Okay, so those books came that I ordered at Amazon last week.
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Sharp Sports Betting; Stanford Wong (recommended by lumpy)
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Weighing The Odds In Sports Betting; King Yao
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How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Point Spread; J.R. Miller
As I searched around various gambling forums, those three books were consistently the most mentioned as being worthwhile. I've been betting sports for over 25 years with varying degrees of success. Easily more failure than success, however. I didn't need a book to tell me how to gamble. I needed a book to tell me how
not to gamble. I had to address my biggest weakness (by FAR).... money management.
Wong's book is ####### amazing. I am not prepared to give a summary on it just yet, as there is a ton of data yet to digest.
The book by Miller contains almost no betting strategies, other than stuff we've all heard. Rather, the entire book is one big money management seminar. The recurring theme - one he stresses time and again - is that you should never, EVER EVER vary the size of your bet. ALWAYS 2% of your bankroll. Period.
If your bankroll is $3,000, each bet should be $66 to win $60.
If your bankroll is $11,000, each bet should be $220 to win $200.
Only when your bankroll reaches the next-highest level on the chart he displays do you increase your standard wager size. For example, when that $11,000 stake becomes $15,000, each play is now $330 to win $300.
Miller says that most people go broke not by picking losers, but rather by having wild swings in their betting patterns. His says gamblers assume they will hit 5.3 out of every 10 bets. Or 53 out of every 100 bets (for the targeted 53% win rate). But that sample size is too small. Miller says by keeping your wagers uniform, you'll survive bad streaks and stay alive long enough to hit
530 out of 1000 bets. Slow and steady. The problem, again, is that he offers no solid handicapping tips. It's as if we will ALL magically hit 53% just by staying in action long enough to increase the amount of bets placed. Still, some eye-opening things are in the book.
You mean I'm NOT supposed to bet $1,000 on a game when I only have $2,000 left in my account?
Oh, Miller has a "no-think" system for NFL totals.
Bet OVER any line of 37 or lower, and bet UNDER any line of 51 or higher. He showed a 10-year sample where this system went 195-111-1.
King Yao's book is really excellent. He spends a lot of time preaching about +EV, how to achieve it in your betting, and how to always avoid -EV wagers. His money management plan is similar to Miller's, but even more conservative. Yao suggests betting only 1% of your entire bankroll on each bet, and saving the 2% bets for the ones which have the most edge. (Again, Miller says to never have one bet that you "like" more than another one -- same wager amount all the time.) Yao's book touches on everything you can imagine: props, scalping, hedging, 1st half betting, March Madness pools, horce racing, etc.
If anyone has thoughts on any of this, I'd love to hear them.