Yes the pre-season has begun, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to have a strategy for the NFL regular season, or for your sports betting in general. Sports’ betting has similarities to both poker and market investing. One big thing they all have in common is that there are very few people who can consistantly make good wagers/investments without first having a solid betting strategy.

So what makes a good betting strategy? For me there are four main categories to a solid betting strategy.

Amount of your bankroll

This is a little of a misnomer because the amount of your bankroll can vary quite a bit. Especially since now there are quite a few online sports books that allow you to wager as little as a dollar. So you can have a relatively low bankroll and still have a viable strategy. How low? Well if you go with the minimum bet of one dollar you can start with a bankroll as small as fifty bucks. That is following the pretty standard method of betting two-percent of your bankroll on each bet made.

Having a large bankroll becomes much more important if you are no longer betting recreationally and are trying to earn a living, or you are at least treating it as a side job. I think a good starting point for your bankroll in this case should be around two thousand dollars. That way you can make one hundred dollar bets and still be using less than five-percent of your overall bankroll. Having more definitely helps.

So know that the size of your bankroll is flexible, so long as your reason for betting is as well. You can start with as little as fifty dollars and still have a good strategy for sports betting. Two thousand dollars is where you can start to think about making some side money to support yourself if you are planning on being a serious bettor. Back to top

Number of bets you plan to make each week

Let’s get this out of the way. No one makes money betting on every game each week. It’s just not a good strategy, and I will try to quickly lay out why.

Vegas says you can’t, that’s why. Along with that the public will often be putting their money heavily on one side for certain bets, and this will often move the line in a way that kills your odds. Here is an example. We’ll go to NFL week 16, 2007. Oakland was playing at Jacksonville. The two ranking systems my site uses had Jacksonville as a 20 point favorite at home. That gave them a probability of defeating Oakland about eighty-eight percent of the time. Having a 20 point spread and ninety-percent probability to win seems like an easy bet to make right? Wrong. Vegas and the general public had bet Jacksonville to odds of -1100, basically a huge favorite. So strong of a favorite that even at an eighty-eight percent win rate, a one-hundred dollar wager on Jacksonville to win would average earning only ninety-five dollars in return, a five dollar loss on the bet. See the example

So don’t try to bet every game. Most experts recommend making about 4-6 wagers per week. I don’t view it as a good idea to go with fewer than 3 bets per week. You just aren’t splitting up your bets enough, giving one or two games the opportunity to make or break your week, which is a very risky strategy. Before the season starts you should lay out a max and a min number of bets you’ll be allowing yourself to make each week. If you have had a lot of experience before, this can be a wide range, with your min being 3 games and your max being 8 games. If you are just getting your feet wet with sports betting, keep a narrower window for yourself. Remember the experts themselves usually follow their own advice and make about 4-6 wagers per week. Back to top

Types of bets you plan on making

There are quite a few different ways to bet on a sports game. So many that listing them here isn’t really necessary. Here is a general rule of thumb for the types of bets to make this season. If you see or are recommended or hear about a bet and you don’t know what type of bet that is, don’t make it. Something every sport bettor should know, but I believe few do, is that you can be as accurate as seventy-percent with your NFL picks and still lose money. Having accurate picks is just the start. Every bet made has to take into consideration the odds vegas is giving on that bet. Every one. This is why if you don’t know what type of bet your making, you shouldn’t make it even if someone tells you it wins almost ninety percent of the time (remember the example from above).

If you really want to make a certain type of bet but don’t understand it fully take some time and read up on it. There are links on this blog to help you find more information. If you have a sports betting service, they should also have more info for you. ITN’s Legend page explains some common bet types for its members and what you should know when making those types of bets. Back to top

Method for choosing your picks

Ah yes, making those NFL predictions. This is the part of sports betting I enjoy the most, and is the reason I created Inside the Numbers. I break making NFL picks into three different categories: Visually based, Odds based, and Stat based predictions.

Visually based predictions are probably both the most time consuming and toughest to master. This is where you are basing your predictions on having watched as many football games as possible from week to week. Here you are watching multiple games at once, or are recording games to be watched later. You know the X’s and O’s, and why the D is playing in nickel right now. I know a few guys who make their bets this way, and all of them either played football in college or have coached football for several years. They have had middling success. I think the most difficult part of going this route is the time it takes, and being able to keep all the information you gained while watching games in some sort of usable order in your head. I don’t recommend going down this route, but if you do I have two suggestions.

