Every company has its own budget, its managers look at results, learn from mistakes and try to make good decisions in all areas of their business. All these aspects apply to sports betting too. Start by looking at all your results and work with a fixed budget. You can add money to your betting budget if necessary, but make sure that you act in a planned and responsible way at all times.
Strategic position: newcomers versus local teams
Sports betting is a place where you need to apply strategic thinking, so it’s worth knowing a few general truths, such as the fact that in all sports the home team wins more than the away team. Exact winning percentages vary from sport to sport and from season to season, but can be observed in all sports. Most people know this from watching the games, but few realise how it also affects sports betting. You need to understand what is an advantage for the home team and how it can harm your sports betting results.
Because home teams win more often than away teams, many sports bettors give too much attention to the home team when trying to determine the best bet. While you have to take into account the home team’s added chance of winning when trying to determine the best team to bet on, you can’t count on them being home winners all the time. Home team bias is challenging for the general betting public, and sports bookmakers have learned about it over the years by studying match results and looking for correlations.
Of course, you have to be careful not to distract yourself from the objective performance and venture too far in one direction or the other. Some sports bettors give too much attention to the visiting teams when they are trying to avoid bias against the home teams.
Let’s be honest – your favourite team is often not the best
Related to the previous tip is the tendency to bet on your favourite teams. It is very likely that the first bet you made on the outcome of a sporting event involved your favourite team. Many sports bettors continue to bet on their favourite team because they have been following the team for a long time and want to enjoy the winnings when their team wins. Such sentimentality is not very valid in sports betting.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with such a bet in general, but it is not the way to become a winner in sports betting. If you want to make money from sports betting, you need to be able to look at games and teams objectively. The problem with betting on the games your favourite team is playing is that it is hard to be objective. When you watch and follow a team, you want them to win. This leads many people to believe that their favourite team is better than it actually is.
Instead of trying to view your favourite teams without bias, maybe you should stop betting on their games. This does not prevent you from continuing to be a fan and follow all their games, but by doing so you will be able to approach the betting with an unbiased view and not lose your betting money just because of subjective likes.
Some sports are more predictable than others
Most sports bettors never think about the variability of the game in a betting shop, but sometimes it is possible to experience situations where the course of the game changes out of the blue. Some sports are harder to evaluate and predict outcomes than others, but if you are not aware of these possibilities, it can cost you money.
Individual sports such as tennis or cross-country skiing are the easiest to evaluate. You only need to understand the performance and trends of one athlete, so you can make a decision that works for you based on your knowledge of that athlete. Variability is less likely in individual sports than in team sports, where several players are involved, each of whom tends to behave differently. Predicting the performance of an entire team is more difficult than predicting the performance of one person in individual sports.
By learning and applying everything you have just learned on this page, your results will improve immediately. Once you’ve mastered the tips here and implemented them in your daily bets, keep learning and testing new strategies to keep improving. Remember that professional sports bettors have put a lot of work and time into this, but with dedication and determination, you too will learn to win win after win, and the luck factor will suddenly be replaced with serious knowledge of this wonderful field!
