Bet Sizing

When it comes to betting on football games, there are many systems out there. The most popular systems seem to follow the same basic idea. It goes along with the idea of raising your bets when you’re winning and lowering them when you’re losing. That way you take full advantage of winning steaks and won’t get hurt on losing steaks. The reasoning behind this seems logical enough. That certainly sounds like good advice, but is it? As it turns out, that piece of advice has hurt far more gamblers than it’s helped. Raising and lowering your bet sizes actually makes it harder for you to win. Here’s a simple example: Take any series of 10 bets with 5 wins and 5 losses. If you bet the same amount on every game, you’re going to break even, no surprise there. Now let’s look at a sequence of bets, raising and lowering after a win or loss. It doesn’t matter what the order is for these 5 wins and 5 losses. I’ll do 2 sequences below. The one on the left is 5 wins followed by 5 losses. On the right, 5 losses followed by 5 winning bets. The bet size will be 10% of the total bankroll after the last bet. The bankroll starts out at $1000.

 

	Bet size	Bankroll			Bet size	Bankroll
		1000				1000
win	100	1100		loss	100	900
win	110	1210		loss	90	810
win	121	1331		loss	81	729
win	133	1464		loss	73	656
win	146	1611		loss	66	590
loss	161	1449		win	59	650
loss	145	1305		win	65	714
loss	130	1174		win	71	786
loss	117	1057		win	79	865
loss	106	951		win	86	951

 

The first thing we notice is both sequences end up losing money. Remember, when you bet the same amount on each game, you start with $1000 and after 5 wins and 5 losses you still have $1000. When you change bet sizes, you end up with $951. You’ve picked at the same win rate, 50%, and yet lost money. The order of the wins and losses can be in any order. As long as there are 5 wins and 5 losses, the results will always be the same… you’ll lose $49. The second thing to notice is when you juggle the bet sizes, you have to win at a higher percentage rate to make money. Where 50% was break even, now it’s a higher number.

There’s no doubt about it, raising and lowering your bet sizes makes it harder for you to win money.

This doesn’t mean to never raise your bet or lower it. If you use a bankroll, there will come a time when you should change bet sizes. As your bankroll grows, it only makes sense to raise your bets, and vice versa. However, you should change your bet size very rarely, as changing it does come with a hidden cost. If you don’t use a bankroll, you should never change your bet size during a season.

Most gamblers don’t understand this concept and consequently make it harder on themselves to win. Don’t fall into this trap!

 

Who Pays the Vig?

Vig is short for vigorish, which is the amount of money that the bookmaker takes to handle wagering. It’s also called the juice. It’s how bookmarkers makes their money.

Who pays the vig when betting on football?  Even people who’ve bet football for decades get this completely wrong.

 When a gambler bets on a football game, he bets 11 to win 10. If a gambler wins his bet, he wins $10. If he loses his bet, he loses $11. Who pays the vig, the winner of the bet or the loser? The answer almost every person will give is that the loser pays the vig by virtue of the extra dollar he pays.  However, this is incorrect. The winner pays the vig. The winner always pays the vig in games of chance, whether it be in the casinos, the lottery or in sports betting. The reason for this is that the loser of the bet always loses what he had at risk, no more, no less. The winner always receives LESS than the proper payout. The difference in what the winner should have been paid and what he received is what the bookmaker kept, or the vig.

 Let me give a simple example. If two friends decide to bet $11 on a football game, one wins $11 and the other loses $11. There’s no vig in play here. Let’s say the same two friends decide to bet another game, but this time with a bookie. Once again they both bet $11. When the game is over, one of them loses $11, just like in the first case. However the winner wins only $10, as the bookie keeps a dollar as his fee, which is the vig.  In both cases, the loser loses the same amount. It doesn’t matter to him if a bookie was involved or not. He loses what he bet. Does it matter to the winner if a bookie was involved? Absolutely! He wins $1 less when the bookie was used.

I once had a friend tell me that I had it all wrong, that I was playing with the numbers somehow. He tried turning things around. His reasoning went like this: If two friends decide to bet $10 on a football game, one wins $10 and the other loses $10. There’s no vig in play here. Let’s say the same two friends decide to bet another game, but this time with a bookie. When the game is over, the winner receives $10, but the loser loses $1 extra for a total of $11. In both cases, the winner wins the same amount. It doesn’t matter to him if a bookie was involved or not. Does it matter to the loser if a bookie was involved? Absolutely! He loses $1 more when the bookie was used.

Can you spot the flaw in that reasoning?

What my friend forgot is that while the winner wins the same amount either way in his example, he risked more when the bookie was involved. He was still shorted $1 in the payoff, which is the vig. 