Try to keep it to watching no more than two games at a time. Otherwise you are just going to miss too much of what is going on. It would probably be wise to get a good NFL TV package, and have a DVR too so you can watch the games later, and zip through commercials and timeouts. Take notes. Get organized and write down what you are watching. For most people it’s just too difficult to keep 12-16 games worth of information fresh in their mind. I’ll be searching for links and references to post on the blog to help people out with this strategy.

Odds based predictions are a pretty common form of making predictions. In forums and chat rooms you’ll hear a lot of bettors talk about making their picks based on shifting lines, backwards odds handicapping, or something similar. I think the appealing part of odds based predictions is that you don’t have to adjust your picks for the Vegas line, since you are basing them off the Vegas line. One less step in the process. I’m not much of an expert on this strategy though, mainly because I don’t like basing predictions off of non-football stats (odds based). Football stats are ones derived directly from NFL games. Margin of victory, win percentage, time of possession, home field win percentage, yards per play are all examples of Football stats. Examples of odds based stats are record against the spread, record against the line, public fade, etc. This strategy is also limiting for the casual sports bettor who wants to still place bets on his or her favorite team. You will be relying upon public opinion and the Vegas handicappers to determine when its favorable to bet on that team you have a crush on.

I include following experts or handicappers under odds based predictions. This is becuase you rarely get to see what they are basing their picks off of, and so you are basing your picks on something other than football stats. If you have a handicapper that shows his stats or method, then it falls into one of the other categories. This includes experts like the ESPN analysts, Mike Greenfield, and Eric Hollobaugh.

I’m sure there are people out there that do very well using odds based predictions, and they are welcome to share their insights. I’ll be reading up on these strategies throughout the season, and posting links to any quality information I find.

Stat based predictions have been around a long time, and are pretty popular among casual bettors and with the large sports networks. There are two types of stats, fundamental and hybrid. Fundamental stats are the ones you see in box scores: points scored, rushing yards, turnovers, and time of possession to name a few. Hybrid stats are created by combining multiple fundamental stats together. Examples are the Sagarin Ratings, Inside the Numbers’ Real Points (RP) and Win Grade (WG), the PerformanZ ratings, and the Dunkel Index.

I don’t want to give away too many secrets that Inside the Numbers employs for free, as I am here to make a profit just like most of you are. I can say that hybrid stats often run into problems with redundancy and with home field advantage. What do I mean by redundancy? It’s a simple principle, but a hard one to follow: Don’t give a team credit (or take away credit) for the same thing twice. An example of this would be giving a team credit for having a good scoring defense, and also giving a team credit for having a good run defense. One tends to imply the other. I’ll be touching on the details of this again in future posts.

I find using Stats based predictions to be the best method for several reasons. It relates directly to football, makes it is easier to organize the data for all 32 teams, helps you keep emotion out of your betting, and it allows you to categorize NFL stats for max profit. I know this has been a long post, but I think it’s important to know what I mean by categorizing stats.

If you use Stats based predictions, you should know that some weeks in the NFL season are far better weeks to wager on than others. Here’s a little secret info: NFL week 3 is a hot week to bet. Why? Well, NFL week 1 is no good because you have no previous regular season games to use for stats. Preseason games just aren’t accurate enough to make great predictions off of. Sure when NFL week 2 rolls around you now have one game under each team’s belt, but these numbers can be inaccurate because one game doesn’t make a very good average. Then you hit week 3 and now you start to have some concrete information on a team. Excellent, bet away! I’m guessing some of you are asking yourselves, ‘Well then why doesn’t NFL week 4 keep getting better since teams will have played another game?’ Becuase thats when the bye weeks usually start and it skews the numbers and rankings!

With Stats based predictions you can use categorizing weeks and prediction types to know when to open the wallet a bit, and to also know when you should lower the amounts you are betting on each game. This is a big key in maximizing profit over the course of the NFL season. If this seems like a lot of effort to you, it is. It can be very rewarding time spent though. If that’s not your thing, there are plenty of sites that offer to help ease the proccess for you. Of course I recommend Inside the Numbers, but I have links on this blog to similar sites, and I suggest you shop around before making a decision and see which one is the best fit for you. Back to top

Putting it all together

Whew! Got all that? For those of you feeling a little lost, in my next post I’ll have a table that shows an example of putting the 4 categories together into one complete betting strategy. Until then you should be able to draw up an outline of what your strategy for the season will be. If anyone has anything to add, or solid links to pass along feel free to leave them in the comments below.

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