
• Always Compare Odds & Lines
• Keep Records of Your Betting
• Learn the Lingo
• Ignore Personal Bias
• Don’t Get Overconfident When Winning
• Don’t Get Disheartened When Losing
• Spend Time on Research
• Trust Your Judgement
• Avoid Betting When Impaired
• Experiment
• Join a Betting Forum
• Take Regular Breaks

Our first betting tip is extremely simple. Be confident that the advice we have to offer is truly valuable. Don’t pick and choose which pieces of advice to follow and which to ignore. There’s a good reason for everything we advise you to do, and we promise that following it WILL benefit you: in both the short term and the long term.

Please note that this doesn’t just apply to the advice on this page, but to all the advice that we offer throughout our entire guide to betting on sports. We’ve worked very hard to make sure that our guide is as comprehensive as it possibly can be, and that it’s genuinely useful. We’re experienced bettors ourselves, and successful ones, so we really do know what we’re talking about.

There are no fees for the tips and previews we provide, nor is there any “premium content” that costs money to access. All of our content is premium in our opinion, and it’s all provided free of charge. Why do we give away all this free information and advice? We simply want to help our readers become responsible and competent sports bettors.

There’s no ulterior motive here. We take great pride in our work, and from the moment we started on our sports betting guide we had one single goal in mind. We wanted to produce the best sports betting resource on the internet. Have we achieved that goal? That’s not for us to say. All we know for sure is that we’ve tried our hardest, and that we continue to update and improve our guide in any way we can.

So please place some trust in us. We’re extremely confident that following our advice will lead to a much better sports betting experience. We’re not promising that we’ll help you to win millions of dollars. We’re not even promising that we’ll turn you into a winner at all. But we do promise that our advice will help to make sports betting more enjoyable, with a BETTER chance of winning money.

It’s not too difficult to win a few wagers when betting on sports. Anyone who’s even vaguely knowledgeable about a sport is likely to make accurate predictions at least some of the time. However, there’s a big difference between winning a few wagers and winning often enough to actually make a profit. That latter IS difficult. Very difficult.

The reality of sports betting is that the majority of people lose money at it. There are several reasons for this, but they’re not important right now. What IS important is that you understand that you’re more likely to lose than win as a beginner.

Some people start betting on sports with the belief that they can rely on their sports knowledge to beat the bookmakers. This is a mistake! It’s definitely possible to make a profit from sports betting, but it takes more than a little sports knowledge. Even a truly extensive knowledge is not enough by itself. There’s a lot that’s required to be a successful sports bettor, so please don’t think that you’re going be winning from the moment you start.

There’s nothing wrong with setting the long term of goal of making money. It’s important to be realistic though, and set achievable objectives. Your early objectives should be based on learning more and trying to improve gradually. Once you’ve gained some experience, you can start to set more complex goals.

Of course, the goal may simply be to enjoy yourself. That’s certainly an achievable objective in the short term. In fact, focusing on having fun is arguably the best approach as a beginner. It’s still possible to start taking things more seriously at a later stage.

If you’re not entirely sure what your objectives are, or should be, please consider reading the article listed below.

Learn All the Basics

We stated at the very start of this article that sports betting is very simple, but that doesn’t mean you should just get started right away. Learning the basics before you start placing wagers will put you in a much better position to enjoy the experience of betting on sports. The basics alone may not be able to help you make an overall profit, but they will get you started on the right track.

Luckily for you, we’ve summarized the most important sports betting basics in a single article. This article will be particularly useful for beginners, and covers all of the following.

• Fixed odds betting explained
• Components of a sports wager
• Different types of sports wager
• Alternative forms of sports betting
• How to bet with a bookmaker
• Why bookmakers make money

One of our team wrote an excellent blog post on how sports betting works, and that’s also a really good read for beginners.

How Sports Betting Works - A Guide to Understanding Sports Betting

Wagering is almost as old as man. You can find places in the Bible where it talks about casting lots, which is a form of gambling. No one knows for sure when the first bet was made on a sporting event, but the odds are that it was made soon after sports were...