Remember, the loser ALWAYS loses everything he risks, no matter the game, no matter if a bookie or a casino is involved or not. The vig is always deducted from the winner and never added to the loser. The winner wins less than the correct payout. The difference between what the winner receives and what he should have been paid is the vig. 

It’s true that this knowledge isn’t going to save you any money or let you win more money. It should, however, serve as a warning of how little most people know about sports betting and handicapping, even those with lots of experience.  

Averaging Numbers May Lead to False Results

When people try to predict football games, they often fall into a trap of their own making. That trap is called averaging. When two numbers are averaged together, they sometimes cause false results. When two teams are playing, many handicappers try to predict the final score so they can make an informed decision on which team to bet on. To arrive at a score, they average the 2 teams together, comparing offense to the defense.  

Averaging two numbers when the numbers are on different sides of average works okay. The trouble happens when both numbers are on the same side of average. That may be a hard concept to visualize, but after a couple examples it should become clear.

The average number of points scored by a team in the NFL during the 2013 NFL season was 23.4, which can be rounded down to 23. If team A comes into the game scoring on average 34 points a game and team B comes in allowing 10 points a game, averaging the totals together gives a result of 22 points scored for team A. (34 + 10 = 44, divided by 2 = 22.) One team scores above the league average of 23 and the other team allows below the league average of 23, so that works well and gives a good result.  

If team C comes in scoring 34 points a game and team D comes in allowing 28 points a game, averaging the totals together would give a result of team C scoring 31 points, which is less than what they normally score. That just doesn’t make sense. Team C comes into the game with a really good offense that scores well above average, and when faced with a poor defense that allows more than average, why would they be predicted to score less than they normally do?

The problem is, both teams are on the same side of the league average, which gives false results. It makes good teams seem worse and bad teams seem better. The fix is simple enough. Add the two scores together and subtract the NFL average to get a good prediction.

Using teams C and D, the better number is calculated like this:

34 + 28 = 62
 62 - 23 (the league average) = 39

Where averaging gave a score of 31 for team C, subtracting the league average gives a score of 39, a huge difference of 8 points. To obtain consistently better results, don’t average numbers together to make predictions in the NFL.

Here’s a full game mock up to illustrate the difference. These numbers are just an example, and we’ll use the Seahawks and Lions for the teams.

The Seahawks come in with a season average game score of 31-24. The Lions come in with a season average of 20-27. When using averaging, the result is a predicted score of the Seahawks winning 29-22. When using the recommended method, the predicted score becomes Seahawks winning by 35-21. Using the average, the Seahawks are predicted to win the game by 7 points. Using the correct method I’ve laid out, the Seahawks are predicated to win by 14 points.  If the Seahawks were a 10-point favorite, a handicapper could be fooled into thinking the Lions +10 was a good bet if he averaged the numbers. Using the correct method, the Seahawks -10 is the clear choice.

Averaging when comparing teams is a very common mistake and also one of the costliest.

Be aware and beware!

The NFL is Back!

This season I’m ready to put everything to the test. Everything is about to change. The last two seasons I’ve taken a break and stepped away from doing all I could to predict football games. I didn’t want to write, I didn’t want to do the work and I didn’t really care. I frankly lost my passion. After 16 years selling my picks on this site, I stopped. I still made some picks from time to time, but as I knew I wasn’t putting the work in that I could and should, I just didn’t feel right selling the picks. I was OK with my decision and I really thought about just letting the website go.
 

The summer of 2013 I was thinking about just that, just letting it all go away. Then, for some reason, literally out of the clear blue sky, I wanted to try again. I wanted to give predicating football games another chance.  I’ve been doing it for 38 years, and I wanted one more chance. I’ve been on the hunt to find a way to crack the code of football handicapping. I’ve tried many systems, explored many theories and even though I’ve been successful, I haven’t found what I’m looking for. I decided a year ago to give it another chance. I had a decent season, including hitting my lock of the year in Week 16. It felt great seeing a line that was clearly wrong, having the analysis and numbers to back me up, to having the game go exactly as I predicted and getting an easy win. That really pumped me up and I’m still pumped today!
 

After last season, I’ve got my passion back! I realized that even if I don’t enjoy writing, I absolutely love using my spreadsheets, doing analysis and picking football games. I’ve been doing much soul searching in the past year, and everything seems to be coming together. I couldn’t be more excited for the future! I mean that.
 

In a few days I’ll be laying out my goals for this season. I also have a few articles ready to go that concentrate on mistakes made by handicappers.
 

I view this season as a voyage of discovery. I’ve learned much in the past year, both about myself and about football handicapping. I’ve never worked harder in the off season as I have this year and it should pay off.  It’s time to put all my years of experience together with my knowledge and theories and set a course for the future.
 

Please be sure and check back here on The Prog’s Blog. Also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Let’s see what the future holds, shall we?

The Prognosticator is back!