Best Sports to Bet On
Picking the best sports to bet on largely depends on what you want to get out of your betting experience. If you simply want to add enjoyment to a game you are watching, or to bet on your favourite team to make their games even more exciting then you’re not going to be too concerned with what sports are better than other to bet on, but if you’re serious about betting and want to make consistent money from betting then picking the best sports is key. So how do you go about doing this and what factors should impact your decision?
Finding an Edge
To make an obvious statement, the best sports to bet on are sports where you can win. There are some sports like American Football and English Premiership soccer where the bookmakers do an incredible amount of research and have teams of statisticians dedicated to pricing up matches so that they’ll always maintain an edge. It’s extremely rare for them to make mistakes and you’ll find it very difficult to make a profit from straight bets on these games after the bookies have factored in their profit.
Although betting on straight match bets should generally be avoided, that’s not to say you should steer away from the big sports altogether. There are plenty of smaller markets associated with each game such as the over/under on the number of points or goals that will be scored. A good example of where bookmakers have consistently made a mistake is when pricing up Italy in the 6 Nations Rugby tournament for the first half handicap. Italy are probably the poorest team in the competition, but they’re capable of putting in a good performance for the first 50-60 minutes and often stay quite close to their opposition and almost always beat the first half handicap. In fact in 2015 they were 5 out of 5 in this market.
The best sports to bet on however, are the lesser known sports in betting terms. If you have a good knowledge and are passionate about a sport like boxing, cycling, darts or snooker then you have a great chance to make money. The fact is that the vast majority of the money bookies take in is for the big sports like soccer, horse racing and rugby in the UK and football, basketball and baseball in North America and so they focus their attention on getting these markets right. They simply don’t put the same level of research into the smaller sports, and if they come up against a punter who does, they’ll end up losing out. Another perk of betting on your favourite sports is that you’ll enjoy it more and be far more motivated to succeed. Who wants to trawl through research and news stories about a sport that they’re not even interested in?
Sports Betting and Bankroll Management
Any professional gambler will have a betting bankroll, and they’ll only bet a small fraction of it on an individual event to minimise the risk of going broke, because even the best sports bettors lose almost as many bets as they win. Typically if you want to avoid going broke, experts recommend you should only bet 3-5% of your bankroll on an individual event but your choice of bet has a lot to do with the bankroll you need. If you plan on betting on horse races where individual horses might be priced up at 7/1, this means you’ve a 1 in 8 chance of winning. With these odds there’s a 2% chance that you could go 30 races without a victory. As you can see this would put a serious dent in your bankroll if you weren’t lowering your stake each time you lost. If you’re betting on handicaps and think you have a 55% winning rate then you have a 2% chance of hitting a 5 game losing streak, so you can see that overall the lower odds you’re betting at, the lower your variance and swings will be.
