Sports Handicapping Services - The Five-Star Lock of The Century
Many sports services grade their bets in various ways. Apparently, they like some of their sports picks better than others. They wager five units on one, two units on another, a single unit on still another. Usually, they assign a ranking to these bets, normally stars, such as 5-star, 3-star, 1-star. Also, many have locks, as in a Lock of the Week, Month, or even the dreaded Lock of the Century.
Of course, these are just marketing gimmicks, and very transparent ones at that. Varying your bet size is not only dangerous, it’s completely pointless as well.
The issue surrounding the grading of bets is confidence. Let’s say you have capped the day’s games and come up with three sports picks you like. The first two you are pretty confident in, the third not as much. Maybe, you think, I’ll bet a unit and a half on the first two and only one on the third.
But why bet the third at all? Sure, it might win, but even your gut is telling you it has a good chance of losing. Why bother with “1-star” bets at all? Just to have action? Never a good idea. When Precision Plays evaluates a sports pick, it must give us a certain level of confidence before we’ll play it (and release it to our customers). Doubt cannot be eliminated; there are no “locks” in sports betting, only on doors. Any bet can lose, but if there is more doubt on one pick than another, we’ll trash it.
Although each sports pick we make must meet a certain level of confidence before we’ll play it, this level is necessarily tied into the payout the bet will produce if a winner. The smaller the payout, the higher our confidence in the pick must be.
For example, if we like the Anaheim Ducks at -150, we’ll need to be 100% confident that the pick will have a 65% chance of winning, not 60% as expressed by the -150 money line. Likewise, if we like the Boston Bruins as 150 dogs, we’ll need to be 100% confident that the bet will have a 45% chance of winning, not 40%*.
In our hockey example, the Ducks are seemingly the stronger bet, the one that should inspire the most confidence. After all, we figured them to have a 65% chance of winning, not the mere 45% chance we gave the Bruins. But the two bets are exactly the same. We have the same level of confidence in the percentages (100% confident). We have the same edge on each bet (5%), and if we made these bets a thousand times, we would win the exact same amount of money on each.
*To learn more about money lines and percentages, please see the Precision Plays article entitled “Money Lines, Fair Odds, & Juice”. It demonstrates mathematically how to calculate the actual house edge on a sports bet and how this relates to the odds of a sports pick winning or losing.
To learn more about how a Precision Plays account can help you succeed at sports betting, please visit PrecisionPlays.com PrecisionPlays.com