why is sports betting so hard to be successful in when stats and trends are readily available to the public?
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Because the oddsmakers set the stakes according to those stats and trends. If you bet on the favorites your return will be very low.
So to make a lot of money sports betting you either have to bet a ton of money on the favorite, or bet on underdogs, both are risky.
Specifically because stats and trends are readily available to the public.
Sports betting isn’t you against the bookie. Sports betting is you against every other bettor.
When a bookie takes in bets, they adjust their odds for future bets. This way, they can have bets balanced between all outcomes. A bookie is making money *no matter who wins*.
Here’s how this works:
1. I offer odds of 1:1 for outcome A and outcome B
2. All the early bets are on outcome A. For future bets, I’ll make outcome A less valuable and increase the value of outcome B.
3. Now future bettors think outcome B is more attractive, so they bet on it.
There’s math behind it, but the overall jist is the bookie wants any outcome to result in paying out about 90% of what was bet. That way, they get 10% no matter what.
Now that you understand how this works, you see the bookie doesn’t care who wins. You aren’t trying to beat him, you’re trying to beat every other person who bets with him, because his odds already reflect what they think.
The first issue is the bookie or casino is taking a cut from every bet, so if you win 50.1% of your bets you still lose money. Even with stats you never have all the information a player may not be listed as injured but may still have some effects from a previous injury. Humans tend to be unpredictable and teams need, in some cases 50 of them in sync. Humans have thoughts and feelings that can affect playing, play calling and officiating. Past outcomes are never a guarantee of future outcomes. Sometimes the ball just doesn’t bounce your way.
It’s built from the ground up by people who design game and tech systems for casinos to be a trap. It’s also nearly entirely focused on getting people into it as first time users who have no financial means to keep themselves out of trouble.
Because everybody involved in sports betting has access to same information. The other bettors have access, and the oddsmakers at sports books definitely have access to all the information, adjust the odds accordingly.
It’s simple enough. Sports are played on grass not on paper. All the stats in the world cannot tell you what the result of any competitive sport will be only what they have been. Trends, streaks, form are all temporary. You can’t ride them forever. And there’s no way to account for the bolt of lightning. Just think back to the beginning of the NFL season when all the smart money was on Aaron Rodgers transforming the fortunes of the Jets. Out for the season after just one play as predicted by absolutely nobody.
A lot of people are getting into the math of it all, but for me it comes down to a simple fact–if a bet had a good chance of making you money, they wouldn’t offer it. Good financial decisions don’t need advertisements
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Others have talked a lot about the match of being a bookie, which is a big part of it. But there is a second side to it, that of the gambler.
Nate Silver of 538 has a book out there called ‘the signal and the noise’ which goes into this, but parsing a lot of information is really hard. For example- for the next game of Sportsball, you can access the historical performance of the team, projected windspeed, star ballman’s favorite color and 99 other stats that could be relevant in an instance. So, which do you take into account?
Some answers are obvious- the Champions are likely going to beat the Underdogs. So making that bet doesn’t win you very much money. What you really want is to figure out when the Underdogs will have an upset. But you have to be certain enough that you don’t throw away all your money on risky bets.
Now, it can be done. A few years ago, John Oliver did a segment on sports betting which talked about the few people legitimately making a lot of money on it. But you have to be very lucky or very good to make sense of all the data consistently.
Because they set lines in sports where it looks good to the average bettor. Say a player averages 36 points per game against a certain team, his over under might be 35.5 or something like that. It’s meant to be a coin flip
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