How to win at Sportsbetting
The essential guide to beating the bookies and earning income from sportsbetting.
Welcome to the Punt Stats Bible. This is a definitive list of theories, tools and research to help you get more bang for your buck when punting. Fundamentally, sports are unpredictable. There is no law of the universe that states that one team must beat another, that Leicester can't win the premier league, that Reece Walsh must score a try against the Bulldogs. However by using data, we are able to quantify the statistical probability of events occurring based on historical trends. We can then use these insights and intuition to compare our probabilities to the market odds set by bookmakers and place more informed bets with positive expected value (EV - more on this later). We hope you will find the stats here useful and feel free to reach out via email on Discord. I cannot expose my identity due to my high profile position in financial markets.
#1 - Finding winning bets
In order to find profitable bets, you need to understand expected value and the relationship between sportsbook prices and outcome probabilities. In every price is an explicit probability of what they expect the outcome to be. You can find this by dividing 1 by the price. For example, a $2.5 priced market assumes that the probability of winning is 1 / 2.5 or 40%. This number is alot more intuitive to use.
Next we can compare our expected probabilities of the event occurring. We can come up with these numbers using historical statistics (i.e. last 10 game strike rate) or more sophisticated machine-learning based projects like Punt Stats provides. Say we think a player is going to hit a prop with 60% probability based on historical stats. If the market price reflects only a 40% probability, then there is a potential positive expected value bet (+EV). Without the available data to back up your play, all you have is an opinion and no way to validate the true value of your bet. Sportsbooks don't want you to know this.
#2 - Getting the bets odds for your bets
Probably the easiest thing you can do to improve your profitability is simply to just put your bets on at the best prices available. You will instantly lose less or win more by doing this. This implies that you need accounts open at multiple sportsbooks. To avoid manually looking through prices at each of these different venues, Punt Stats provides consolidated stats on the best odds in the market with price comparison on every selection making it easy to maximise your profitability.
#3 - The secret to long-term success: Account Management
Interestingly finding +EV bets is not the key to long-term profitability. It is account management. You can have the best system, strategy or betting angle but if you can't bet then it is worthless. If you open an account quickly and only focus betting only positive EV promotions that are offered, you will make some money but very quickly be banned and limited on your account. Professional syndicates pay lots of money for a user's betting accounts as they know how to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.
In order to keep your accounts active, you need to understand how to make your account look like a recreational account (betting overs, multis) and you need to understand account variance. Account variance is the peaks and troughs of your account value and is your friend when trying to get the most value out of your account in the long run. If you have straight-line returns, bookmakers will limit you very quickly.
Lex
Data Scientist
@puntstats
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