Maximizing your sports betting profitability
The only forms of betting which, when done correctly, will yield long term profitability are sports betting, poker and blackjack backed up by card counting. That is the reason you will not find any professional roulette or craps players. Most casino games are dependent entirely on the laws of chance and although luck certainly plays a part in sports betting and other skill based games it is not, or at least it should not be assuming the games are played correctly, a dominant factor.
There are two ways to make a long terms profit at sports betting, and they both require work and investment of time as well as money. The first depends on building up your understanding, knowledge and predictive powers in the sport of your choice, and the other uses mathematics to guarantee a (usually) modest profit. The mathematical approach is known as arbitrage betting or sports arbitrage.
Arbitrage betting is a spin off from trading on the financial and stack markets. It is a way of leveraging differences (often small differences) in buying and selling prices on different markets. Assume that one market is offering to sell a commodity at x dollars a share and another is offering to buy the commodity at x + y dollars a share. If you can arrange to simultaneously buy the commodity from the first market and sell it to the second, you can guarantee a profit of y dollars for every share that you trade. Although y might be a very small amount of money, trade enough shares and you can make a handsome profit.
Sports arbitrage betting works the same way. If bookmaker 1 and bookmaker 2 are offering different odds on the outcome of various horse races, then it is sometimes possible to find arbitrage bets that trade off these different odds in such a way that whatever is thou outcome of the races you can guarantee a profit.
Finding such ‘arbs’ as they are known can be quite difficult and often they can be very complicated and involve a large number of different bookmakers and different events, but once they have been located they can turn a tidy profit.
There are downsides to arbitrage betting. Generally you need to stake high sums of money to generate a relatively small return, and they can go wrong, for instance one of the bookmakers in your arbitrage chain might refuse to take your bet, or a key event or entry might get cancelled, so if you are considering arbitrage betting you will need to get into it with your eyes wide open.
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Free Horse Racing Tips and Strategies | joe June 21, 2012