Now that the College Football season is done, with the NFL soon to follow, I can fall into a nice little routine with my sports gambling; let’s call it routine investments. It starts the night before…
I will review the next day matchups for the three leagues I’m interested in: College Basketball, the NBA, and the NHL. One of the biggest things I look at is the history between the two teams, specifically earlier matchups between the two teams in the same season; sometimes I will look at the previous year; sometimes I’ll check the last couple years. One thing that will stick out to me is if the last matchup between the two teams was a blowout; I imagine that will stick out to the team that got blown out too, thus, I look that way. I look at the teams recent performance, specifically the last 5-10 games. Similarly, I look for blowouts there too; did this team get blown out in their last game? I look for streaks. Is this team on a prolonged losing streak? I look at home vs road splits, both in recent performances and for the whole season overall. Ideally, I’d like to log in all of these (and more) into a spreadsheet and come up with plays based on this information, but I don’t have time for all that; I do this in my head, back of the napkin type stuff.
In College Basketball, one of my favorite angles to play, is an unranked team playing at home favored against a ranked team playing on the road; I know I’m not alone looking at this angle. Again, I’d love to track all this, to help support the system I’m running in my head, but in general, I feel like it fares pretty well. I wouldn’t say I play this angle blindly, but pretty damn close. In the NBA & NHL, I look at “good” teams… teams that have had a recent history over the past number of years of being respectable vs “bad” teams that should be minimally supported; this helps some of my decision making if/when the other items line up. It’s much harder in the NBA than the NHL. Funny enough, I seem to have my most success lately in the NHL, the league I watch the least. This supports the notion that our eyes deceive us when watching a game, which lends into the difficulty of live betting.
Sometimes there may be no games that meet this pre-defined criteria; sometimes there may be a lot. I try not to force things that aren’t there; this is one of the hardest lessons. If I document my process, I think I would stay on track a lot better; one day… Looking at Saturday’s slate; I found 13 games that I liked across the 3 leagues. Is that too many games to play? Before I tried to limit myself, on the number of games I play, but maybe that’s not the best strategy. If I bet 13 games every day, that wouldn’t be good, but on a high volume day like Saturday, with many games that fit my conditions for an investment… then no, it’s not too many games; again, there are those days where it’s 1-2 games. But for this Saturday, we’ll go with the lucky 13… Good Luck to us.
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