Five Tips from a Top Professional Handicapper
Mark Miller
www.sharkhandicapping.com

Most casual sports bettors don’t make a profit from their sports betting hobby. This includes those who are relatively sharp as well as those who could not pick a winner if their lives depended on it. That is not a horrible thing either.  If every bettor won, sports books would be going bankrupt far more often than they do, and bettors would run out of places to play their Super Bowl favorite. Football betting is by far the heaviest season where everyone likes to play their favorite team and usually look for lots of “action” that will make watching the game more exciting.   Many of these types of sports bettors are far more interested in TV games and they tend to bet more on the well-promoted games, like the Super Bowl, college bowls or NCAA Tournament.

Much of the industry jargon considers money management as important as picking winners, if not more so. And it certainly is. But throwing around buzzwords like ‘money management’ and describing esoteric concepts like ‘isolate a percentage of bankroll’ and ‘positive expectation bets’ really doesn’t help the fortunes of most recreational bettors. If you are placing bets at a sports book for entertainment only, then this article will be of little help or interest to you.  However, if you wish to be a successful sports bettor, even as an amateur, and earn a profit from your betting over an extended period of time, here are some tips that should help you in that quest.

Five Tips for Sports Handicapping

1. Don’t bet into bad numbers.  Professional handicappers recognize the value of the half point. On the average college basketball Saturday, for example, at least a half dozen games are won or lost against the spread by a point or less. He’ll either get the push when others lost, or he’ll get the win when others pushed. The pro wins by a half point far more often than he loses by the hook. Making a modest 20 bets a week (1000 a year, a number that is on the low side for most professionals), it is not unusual to gain an extra 10 or 15 wins a year and another 10 or 15 pushes just by betting into good numbers. Assuming the bettor is betting a modest 2% of his bankroll on any given play, those 20 or 30 favorable decisions translates into a 40-60% swing in his return on his sports betting investment. That’s not chump change, folks, its hard-earned profit gained one-half point at a time!

1. Make more straight bets and less parlays.  Professionals make the vast majority of their bets as straight bets, not as parlays. Professionals are satisfied with the return on investment from a 3-2 day, or a 12-8 week. Amateurs are often lured by the big paydays that winning parlays provide, conveniently forgetting that a season largely consisting of steady 2-1 type days will be even more profitable than the big hits that parlays provide. Straight bettors never curse the 4-1 days – when they pick more winners than losers – because they make a profit every time, while parlay bettors don’t. There is a reason that every sports book in Las Vegas has their parlay cards prominently displayed

1. Concentrate more on box scores and less on final scores. It’s easy to look at the final score of a game and make all kinds of false assumptions. This team got killed, that team gave ‘em all they could handle. But without reading game recaps and looking at box scores, you really have no idea of what took place, and what kind of current form the teams you are examining are in. It’s key to handicap games again, after the games are over. What happened that you expected to happen, and what was a surprise? Which things are likely to repeat themselves, and which are something of an anomaly?

1. Take advantage of value. Odds makers have a good idea of which way the money is going to flow once they hang their opening numbers. And amateur bettors are a big part of this, falling in love with ‘public’ teams, betting them over and over again. In college sports, these ‘public’ teams are usually in the Top 25, from a major conference.  In the pro sports, they are the hottest teams, teams at the top of their respective divisions or conferences. The professional bettor will recognize this public bias, notice that the lines are inflated for many of the best teams in the country, and either bet against many of the good teams or pass on their games entirely. The pros bet against Top 25 clubs far more often than they back ‘em – that’s where the value is, catching six points with an underdog that should only be getting four.

1. Be smart when betting your streaks. It’s one of the most common mistakes that amateurs make, and it’s quite possibly the most costly. They press their losses, raising the stakes to get back to even off a losing week/streak. Pro bettors know that there will be times when you lose more than you win. Rather than raising the stakes during those times when you are having a bad run, the pro lowers his stakes, conserving bankroll while waiting for things to turn around. Conversely, the pro knows that winning streaks are the time to press your bets, not the time to pull back with a conservative approach to their recent profit. It sounds so basic – don’t chase losses, ride your winning streaks.  But few amateur bettors are able to maintain an even keel during periods of higher rates than the norm of both successes and of failures.

Remember, the key to winning at sports betting is to utilize discipline to beat the odds makers and the sports books.  Whether you are betting on the Super Bowl or just football betting for entertainment, take these tips from a professional handicapper and even as a casual sports bettor, you will have fun and make a few bucks.

