A good sports betting column should be backed by a profitable gambler with a proven track record. It should offer picks generated by a sophisticated and conceptually sound model. Most importantly, it should treat the subject with the seriousness it warrants.
This is not that column.
Instead, this will be an off-beat look at the sports betting industry-- why Vegas keeps winning, why gambling advice is almost certainly not worth the money, and the structural reasons why even if a bettor were profitable, anything they wrote would be unlikely to make their readers net profitable, too.
While we're at it, we'll discuss ways to minimize Vegas' edge and make recreational betting more fun, explain how to gain an advantage in your office pick pools, preview games through an offbeat lens (with picks guaranteed to be no worse than chance), and touch on various other Odds and Ends along the way.
Some Thoughts on Betting Systems
Two weeks ago, I pulled the curtain back on THE System, one of the oldest scams betting touts use to fool people into thinking they have an edge. But that's not the only betting system out there. If you lurk around the seedier corners of the gambling world, you'll come across plenty of "fool-proof systems" for beating the house. The most famous such system is probably the Martingale.
The Martingale is simple: find a game with a roughly 50/50 chance of success, place a bet, and then double that bet every time you lose. For instance, bet a dollar that a coin flip will come up heads. If it comes up heads, bank that dollar and start over. If it comes up tails, increase your bet to $2 and repeat. If it comes up tails a second time, bet $4 and repeat.
(The Martingale can be applied to games that don't feature 50/50 odds, but for the sake of keeping the math simple, we'll stick with the coin flip game.)
The possible outcome tree of a Martingale system is as follows: 50% of the time, you'll get heads on your first flip and win a dollar. 25% of the time, you'll get tails on your first flip (-$1) and heads on your second flip (+$2) and win a dollar. 12.5% of the time, you'll get tails (-$1), then tails again (-$2), and then heads on your third flip (+$4) and win a dollar. And so on. Given that as the number of flips trends towards infinity, the probability of *eventually* flipping heads becomes 100%, the Martingale is theoretically a "fool-proof" system to win a dollar from a coin-flip game.
Allow me to repeat with added emphasis: the Martingale is theoretically a fool-proof system to win a dollar from a coin-flip game. So long as you have infinite time to make infinite flips and infinite money to fund them.
In practice, occasionally, you'll get 19 tails in a row. It's extraordinarily rare, sure, but it happens. And then, on the next coin flip, you'll be on the hook to bet more than a half-million dollars (after having already lost more than a half-million dollars). And the upside, if you succeed, is you get to walk away from the whole affair with a single dollar in profit. (The downside if you fail, of course, is you've now lost a million dollars and are on the hook for betting a million more.)
Under real-world constraints, the Martingale has an extraordinarily high chance of winning you a dollar and an extraordinarily small chance of subjecting you to complete and total financial ruin. If that opportunity was presented as a single bet, few people would likely take it-- but break it up over a series of bets and suddenly people love it. At least until they find themselves wagering $16,384 to win a dollar.
(You could, of course, cap your maximum bet to guard against financial ruin, but the lower the cap, the more likely you are to hit it before you flip heads. Your downside risk is lower, but your chances of losing money are higher. Still, this is a very wise decision if you ever decide to try the Martingale, which you absolutely should not. And remember, too, that Vegas can likewise cap its bets. Good luck finding a casino willing to wager billions on a coin flip, even if they think the odds are tilted slightly in their favor.)
(Bonus math nerdiness: even ignoring real-world constraints, how can a betting system guarantee a profit in a game with an expected value of zero? The secret is that it doesn't; the Martingale guarantees you will make a $1 return if given infinite flips, but any number divided by infinity becomes zero—or at least can be treated as such for our purposes—so the expected value of each individual flip remains zero.)
All betting systems are like this. They ignore real-world constraints, or they fail to account for the disproportionate downside risks compared to the relatively meager upside, or they forget about that whole "dividing by infinity" thing. This is the gambler's dilemma: there is no betting system that will make negative expected value bets profitable. (The reverse is not true: there are lots of betting systems that will make positive expected value bets unprofitable. Later this year, I'll run through the math on how to lose money making nothing but +EV bets.)
If there were a fool-proof way to "get" Vegas, Vegas would have gotten got by now, and yet when last I checked, they were still building more casinos. The only way I know of to turn a guaranteed profit from a betting system is to convince some poor suckers to pay you to teach them their betting system.
You're almost certainly not going to make money from betting, at least not in the long run. (Though you'll have plenty of streaks in the short run that might give you that illusion.) But as I keep saying, there are reasons to gamble beyond "making money". If you treat it as entertainment, treat your losses as the cost of that entertainment, and never wager more than you can afford, it's a good way to increase your enjoyment of something you already like. A good betting system can highlight that aspect of gambling to further increase your enjoyment.
Good betting systems focus not on the odds of making a profit but on the odds of enjoying the journey. You can buy futures for your team to win the Super Bowl to make good seasons more exciting. You can bet extreme long-shots or 6-leg parlays and daydream about what you'd do if they actually hit. (From a pure "expected value" standpoint, parlays are among the worst bets you can make, but they'll get you a hell of a lot better return than buying lottery tickets and are a lot more exciting than watching a drum full of balls spin around.)
I'm personally partial to something I call the "fan hedge"; when my favorite team is in a big game (and especially when they're heavily favored), I'll bet the moneyline for their opponent. If my team wins, I'm so happy that the financial loss doesn't sting. If my team loses, at least I have a wad of cash to show for it.
(You can even apply the "fan hedge" to your fantasy football leagues. If you're in the championship game heading into Monday Night Football with a lead and your opponent only has one player left to play, you can bet the "over" on that player's yardage prop. If they have a huge game, you lose your fantasy league, but at least you make a little bit of money off of it.)
Certainly, you don't need me to tell you what is fun for you. Just remember, at the end of the day, if "making money" is your target, you're probably going to wind up disappointed. Make "increasing excitement" and "having fun" your target instead, and you'll win even if-- when-- you lose.