Every single tip on this page is important, but none of them are more important than this one. Regardless of how much money you have, or what your short term or long term goals are, you simply MUST set a budget. Remember, losing money is a far more likely outcome than winning money. You need to decide how much money you are prepared to put at risk, and make sure that you don’t start risking more if you lose it all.

You can set a daily budget, a weekly budget, a monthly budget or an annual budget. We have even heard of people setting aside of sum of money with no timescales attached at all. How you set up your budget is entirely up to you. Just make sure that your budget is set at an affordable amount and that it’s something you are determined to stick to.

No-one has an infinite amount of money, so everyone has to manage their finances to some extent. There are certain living costs that should always be the priority. Gambling with disposable income is fine, but gambling with money that is needed for other things is not. That’s when gambling can start to get out of control, and the consequences can be dire.

This is easily avoided by simply sticking to a budget. Sports betting is far more likely to be an enjoyable experience when it’s affordable, and there’s no need to worry about whether a wager wins or loses.

Ideally, you should also use a staking plan. A staking plan is basically just a set of rules that determine how much should be staked on each wager relative to the size of your budget. We recommend staking around 1-2%, and definitely no more than 5%. This will allow you to withstand a few losses without blowing your whole budget too quickly.

Using a staking plan has other benefits too.

• Less likely to chase losses during a bad run.
• Less likely to lose any money made from a good run.
• More likely to make rational betting decisions.

We explain these benefits in more detail in our article on bankroll management and using staking plans. We also offer lots of useful advice on how to manage your budget effectively when betting on sports.

How To Bet Sports Online

One aspect of sports betting that is rather appealing is the amount of options it presents. These days we can bet on virtually any sport, and virtually any game, event, league or competition. We also have a wide variety of different types of wager to choose from. All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for getting our money down.

However, it’s important to be selective. Placing too many wagers can be just as damaging as staking too much money, as this is also likely to lead to losing money more quickly. It’s hard to consistently make sensible selections when placing lots of wagers, so it’s much better to concentrate on trying to find genuinely good opportunities.

We recommend thinking very carefully about how many different sports to bet on, and how many different leagues or competitions to bet on. It’s not necessary to focus on just a single sport, but it’s not a good idea to bet on too many either. Try to focus on the ones you know most the about, and definitely avoid those that you don’t really understand or follow.

The number of leagues or competitions is only relevant for certain sports. When it comes to tennis, for example, betting on every single tournament would be realistic. The same players generally participate in each one, so it wouldn’t be overly difficult to keep track of. Soccer is a completely different story. There are too many tournaments and leagues to be able to keep up with every single one of them. It’s possible to know enough about the players and teams in just two or three leagues though.

It doesn’t hurt to also consider how many games or events you’re going to bet on. Let’s look at football, for example. During the regular NFL season schedule, there are usually 15 or 16 games each week. Even if football was the only sport you bet on, and the NFL the only league, it still wouldn’t be advisable to try to bet on every game each week. It would make much more sense to pick a few games that presented the best opportunities, and concentrate entirely on them. This would almost certainly lead to better betting decisions, and therefore better results.

A similar principle applies to deciding how many wagers to place on a single game or event. There are dozens of betting options for each NFL game, but this doesn’t mean you have to place dozens of wagers. Again, it’s better to try to identify the best opportunities. If the total line is hard to call, ignore it and focus on the point spread. If that’s hard to call too, take a look at the moneyline or any of the other available betting markets.

Whenever there’s a good reason for placing a wager, you should go ahead and place it. But you should never place wagers just for the sake of it.

Betting online is without a doubt the easiest and most convenient way to place sports wagers. It also offers several distinct advantages over other methods. You can read all about these in the following article.

The hardest part of betting online is deciding which sites to join, because there are so many to choose from. Although the majority of sites are reputable and safe to use, there are a few that are not. You obviously only want to use the very best sites, but how do you know which sites are the best?

This is something we can help with. We make recommendations of the best sites to use, based on our own extensive research and testing. Each one of our recommendations has proved to be completely trustworthy, and they all provide an excellent all-round service. Signing up at any one of them will help you have a great overall experience.

We have actually ranked the top sports betting sites in a number of different categories. This makes it easy for you to find a site that is right for any personal preferences or requirements you may have. You can find all our rankings here.

