85% of my "play" money, $8500, in one month, July '05, in sports betting the "professional" way, ie. 1% per wager. That was one helluva shitload of losing, which couldn't be possible of course since I was using professional handicapping services. But, it happened anyway. Quite a bit of truth in that movie, Two For the Money.
That's my experience. It appears to me that the betting public has gotten a lot less team loyal, and a lot more mathematical in their wagering. Consqquently, the books are showing more consistently realistic lines. Therefore, sports wagering is far closer to 50/50 than it used to be, and subtract the book's cut, and there you go: slow losing, long-term.
More mathematical in their wagering? Hmmmm....i always thought the idea was the bookie wins, you lose-just out of curiosity, what the heck does a pro handicapping service do? You would have to be a mad sports freak to even follow this stuff, let alone recognise a value punt in quoted odds terms. Misread your post, one month is losing quickly, and agonisingly. How did you determine what to bet on, what sort of things were you looking at?
No, the bookie takes bets from both sides, and transfers the money to the winner, minus a cut. A pro handicapping service looks at an event, looks at the posted odds at various books, and tries to find value, that is, a book's odds that are not in line with the handicapper's estimate of the likely outcome of the event. This can happen when a bunch of Yankee fans are betting heavily, forcing the books to lower the payout on a Yankee win (and thus raise it on the other team), but handicapping analysis indicates the Yankees will likely lose. That is, over time, value, and if you bet incrementally, and get in on enough wagers, you'll make money. Yeah, that was a particularly bad month, and I was in on far too many baseball games, sometimes a dozen a day. And baseball is notoriously fickle.
Right, so their doing, supposedly, what the punter should be doing, looking for high probability AND value punts. Rare combination, which is why i wondered how one month could have sucked that bad, i dont understand the bookmaking industry too well. In any major sporting event, you hear of people putting out $100,000, to win maximum, 5-10 k, who knows whether their the hedging type. Usually, they are just the "rich" type, but it is a fascinating industry. If i might ask, what prompted you to have a wager on sportsbetting?
The lure of easy money, lol. Sites like professionalgambler.com make it look easy, if you only remain disciplined. It's not that easy. I played my handicapper's picks religiously, never chased losses, etc. You just win too little from the line on favorites now to cover the inevitable turnovers and the book's cut. The public is too savvy, most of the time--must be thousands, maybe millions out there like me, with ZERO team loyalty, strictly playing the math.
You need to try the ponies. It makes the whole deal a lot easier. I've enjoyed a ton of success there for the last five years. I even took a year and joined an online service as a handicapper. I had documentable success regularly. I put together a solid track record and had a great following too. It became hard to hit the local OTB's without drawing a crowd. I stopped giving public selections about a year ago and worked on perfecting my own software. I now have a solid automated setup that will be going through its next morphing over the next two months. It became so successful that I curtailed my stock trading and have been playing ponies exclusively with a good portion of my investment capital.
My understanding of betting the horses is that the tracks takes the biggest vigorish of all in sports betting.
Vigorish? What the heck is that? remember what happened to the HYIP thread.........I Would like to think, the average punter understands there is not a quid to be had there, and they should be trading instead, but...............