Breaking Down the NFL QB Rating
T.O. Whenham of Doc's Sports Predictions

The San Diego game on Sunday was over soon after it started, leaving announcer Phil Simms desperate for something to talk about. That’s always dangerous. You can only talk about how good LaDainian Tomlinson is for so long, so Simms had to find something else to drone on about endlessly. He settled on the passer rating. He doesn’t like it, as it turns out. I don’t like him much, either.

Listening to Simms talk endlessly, I realized that I didn’t know everything I could about the passer rating. I know that 158.3 is perfect, anything above 100 is really good, and the 1.3 that Rex Grossman got last week is really bad, but the specifics are a bit sketchy. Or at least they were before I embarked on some research.

The passer rating is the combination of four different categories of statistics – completion percentage, average yards per passing attempt, the ratio of touchdowns per attempt, and interceptions per attempt. In order to weight the four categories equally, each one is calculated differently so that they all have a range between 0 and 2.375. It seems obvious that none of the calculations are going to be straight forward if they are boiled down to such an odd number.

The completion percentage number is determined by dividing the completions by attempts, multiplying the result by 100, subtracting 30, and dividing the whole thing by 20. To be perfect in this category a quarterback would have to complete more than 77.5 percent of his passes.

Average yards per passing attempt is a similarly convoluted equation. You divide total passing yards by attempts, subtract three from the solution, and divide the whole mess by four. A quarterback needs to average more than 12.5 yards per attempt to get a perfect score here.

Touchdowns per attempt is the hardest category to comprehend, but the easiest to calculate. You take the number of touchdowns a quarterback throws, divide it by the number of pass attempts, and multiply the result by 20. You would be perfect if you throw a touchdown slightly more often than once every nine passes. You’d also be a very rich quarterback if you did that consistently.

To determine interceptions per attempt you start at 2.375 and work backwards. You divide interceptions by attempts, multiply it by 25 and subtract all that from 2.375. Since you’d have to go a whole season without throwing an interception to be perfect here, it’s no wonder that a 158.3 is practically impossible.

Once you have these four numbers you have to combine them into something that makes sense, or at least something that makes a bit more sense than four decimals does. To get the passer rating you add together the four numbers, divide the result by six, and multiply it by 100. Does your head hurt yet?

Simms’ biggest complaint was that the rating doesn’t give a complete picture of how a quarterback plays. Like most things Simms says, that’s a pretty ridiculous comment. He’s right, but it isn’t meant to give a complete picture. It’s a passer rating, so it is only an indicator of how well a quarterback has been passing. Where we get into trouble is when we call the passer rating a quarterback rating and assume it means more than it actually does. It would be like complaining that a defensive player’s sack total doesn’t accurately tell us how good he is at covering receivers. It doesn’t, but that’s not what it is designed for.

Because of that limitation of the passer rating, it obviously means that it is more important that a pure pocket passer, like Dan Marino, has a higher rating to be as effective as a scrambling quarterback, like Michael Vick. Because of that, comparing two quarterback’s passer ratings in isolation does nothing to tell us which one is the better player. Just the better passer. The added value of a quarterback’s rushing yards isn’t considered.

If last weekend was in any way a typical game, the passer rating isn’t much of a predictor of the outcome of games, either. There were nine games played with two established quarterbacks that have played a significant portion of the season for their teams. The higher rated passer only covered in four of the nine.

Despite that, it only makes sense that the passer rating can be a valuable tool in your handicapping, and there’s one stat that gives us the clue to how to do that. Three of the top four rated active passers covered in their games this weekend, and the fourth, Tony Romo, lost to a higher-rated QB. They didn’t cover because of their higher rating, but their higher rating is one reason why their teams were successful. Or, more directly, it’s one indicator that they play for good teams, or teams with good offenses, at least. Beyond the effectiveness of the quarterback, the passer rating is a good quick indicator of the effectiveness of a team’s passing game. It measures yards, touchdowns, interceptions and accuracy. Using the rating, combined with a small handful of other stats like yards per rush, defensive yards allowed, touchdowns and average margin of victory, can very quickly help you isolate the games that are potentially mismatches, especially if they are teams you aren’t as familiar with. None of those stats, when used alone, tells the whole story, but the passer rating effectively combines a whole bunch of data into one easy to digest, and easy to compare, figure. Surely you can see the value in that.

So, there you have it. The passer rating is a bit confusing, and calculating it by hand would be incredibly painful, but it can be another useful tool for you to use in your handicapping. And it’s not nearly as defective as Phil Simms says it is. He just doesn’t bother to understand it.