Here’s a couple of extra tips related to betting online.

• Sign up with multiple sites
• Take full advantage of bonuses and rewards

Signing up with multiple sites is a good idea for several reasons. One of the biggest is that it makes it easier to compare odds and lines when placing wagers, which is something we discuss later in this article. Using multiple sites also means more bonuses and rewards to take advantage of, and these can prove to be very valuable.

What are bonuses and rewards? Well, they come in various forms but they’re basically money that sites give away to their customers. Virtually all sites offer bonuses or free bets to new customers, to encourage them to sign up. And most sites have some kind of loyalty program in place, to reward their existing customers and keep them happy.

It’s well worth spending some time learning how to get the most out of these bonuses and rewards, as they can have a big impact on how much you win or lose overall. We explain more in the following articles.

Value is a term that gets used a lot in relation to sports betting, but it’s something that a lot of bettors don’t really understand. The concept is reasonably straightforward, as value basically just measures the relationship between the odds of a selection and the probability of the associated outcome happening.

When the odds are higher than they technically “should” be based on the relevant probability, a selection is said to have positive expected value.

If your goal is to make money though sports betting, then it’s absolutely vital to properly understand the concept of value. It really is that important. In theory, you should only EVER place wagers after identifying positive expected value. This is ultimately the only way to make a profit in the long run.

We strongly recommend trying to understand value even if your goal is just to have some fun. Although it’s not quite so important to identify positive value when betting recreationally, we still believe you should give at least some consideration to value before making selections. Not only will this lead to better results, but you’ll also have a more enjoyable experience.

Most beginners don’t give any thought at all to the strategy involved in sports betting. This is perfectly reasonable, as there are lots of other things to focus on as a beginner. However, we believe it’s a mistake to ignore strategy completely. Most of the basics are relatively straightforward and easy to learn, and these basics can REALLY help a beginner make good decisions. Obviously, there’s no need to learn about ALL the strategy involved, but a little knowledge can go a long way.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled a collection of simple betting strategies that work. They are all ideal for beginners to learn and we explain each one in a very easy to understand way. We also demonstrate exactly how they work and how they can be used. Here are some examples of the strategies we cover.

• Arbitrage betting
• Backing heavy favorites
• Betting off market prices
• Betting based on winning streaks

We want to make it very clear that none of these systems will lead to guaranteed success. Still, we believe they have merit and are worth learning about. If you’re able to use just one or two of them effectively, you’ll stand a much better chance of making winning selections.

This is one of the easiest tips to follow. Comparing odds and lines is very simple, and takes just a few moments whenever you’re placing a wager. Since bookmakers and betting sites don’t all offer exactly the same odds and lines, by shopping around a little for each wager, you can make sure that you get the best possible deal for every wager you place. The differences in the odds and lines are usually quite small, but they add up over time.

To demonstrate this, here’s a list of the odds available from three random betting sites on a boxing match.

• betting site A
  Chris Eubank Jr2.10
• Chris Eubank Jr2.05
• Chris Eubank Jr2.00

Let’s say we wanted to back Daniel Jacobs here, for $50. If we took the odds available at the first site, we’d stand to win $36.50. If we took the odds available at the second site, we’d stand to win $37.50. If we took the odds available at the third site, we’d stand to win $40. That’s a difference of $3.50 between the worst odds and the best. Not a huge amount by any means, but still nearly 10%. An extra 10% every time we bet will certainly add up!

You can read more about comparing odds and lines, and the benefits it offers, in the following article.

Keep Records of Your Betting

Very few beginners bother to keep records of their sports betting. This is a mistake, for two reasons. First, without any records it’s hard to keep track of how much is being spent. And, as we explained earlier, it’s very important to monitor spending and stick to a budget. Second, keeping records enables you to study those records periodically and look for ways to improve. This is vital when the long-term aim is to make a profit.

We recommend recording the following information for each wager as an absolute minimum.

• Selection
• Odds of selection
• Size of stake
• Result of wager
• Payout received (if wager won)

This information will help you keep track of overall spend (or profit), and it doesn’t exactly take long to record. So, there’s no excuse for not doing it.

