5 Mathematical Facts About Sports Betting That You Need to Know

Many gambling activities are so strongly based in mathematics that you can determine a perfect way to play them. This doesn’t mean that you can win every time, but you can certainly learn how to use strategy to play with the lowest house edge.

Sports betting isn’t the same as most gambling activities. You can learn how to win, but it’s not as straightforward as the strategy you’re likely to use in other games like blackjack or poker.

Here are five mathematical facts about sports gambling that you need to understand if you want to win more often.

1 – The Vig Is a Killer

Let’s say that you and I both decided to place a bet on a game for $100 each. When the game is over, one of us would win $100, and the other would lose $100. If we bet on 500 games this way, and we each won 250 games, we’d both break even.

If you place a bet on a game with a sportsbook, you have to risk more then when you bet with me because of the vig. You have to risk $110 to make the same wager with the sportsbook. If you bet the same 500 games with the sportsbook and won 250, instead of breaking even, you’d lose money.

Your cost of wagering on the 500 games is $55,000. But you only get back $52,500 on the 250 games you win. This is a loss of $2,500. In other words, even when you win 50% of the time, you’re averaging a loss of $5 for every game you place a wager on.

Now, imagine if you and I both placed the same wagers with sportsbooks instead of with each other. We would both lose $2,500 over the course of the 500 games, and the sportsbook would make a profit of $5,000.

This is basically how real money sportsbooks operate. Of course, there’s a little more to it. But at the base of a sportsbook operation, if they come close to balancing how much is wagered on each side of a game, they make a profit from the vig.

You’re going to have a hard time getting large wagers down without paying vig, but any wager you can place without vig directly increases your profits and reduces your losses.

2 – No Value Without the Lines

When you evaluate any sporting event as a sports gambler, your goal is to find value. You need to identify games where you can place a wager that leads to long-term profits. But you don’t have any idea if a contest offers value by just evaluating the contest.

The only way to see if a contest offers value is to compare the lines to your evaluation. This might seem like common sense, but a mistake that many sports gamblers make is evaluating a game and convincing themselves that there is value.

This is the wrong way to gamble on sports. You don’t have to look at the lines before you evaluate games, but you have to use your evaluation and the line together to find value.

Many sporting events don’t offer value. When you evaluate an NBA game and determine that the home team should win by 4 points, if the line is 4, 3, or 5, there isn’t any value.

If you try to force value on a contest and a line, you’re going to lose money. Instead of trying to force value, learn how to accurately handicap contests, and only place a wager when there’s clear value with the available line.

The good news is that there are many different sportsbooks, so you can find different lines on the same contest sometimes. This means that just because there isn’t any value at one sportsbook, doesn’t mean that there’s not value at a different sportsbook.

3 – Small Profit Margins Even for the Pros

Most sports gamblers spend at least a little bit of time dreaming of winning 80% or 90% of their point spread wagers before reality crushes their dreams. The majority of sports gamblers never learn how to win more than 50% to 52% of their point spread wagers.

Even the pros struggle to do much better than the amateurs. A win percentage of 55% is rare, with only a handful of the top sports gamblers in the world able to do better.

The good news is that if you can win 55% of your point spread wagers, you can make good money. But your profit margin is still slim. Here’s an example to show just how thin your profit margin is, even if you’re a pro.

Working with a winning percentage of 55% and a standard vig of 10%, here are some numbers. Let’s say your average bet size is $220 to win $200, and you make 180 bets. You win 55% of your wagers, which equals 99 bets.

It costs a total of $39,600 to make 180 wagers. You win a total of $41,580, including the return of your original wager, on the 99 contests you win. This gives you a net profit of $1,980 on the 180 wagers.

This works out to an average net profit of $11 per game you bet on. In other words, you’re making a 5% net profit on every bet you make. This is good by itself, but it’s still a small profit margin for the amount you have to risk.

The problem is that sports gambling doesn’t leave much room for error. If your winning percentage falls to 54%, your margins become razor thin. Using the same numbers as above, but winning 54% instead of 55%, here’s what the numbers look like.

Instead of winning 99 wagers, you win 97. The cost of making 180 wagers is still the same, but your return is now $40,740. This leaves a profit of $1,140, which is an average of $6.33 per game. This is a net profit percentage of just 2.9%. A drop of just 1% in winning percentage drops you net profit percentage by 2.1%.

What all of this means is that your profit margins are so thin that you have to be on top of your game at all times. You can’t afford to let down for a single second if you want to start making a profit gambling on sports.

4 – Large Profits Require Huge Wagers

In the last section, you learned why the margins are so small for winning sports gamblers. Because the margins are so small, it means that you have to risk a large amount of money if you want to make large profits.

Risking $220 per game, you have to bet on 180 contests and win 55% of them to come close to winning $2,000. This tells you that you’re not going to be able to make much money at this level. It might take months to find 180 contests that offer value.

You need to be able to place wagers of $1,000 or more on average to get close to making good money as a sports gambler. And you still have to win 54% or more of your point spread wagers.

The other thing you need to realize is this level of betting requires a big bankroll. Do you have a large enough bankroll to average $1,000 and higher wagers?

5 – The Coin Flip

If you understand how statistics work, you know that sports gamblers on average win 50% of their point spread wagers. When you make a wager on a sporting contest, there are only three possible outcomes. You can win, lose, or push.

The sports gambling world isn’t perfect, but over millions of contests, the average is pretty close to 50% of the money being on each side of games. This is how sportsbooks make money.

From the side of people gambling on sports, winning 50% of the time is still losing. You learned about this in the first section about vig.

The reason why this is important to you is because you need to make a choice. You can either do everything in your power to learn how to evaluate sporting events so you can win 55% of the time, or you can skip the hard work of learning how to be a good handicapper and accept that you’re only going to win 50% of the time and lose money because of the vig.

These are your only two choices. As a sports bettor, you either have to do a lot of work or lose money little by little. The good news is that the choice is 100% yours.

Conclusion

The vig is your worst enemy. Without the vig, you can easily learn how to win money using sports gambling strategy. Find ways to reduce or eliminate the vig, and you’re on your way to more profits.

When you learn how to win while gambling on sports, you’re working with a small margin, and you’re going to need to risk large amounts of money. Sports gambling isn’t for the weak-hearted.

Finally, remember that there’s no betting value without the lines. Until you see the available lines, you don’t have any way of identifying value.

Don’t forget to comparison shop as a bettor. Good luck with your wagers!