So sports betting is in a nutshell attempting to make money by correctly predicting the outcome of sporting events. Of course sports can be hard to predict at times. This is what makes it fun to watch but difficult at times to correctly predict the outcome and thus make money.
If you think you are going to be able to predict the outcome of every game- forget about it. That is impossible.
One of the best sports bettors in history is a guy named Billy Walters. His average win percentage is about 60%. That means that he is losing about 40% of his bets and he is considered to be one of the best to ever do it. Most successful bettors only get to about a 55-57% win rate.
There are 2 important things that you need to understand (there are others, but these are the 2 most important) to be a successful sports bettor. That is Variance and Bankroll or Risk Management.
Variance means that there is an difference between the expected outcome of an event and the actual outcome of an event. For example if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of it landing on either heads or tails. If you flipped it 1 million times it should in theory come out to almost exactly 50/50 heads vs tails. But if you flipped it only ten times the results could be much different for example 8 heads to 2 tails. The actual outcome being very different from the expected outcome.
Successful bettors realize that there is a ton of variance in sports betting and that they will lose 40-45% of the time. This can result in losing days, weeks, or even months, but they have a proven strategy and they stick to it because they know that in the long run they will overcome bad variance and make money.
You should do the same. When you have periods of bad variance- forget about it. It is part of the game and not something to get worried about.
Bankroll/Risk Management means that you have a certain amount of dough that you set aside only for sports betting and sports betting only. This could be as little a $500-1000 or $5,000-10,000 or more depending on your circumstances.
Knowing that you will at best win about 60% of your bets in the long run you obviously shouldn’t bet a lot on a single game. You want to spread your risk over multiple games to give yourself the best change of not wiping out your roll and making money long term.
A standard rule of thumb for risk management is to only bet about 1% of your bankroll per game. So if you have a $1,000 bankroll that’s $10 per game, for a $10,000 bankroll $100 per game etc.
Keep these 2 very important things in mind if you are sports betting and you will have a much better chance of being successful. Capisce?