Ideally you should go even further, and keep more detailed records that will allow you to analyze your own performance. We offer some advice for this in our article on record keeping and performance analysis.

The ten tips we’ve covered so far are all very important. You really need to follow each and every one of them if you want the best possible experience when betting on sports. The remaining tips we have to offer, listed below, are all a little more straightforward. And maybe a little less important. We still urge you to follow them though.

• Learn the lingo
• Ignore personal bias
• Don’t get overconfident when winning
• Don’t get disheartened when losing
• Spend time on research
• Trust your own judgement
• Avoid betting when impaired
• Experiment
• Join a betting forum
• Take regular breaks

There are lots of terms and phrases used in sports betting that you may not be familiar with as a beginner. You’ll pick most of these up as you go along, but it doesn’t hurt to try to learn them before you even get started. We can help with this, as we’ve compiled a comprehensive glossary of sports betting terms.

Most people place wagers on the sports that they enjoy watching the most, and it’s natural that they have their favorite teams and players. They obviously like to see those teams and players do well, and this can easily influence their selections if they’re not careful. It’s very common for people to bet on what they WANT to happen, without really considering whether that’s the right thing to do or not.

Now, backing your favorite team and players is not a major problem when betting for fun. But if you’re trying to make money, it’s important to avoid allowing bias to cloud your judgement. The best way to do this is simply to avoid any games and events where you have a personal interest in the result.

Although it’s hard to pick winners consistently when betting on sports, even beginners can go on a nice winning run from time to time. It’s important not to get carried away when this happens. It’s easy to become overconfident, and start thinking that you’re a betting genius. Chances are, luck just happens to be on your side right now. So please, try to keep your feet on the ground.

It’s equally important not to read too much into any losses. Losing as a beginner doesn’t mean that you’ll NEVER make any money. Not even the best sports bettors in the world win every single wager that they place, and in fact they can easily go on lengthy losing streaks where nothing works out as expected. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone. Don’t be discouraged if it happens to you.

There’s no need to spend seemingly endless hours on research, especially if only betting for fun. It’s worth investing at least some time though, even if it’s just reading a few relevant news articles, studying basic statistics or keeping up to date with current form. Simply watching sports on television can be considered research too, and that’s hardly a chore!

There are lots of “experts” in the media who love to give their opinions about how good certain teams or players are, and make predictions about how events are likely to go. There’s nothing wrong with taking on board the opinions of others, but try not to be too easily swayed by them. It’s important to put faith in your own judgement above all else.

There’s no right or wrong way to bet on sports. There are all kinds of different approaches that can be effective, and the best way to determine what works well for you is to experiment. By trying different systems and strategies, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually find an approach that yields positive results. You should also experiment with the various different types of wager, and with different forms of sports betting too.

We’ve mentioned how comprehensive our sports betting guide is, and how much useful information and advice it contains. You can definitely learn a lot by studying it, but it shouldn’t be the only resource you use. There are lots of other ways to expand your knowledge too, like joining a betting forum. Just reading discussions between other bettors can be very enlightening, and actually engaging in those discussions is even more useful.

Our final tip here is very simple, and one that we urge you to follow. Sports betting should always be fun to some extent, even if your ultimate goal is to make money. Avoid sports betting becoming more of a chore than a choice by taking regular breaks. This will help to keep it enjoyable, and coming back with fresh perspective can help with making good decisions too.

That concludes our top 20 tips, but now we’d like to leave you with one last point. If after following all of our tips, you find that you just don’t enjoy betting on sports, don’t carry on for the sake of it. Sports betting isn’t right for everyone, and there’s no shame doing something else with your money instead.

There’s also one more route to successful betting we have to offer you. Our resident betting experts provide regular predictions, picks, and tips on sports events. While we can’t guarantee that you’ll win every bet by following these tips, our experts are profitable bettors who know what they’re talking about.

Here’s a selection of their latest work, or you can go through everything in our betting picks section.

Whether you decide to follow our picks or not, we still recommend that you learn you to how to bet on sports profitably for yourself. Following all the sports betting tips on this page can help.

Researching your sports betting picks is an essential part of a winning strategy. No matter how good you think you are, you can’t just eyeball every game and pick who you think is going to win. Even the sharpest of sports bettors use statistics and research consistently to shape their picks and their winning strategy.

