why is sports betting so hard to be successful in when stats and trends are readily available to the public?
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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.
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