Ways to Improve Your Sports Betting Skills

Are you finding little success in sports betting? Many new bettors lose heart quickly when they realize the money is not coming in as fast as expected. Winning consistently in sports betting is hard. Growing your bankroll will need a good strategy. The good thing is that you have an almost endless variety in choice in global sports markets. You can try new strategies and keep working on them until you find a workable formula. Here are some tactics you can try to improve your win rate.  

Pick Your Speciality  

One common mistake among new sports betting fans is trying to spread their money in the hope they will have winners across different sports. This mistake costs them because they miss out on the opportunity to grow their sports analysis skills.  

When you look at a betting site, particularly new betting sites,  you see so many different betting markets that you feel like you want to have a dip into all of them, but this is the wrong approach to take. 

As a beginner, it is recommended you pick one sport and one team and stick with them. Get as much information as possible about your chosen sport and team. Read about the team, watch past matches and try to follow everything happening with them.  

Specializing gives you deep insight into what happens in the sport in different circumstances. Do they win more at home or away? What is the current relationship between the players and the coach? Questions like these will help you pick the right bet by reading the correct clues. 

There is a disadvantage in focusing on one team only because you miss out on other opportunities. You can expand your opportunity picks by becoming a league specialist, for example, focus on the EPL. Pick a sport with readily available information and stats. 

Bet Against Popular Opinion 

A bookie will drop odds when there is strong public favor for a team. A perennial winner like the Lakers will come into many games as the clear favorites. So will a team that has a dominant player like James Harden. A team that has a passionate fan base like the Red Sox will often be overpriced even when they are on a poor run. TV sports channels are also guilty of giving some teams too much airtime such that the public has a positive bias for the team. 

Betting against the public will work only if you are sure that you are betting from an informed decision rather than going against popular opinion for the sake of it. This strategy is risky. There is often a good reason a team is a clear favorite, and most of the time it comes out tops.   

Develop a Money Management Strategy  

There is always a temptation to wager all your stake when you have a low odds game with high chances of winning. Most sports bettors go bust because of such poor money management practices. You should commit   1-2% of your money in any bet, no matter how favorable the odds.   

Most people start with a small bankroll, then make the mistake of going for high-risk games to build their bankroll faster. This is a ruinous strategy. Expert bettors recommend starting with a bankroll of at least $5,000.  2% of this is $100, which is a good stake for many games.  

Deploy Analysis Tools      

There are software tools that do the heavy research for you. They trawl through thousands of games to bring you value bets. These are bets that the bookies have mis-priced. If a team has 75% of winning but the bookies give the team 50%, you have a 25% advantage. Value betting can build your bankroll. But you must develop the skills to vet what the software picks. 

There is so much information on sports that scouring through it all can be very time-consuming. Analysis software can go back up to five years to give you a very clear picture of historical performance. Some of these tools have Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms that can assess the winning probability of each team.   

The risk in relying on tools is that they can read only what the algorithm is programmed to read. They do not have the big picture ability of human analysis. They can’t tell how the weather will affect a game, or how a bad relationship between the coach and players will ruin a game.  

It is possible to become good at betting if you take the time to build a strategy. It is unlikely that you will find success overnight, but your winning rate will improve gradually.