If you’ve never researched a pick before, it can be pretty tough to know where to start. With so many resources and so many stats at your disposal, you may find it hard to not only find a starting point but also to find a roadmap to get from starting to finishing and making your actual pick.

In the sections below, we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know to start researching your sports betting picks. We’ll talk about the correct approach to take (most people do it incorrectly), how to get started, the resources you should be looking at, the difference between good and bad statistics, and finally some awesome tips that our expert team thinks you need to know.

Researching how to research was a genius move on your part, and we’re glad we get to share this information with you. It’s going to help you out immensely in the long run and hopefully help shape you into a more profitable sports bettor.

How to Approach Each Bet You Want to Make

We’re going to go ahead and throw you for a curveball here right off the bat. It’s our advice that the best way to approach a particular bet is not to approach a particular bet. Instead, we think you should approach particular games, research and make predictions on the flow and outcome of the game, and then look for which bets you can make.

When you try and force a particular type of bet, you miss out on other opportunities, and you can end up making predictions that aren’t what you really want to be betting. For example, if you approach an NFL game and say, “I want to make a spread bet,” you may walk yourself into trouble. What if you’re better off making a moneyline bet? Or what if there are props that you’re better off making?

Instead of deciding that you want to make a spread bet on a particular NFL game, research a particular game and see if there are any bets that you like. Then, begin your research and create a prediction of how you think the game is going to go. Include as much detail as possible so that when you’re done with your research, you almost have a script of how the game is going to go.

Then, you take that script and start looking for bets that fit it. Does a spread bet look good now based on what you came up with? Maybe you found that you’d rather bet the over/under or a particular prop bet? Maybe you found some other value that you normally wouldn’t have if you only approached the game looking for which side of the spread to bet?

While this doesn’t address the main topic of this guide, we felt it was important to discuss before we went any further as it will have an impact on where we direct you to conduct your research.

Starting Your Research

How To Make Sports Bet

Now that we’ve talked about the way you should be approaching sports betting, we need to start talking about the type of research that you’re going to be doing. How do you go about approaching your research? While there is no right answer to this, we do have some things that our experts prefer that work well for them.

We like to start with a top-down approach. We start with the major stats and big-picture items and then slowly work our way down to the little details. For example, let’s say we’re looking at betting on an upcoming NFL game. To start, we’d look at the implications of the game and each team’s position in the league. Does this game mean anything in particular to either team? Are there any big-picture factors affecting the teams or players that you should know about? Playoff implications? Home field advantage up for grabs? Pressure on the coach from the back office to perform?

Once you get all of this information, you need to start looking at team statistics. This might be their record, offensive and defensive stats, special teams, recent point totals, coaching trends…pretty much anything that you deem important to look at. What you choose to look at will be completely up to you.

After you look at the team stats, it’s time to start looking at individual players and matchups. How has each individual player been performing lately? Who are the key matchups, and who do you think will come out on top? How will that affect the game outcome?

Once you’ve collected all of these stats and information, you can start building out your prediction of how the game will go. We recommend breaking down the game into small chunks and looking at each individually. For example, if you’re looking at an NFL game, you could break it down into quarters. Figure out what you think is going to happen in each quarter and how many points each side is going to score. The more detail you can go into here, the better.

When you complete this for all four quarters (or whatever segments you choose), you can put it all together for your total game prediction. You can then take this prediction and shop it around to see what bets you want to make. For example, maybe your prediction shows that both teams are going to start off extremely slowly. Let’s also say that it shows the underdog is going to end up winning the game.

If you only looked at your spread bet, you might just make a bet on the underdog to cover the spread. But now, you might be able to make a lot more money by betting on the underdog to win outright and also by betting on the under in the first half.

We like to take this top-down approach to our research on each game because it gives us structure. If you just start randomly looking at stats, you’re going to end up getting lost and missing things. If you start at the top, you can be sure that you’re not going to miss anything big. For example, imagine if you forget to look at the big-picture stuff, and you don’t realize that a team playing has nothing to play for. Maybe they’ve already been eliminated from the playoffs and are just trying to scrape by and finish the season. You’d feel silly if you fired a bet on them when they don’t even care about winning.

