Handicapping Tips

A lot of content on betting strategies has been written, there thousands of sites and pages with information on it. One of the standard recommendations that appear on most of these lists has to do with spending time analyzing games, teams and all aspects related to the particular sport which motivates the betting action. But the truth is that very few people have the time required to analyze all of the games thoroughly. And many enjoy picking their own games, as opposed to buying their plays from a sports service or following a fellow bettor on a forum.

Obviously, the results aren’t likely to be as good as those who can spare three to four hours per day to the handicapping process. The purpose of this article it to provide handicapping tips for studying the games in a short time period. For the vast majority of bettors, a method that takes 10 minutes a day and hits 55% is more valuable than a method that takes three hours a day and hits 59% just due to the time factor.

You can create some elaborate mathematical betting formulas, but if people don’t have the time to calculate the numbers, they aren’t getting a whole lot out of them.

Let’s start with baseball because we’re getting closer to playoffs. The key to quickly handicapping a day’s worth of baseball games resides in the concept of Regression to the Mean – a premise that many people are familiar with in the business world, but also one that makes sense for sports bettors.

For our purposes here, the main stat that we’re looking for is a pitcher’s ERA over his last three starts, which we will compare to his season ERA.

A pitcher who has pitched much better than his season numbers over the last three starts is a good candidate for a rough outing, while a pitcher who has pitched much better than they have for the season is one that may be due for a decent start. I use 1.5 runs better or worse for the last three games compared to the season stats as my basis. What we’re looking for is a pitcher who has performed at least 1.5 runs better than expected over their last three starts going up against a pitcher who has performed at least 1.5 runs worse than their season-long numbers and we’ll look to back the pitcher who has performed worse than average. We should get a bit of a break on the odds, as his recent poor form won’t go unnoticed by the majority of bettors, while the opposing pitcher’s good form won’t be undetected either.

Ideally, a pitcher’s last start will mirror the three-game trend, meaning a pitcher who has performed better than his season-long numbers is coming off a good start, while a pitcher performing worse is coming off a poor start, although that isn’t always the case and should be given some consideration.

There is some subjectivity allowed here, here’s the first of baseball handicapping tips for those that do it on the go, the place to start is with the starting pitchers who can be expected to work their way back to their season-long averages.

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