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Swain Scheps
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Published:
June 30, 2020

Sports Betting For Dummies

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Overview

The sports gambling book you can bet on 

Sports betting combines America's national pastime (sports) with its national passion (gambling). In the U.S., more than a third of the population bets on at least one sporting event every year. With the recent lifting of the federal ban on sports gambling, states are pushing legislation to take advantage of the new potential source of revenue. 

The best sports betting books are data driven, statistically honest, and offer ways to take action. Sports Betting For Dummies will cover the basics, as well as delving into more nuanced topics. You’ll find all the need-to-know information on types of bets, statistics, handicapping fundamentals, and more.

  • Betting on football, basketball, baseball, and other sports 
  • Betting on special events, such as the Superbowl or the Olympics 
  • Money management
  • Betting on the internet

With handy tips, tricks, and tools, Sports Betting For Dummies shows you how to place the right bet at the right time—to get the right payoff.

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About The Author

Swain Scheps has written extensively on gambling topics and is a veteran sports bettor and industry expert. He has provided gaming advice and instruction in the Fodor's Las Vegas travel series and has contributed to Casino Gambling For Dummies. He is a data and analytics professional in Oregon and author of Business Intelligence For Dummies. Follow him on Twitter: @swainscheps

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sports betting for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Sports betting can be an incredibly fun hobby. But if you’re doing it to make money, you need to understand that most people who gamble on sporting events end up losing money. That’s how sports books and casinos stay in business after all. But if you learn a little about how bookmakers and betting markets work, develop a strategy, and apply a fair amount of know-how, you can go from being a money-losing dabbler to a knowledgeable gambler who stands a good chance of winning in the long run.
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Articles from
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Baseball was a statistician and probability expert’s sport early on and, after horse racing, was what popularized sports betting. The standard listing for baseball bets (shown in the following figure) shows a handful of key pieces of data: Time/Date: When the first pitch is schedule for each game. Rotation numbers: The unique identifier for each side of a baseball bet.
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I don’t have much patience or appreciation for betting NFL team-specific angles. When I hear someone tell me that the Raiders are 15–6 ATS in their last 21 visits to the east coast, I roll my eyes (in the nicest way possible). If there’s no connecting logic behind a trend, I dismiss it.If you read the article on preseason betting however, you’ll see I’m an advocate for some coaching systems.
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Preseason NFL football gets a surprising amount of betting action. In fact, many sports books report there's more money wagered on the Hall of Fame Game (the first preseason game) than on the rest of that day's events combined, which includes a summer Sunday of baseball, tennis, golf, and summer league basketball.
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Bookmakers offer the widest variety of sports betting action on regular season and playoff NFL games, including moneyline odds on both favorite and underdog, plus a standard –110 point spread along with alternate lines for both favorite and underdog. NFL totals are almost as popular as betting the sides, and are also listed as a standard –110 bet along with alternate totals at odds.
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Every sports bettor needs to have a handful of Excel formulas at his fingertips. Spreadsheets allow you to logically arrange, manipulate, explore, and visualize data. And if you invest just a little bit of time, you can use Excel to load and transform data as well as simulate games, size bets, track schedules, spot hedging opportunities, and more.
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Randomness is one key concept that every person involved in sports betting needs to understand. As a sports bettor, there should be a constant question at the back of your mind at any point when you’re looking at statistics: What if I’m looking at a set of completely random numbers that just happened to come up this way?
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Baseball bettors tend to get enamored of teams on a roll. As pitchers get hot, and especially as the teams themselves start to roll, their odds get slightly longer than they’re worth. And the inverse is true as well: Teams who have hit rough waters look worse in the eyes of the average bettor than they really are.
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Betting on baseball is fun. When a game can change so dramatically from year to year, it can be difficult to demonstrate a system’s effectiveness over a long period of time (one of the characteristics of a high-quality system).For example, Major League Baseball sees big fluctuations in offensive production, and the most recent season, 2019, is the poster child for this phenomenon.
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Because NFL teams are constructed according to strict rules—the NFL salary cap, draft structure, standardized schedule, and other forces aimed at maintaining parity—the talent level from top to bottom occupies a narrow band. That means successful teams have superior coaching, schemes, preparation, treatment, technology, process, contingency planning, and so on.
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Sports betting can be an incredibly fun hobby. But if you’re doing it to make money, you need to understand that most people who gamble on sporting events end up losing money. That’s how sports books and casinos stay in business after all. But if you learn a little about how bookmakers and betting markets work, develop a strategy, and apply a fair amount of know-how, you can go from being a money-losing dabbler to a knowledgeable gambler who stands a good chance of winning in the long run.
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It’s been proven by sociologists that it doesn’t take more than a few dollars to increase the intensity of interest and emotional investment while you’re watching a sports game. At the same time, that instinctive drive to bet as an enjoyment multiplier leads many people to bet from the hip. Betting instinctively certainly has its place.
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Starting pitchers are the most dominant factor in any baseball game’s outcome, and in sports betting, the oddsmakers rely heavily on their recent performance to set the odds of any game. ©Brocreative/Shutterstock.com Look beyond traditional statistics. Let me say that a different way: Don’t just look beyond them; don’t look at traditional statistics at all.
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The laws surrounding sports gambling are a knotted web. Gambling on sports is as ubiquitous as the law is gray, and many states have laws overlapping and sometimes contradicting federal laws. Don’t break the law. If you read anything in this article that you’re construing as an encouragement to break local, state, federal, or international civil or criminal statues, you’ve misinterpreted it.
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The incomparable Gambler’s Z-score is one of the most useful weapons in your sports betting arsenal that you’ll use over and over.The Gambler’s Z is an offshoot of the Z-test. No, the Z-test is not a pop quiz in math class that only Taylor Zalinsky and Andy Zimmerman had to take. It’s a test in the statistical sense, in which researchers evaluate data to see if the numbers validate or disprove a previously stated hypothesis, and to what degree.
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