This also helps you to make sure you’re prioritizing your time properly. If you focus on too many small details and run out of time, you might end up making a bet that you regret. But if you run out of time but have looked at all the big details, you can still make a pretty educated bet. Although in that situation, the ideal thing to do would be to not bet at all, but we know some of you probably just want some action.

Resources to Look At

We’ve discussed how you approach your research, but now we want to talk about some of the different places that you can go for stats and information online. There are a lot of different options you can choose from depending on what works best for you.

First, you can go to major media sites like ESPN to get statistics. Typically, they’re going to have recent stats and possibly some calculations broken down for you. If you’re looking for anything historical past this season, though, you might be hard pressed to find a lot.

Your better bet online would be to find some sort of statistics website. These sites are not only going to have every single stat under the sun, but they’re also going to pull calculations and trends for you to look at. For example, they might have all of the pitching stats on a pitcher for every one of their starts. But they might also pull their stats on their last 10 starts, their last 3 starts, and how they’ve done matched up against the team they are about to play. These might prove valuable depending on how you go about picking your value plays.

Sometimes you are going to need to pay for these resources, and sometimes you can find them for free. If you do choose to use a free option (and even a paid option), make sure the information you are getting is accurate and up to date. There’s nothing like trying to make predictions based on bad statistics.

If you notice, up until this point, we haven’t mentioned looking at any picks or predictions on the game you’re researching. This is for a reason. We want to advise you to start off by making your own prediction. Do your own research first, come to your own conclusion, and then you can see what the other experts in the world are saying. If you start by researching other people’s picks, you’re going to get swayed away from trusting your own instincts.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a look at what the pro pickers have to say, taking their picks and using them, or including them in your sports betting strategy. But do your own research before you start looking at what other people have to say. Remember, you’re training to be the expert here, and if you constantly rely on other people’s picks and predictions, you’ll never get a chance to see how good you are.

How To Sports Bet

An additional resource that you should be using for research is game footage. This includes watching the games live. You can only get so much from reading stats on paper. It’s hard to see how well a team is jiving or what sort of trends might be developing that aren’t showing up on the stats sheet. Additionally, garbage time points and stats can skew traditional statistics. If you aren’t aware of these things, you may make an improper assumption that can cost you money. Watching sports is a big part of the sports betting research process.

Since we’re sending you the way of the stats, we wanted to make sure that we covered the difference between good statistics and worthless statistics. There are also a few other important things you need to know about the numbers to make sure you’re getting the most value out of them.

First, let’s talk about the difference between good and bad statistics. Let’s look at an example to make our point, and then we can break it down. Let’s say you are betting on a baseball game. You’re given two different statistics to look at. The first statistic shows that the starting pitcher has an ERA of 2.61 in his last 4 starts against the team he is playing. The second statistic says that one team hasn’t lost a game on a Friday in September in 3 years. Which of these stats is a good stat, and which is a bad stat?

Well, the first stat is what we classify as a good stat and the second is what we call a bad stat. Here’s why. The first stat is going to have a real impact on the outcome of the game. How well the starting pitcher has done historically against a particular team is important. The second stat, though, is nothing more than a cool coincidence.

You have to be able to tell the difference between the two if you are going to succeed in sports betting. If you are constantly researching these pointless stats, you might be great for conversation, but you’re going to be a lousy sports bettor.

Additionally, make sure your stats are pulled from games that are relevant. If you’re using stats on how a player played three seasons ago or in games that were completely different from the game you’re trying to bet on, you’re just going to be shooting yourself in the foot. Use relevant stats that will help you to make a better prediction on the outcome of the game you’re betting on.

How To Do Sports Bets

Research Tips to Get Better Results

Before we send you out to start hitting the books, we wanted to give you some tips to help you succeed. Below, you’ll find the top research tips from our experts. Utilize these along with the information we’ve already given you, and you’ll be well on your way to being a successful sports bettor.

Look Up the Game Implications

One of the biggest things that people will miss when researching games, especially later in the season, is game implications. If a team has nothing to play for, they’re less likely to give maximum effort. You can expect coaching decisions to reflect this as well, especially late in the game.

