Handicap one sport at a time

King Yao is the author of Weighing the Odds in Hold‘em Poker, and Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting. He uses his experience from making millions in financial derivative markets and translates it into gambling. Since he left his trading position in 2000, he has been playing poker and betting on sports. He travels to Las Vegas frequently, especially during football season.

One Sport at a Time

If you are inexperienced as a handicapper, concentrate on one sport at a time. Handicapping any sport successfully is difficult and time consuming. Trying to handicap two sports at the same time means you have to divide your focus and energy between the sports. That could lead to less than optimal performance in either or both sports. Even those handicappers who do beat widely available lines do so by only a small margin. For example, a 2% decrease in expected performance can turn a winning handicapper who expects to beat widely available lines at a 54% clip into a break-even handicapper at 52%. It is better to beat one sport by a small margin than to be a break-even handicapper in multiple sports.

Here are some advantages that handicappers have if they focus on just one sport.

News

It is vital to follow the news about injuries, players and coaches. There is a lot of news nowadays with all the media coverage and you can easily fill your time keeping up to date with the news on one sport. Following two sports means less attention paid to any one sport, and that could mean missing a small but important bit of news.

Relative-value plays

Handicapping should not be about individual games only. There are other types of bets put up by sportsbooks. A lot of the information needed to evaluate individual games can be used for other types of bets. You should be able to use your skills in handicapping individual games to find value in some futures, props and other relative-value plays as well.

Market moves and tendencies

Betting markets and line moves sometimes have tendencies that you may be able to anticipate. Focusing on one sport at a time allows you maximum time to watch line movements and try to keep track of market activity. You ought to turn your opinions into wagers at some point, so you need to keep track of how the lines move. For example, if the market on many games is known to move at a certain time each week due to the released plays by another handicapper, then that is crucial information for everyone. If you feel you are probably going to have the same opinions as the other handicapper, and his released plays move the lines drastically, then you need to make your bets before he releases.

Choose a Sport You Like

Choose a sport you enjoy. The enjoyment level may come from playing the game, watching the games on TV or in person, thinking about the game, reading about the game or other reasons. If you are not interested in a sport you are handicapping, you are more apt to miss pertinent information. Handicapping will feel more like a job. The more you enjoy your handicapping, the more successful you are at it.

Being interested in the sport is important because you will be focused on following all the news and nuances of the sport. Throughout any season (and the off-season as well), players and teams will go through changes that you need to be aware of in order to adjust your numbers correctly. These include: injuries, player improvement or decline, position changes, coaching adjustments, the market’s changing perception on a certain team or player and many other things. If you are not interested in following the sport, you are more likely to miss important changes to a team’s strength and quality. But if you are interested in following the sport, you will be eager to gobble up any information you can get.

Most winning sports bettors can be successful in other fields. Even if they can make more money doing something else, many winning sports bettors choose to bet sports because they get more enjoyment out of sports betting. In other words, for many successful sports bettors, the EV of a career in sports betting is less than the EV of a career in the corporate world; but the expected utility (EU) is higher for them in sports betting because of the quality of life. EU is an individual preference. Different people enjoy different things. Some people do not enjoy sports or gambling, others love it. This is why I think it is important for handicappers to choose sports that they enjoy. It is possible for a handicapper to think that he has more edge against the sportsbooks in sports that he may be less interested in, but if he does not enjoy those sports, then there is no real difference between handicapping those sports and analyzing stocks for a Wall Street firm.

This is part of an occasional series of articles.

Excerpted with permission from the e-book version of Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting by King Yao, edited for this format.