Sports Handicapping Service

Here is the latest in a Godgepodge of articles about sports handicapping information, most based on your questions and feedback.

Redux: Picking the Team that Wins Outright

In Tid-Bets Vol. 3, we rightfully deflated the illogical figment of just picking the team that wins outright and you will more times than not have the spread winner.  We considered writing an entire article debunking the endless flaws in this unsystematic witlessness. 

However we were confident most gamblers could see through this air castle and only touched on the hallucination.  Showing there is a sucker placing a bet every minute this flapdoodle is actually gaining steam and perhaps qualifies as one of the great incongruities in sports gambling.  On high volume posting boards, I see cyber back-slapping every time some lunkhead “tracks” this belief. It’s happening more often, not less. Stop the insanity!

Consult Vol. 3 for the main reasons this is inductive and not deductive, but if there were any veracity to this, why would quixotic ones waste their time betting the games ATS?  Since the prevailing premise behind this urban myth is “it’s so much easier to pick the SU winner than the spread winner” why don’t these fancied geniuses just pick dog winner after dog winner on the moneyline?

There are plenty of underdogs that win outright, many huge dogs in fact.  If one wants to postulate how much easier it is to pick the SU winner, why waste such foreknowledge on collecting $100 for every $110 risked?  Just keep picking those 250 dogs and get your money’s worth.

I don’t want to ruin this fool’s gold with such a logical question, but like I keep saying, I guess those pipe dreamers are needed to keep the books in business for the rest of us.  

No oddsmaker will go broke underestimating the intelligence of the betting public.

Radio Active

We’ve mentioned before how satellite and internet radio can be a valuable tool.  Perhaps we are a bit biased but the best gambling radio show portal is GamblersZoo.com for over—the-air and/or internet sports gambling broadcasts. 

Quality Not Quantity

One FAQ I get that frustrates me goes something like this, “Last Saturday I got your plays and you had 14 releases.  This Saturday, I buy them and you have only four, even though there are about the same number of games.”  Sometimes they will refer to it as inconsistent even though we won. 

Any smart player always allows the quality of the card to dictate how many plays they release.  We’ve had complete Saturday college basketball cards in which we’ve released just two plays and we had a Thursday night football card with two games and we had plays on both sides and both totals including three Wise Guy plays.  

Betting a certain number of games for the sake of doing so or forcing bets on any game is simply playing the lottery. A sharp player must pick his spots. One should be leery of a sports service that guarantees a predetermined and invariable number of plays. It may be smart from a marketing standpoint because clients get a comfort zone with routines, but it’s horrible from an investment standpoint.

Do you think Wall Street wizards got there by habitually buying and selling set amounts?  Sports brokers certainly won’t either.

Duffy’s plays are part of the Dream Team at GodsTips, anchor of OffshoreInsiders.com He is perhaps the most published and respected author on sports gambling theory and has been featured as a regular guest as the handicapping expert on the Rick Ballou Show on Sporting News Radio, Gamblers Zoo national radio show, the Meat and Potatoes gambling show, Pro Fantasy Sports Internet radio and Grogan’s Fantasy Football show.