Conversely, if the team has a lot to play for, like home field advantage or trying to get into the playoffs, they’re going to play much harder. Coaching decisions will also reflect the need to win. You also won’t see star players pulled from the game to rest or be protected or anything like that.

It doesn’t take long to look these things up, or you may know them if you follow the league closely enough. Just make sure that you aren’t missing the big picture by getting too focused on smaller details.

Have a Starting Point Each Week

When you sit down to check out the full slate of games, it can be a little overwhelming. We recommend having a designated starting point each week. This could be a particular conference, a particular type of matchup, or some other reason that you want to look at a few particular games. This doesn’t have to be anything profound or even have any effect on who you choose to bet. It just should be something that gives you a little structure to know where to start so that you don’t get information overload paralysis.

For example, let’s say you like to bet college football. You know that, historically speaking, home underdogs can be a pretty good bet. So, you decide that you’re going to start your research by looking at all of the home underdog games for the week. Or maybe you are a fan of betting the SEC. So, you decide that you’re going to start your week off by looking at all of the SEC games and then look elsewhere.

This isn’t a profound way to help you make better picks. It’s simply giving structure to the process so that you don’t waste a ton of time at the beginning of your research sessions trying to figure out where to start.

How To Make Good Sports Bets Against

Validate Your Stats

You have to make sure that the stats you are gathering from your research are correct. This is one of the main reasons that we’re hesitant to trust any stat that we read in an online article unless we test it out ourselves. This is the same if you are using a stat site. Just because they have a big name or are a paid service does not mean they’re perfect. They could easily have input information wrong and be spitting out facts and figures that are not correct.

If your information gathered during your research is wrong, you can imagine that your research is probably going to be pretty ineffective. How do you go about validating this stuff? First, make sure you’re using reputable sources. Second, when you first start using a new source, double check their numbers against a secondary source that is independent of them. Don’t check a sister site of theirs that might be pulling from the same database. Check with someone who is not connected to them at all to see if the numbers match up.

Continue doing this from time to time to make sure the numbers are correct and that they aren’t getting sloppy. Lastly, you should always give all of the stats and numbers you use the sniff test. Does the number make sense? Don’t just blindly look at all the numbers and hope that they’re right. If it says that Tom Brady has 900 yards passing per game, you know that something is probably wrong. This is why having general knowledge of the sport you’re betting is as important as pulling the stats during your research.

Be Careful of Opinion Pieces

Make sure that you understand the difference between researching cold, hard facts and reading someone’s opinion of what they think is going to happen in the game. While it’s okay to read picks and predictions, you need to make sure you’re not trusting them as facts. These are someone else’s thoughts on what is going to happen in the game. The only true things that you can trust are the numbers. Everything else becomes an opinion piece.

Don’t Be Scared of the Work

Winning at sports betting is not easy and is not as simple as some people might think that it is. It requires long hours of pouring through stats to try and find an edge. If you aren’t willing to put in that work, you shouldn’t expect to crush sports betting. It’s possible for you to pull off some wins in the short term, but you’re not going to survive long term if you aren’t okay with putting in the necessary effort to succeed.

How much time should you spend researching? It all depends on what sport you are betting, what your existing knowledge base is, and how quickly you can get through your research. The shorter answer to that question is that you should spend as long as it takes to be a winner. If that’s a few hours a week, awesome. If it takes you days to find your value and pick winners, then that’s what you need to do if you’re serious about winning.

Take Notes of Your Numbers

When you’re pouring through stats for a lot of different games and players, you need to make sure that you’re staying organized. It can be easy to research stats for one game, move on to another game, and accidentally keep using stats that you remember from the first game. No matter how sharp you are, it’s easy to get things twisted around.

Take notes if you have to. Whatever it takes to keep yourself organized, do it, because using incorrect statistics can be detrimental to your success in finding value and picking winners.

The Wrap-Up

Well, we hope we’ve provided you with all the information you need to be able to get started researching games and making great value picks. It’s ultimately going to be up to you to decide what sort of stats you look at, where you spend your time, and how dedicated you are to the process. We can only give you the tools to get the job done. It’s up to you to take those tools and use them to build your winning sports betting strategy.

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