Apparently we’re happy to stake our money on anything from bullock racing to a bullfight. The consulting firm H2 Gambling Capital released statistics recently which reveal that the average UK adult or the US adult will lose around US$400 gambling every year. But they’re nowhere near the Australians (the most prolific bettors) who will lose more than $1,400 for every adult this year.

All these losses add up and popular sports betting markets like English Premier League soccer, NFL football, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, and MLB baseball turn over billions of dollars each year. And, as in other billion dollar industries, the competition for your custom is fierce. Online bookmaking operations today are slick, sophisticated, and making a killing. They employ expert staff to set appropriate starting prices and use complex statistical models to manage their risk in real time.

Alternatively, all this effort from the bookmakers is nothing when compared with the time expended by punters themselves. look at these guys at the time you spend turning a bet over within your mind before you decide to place it and after that multiply that by the number of bets placed each day. Tens of thousands of man-hours are spent trying to predict the outcome of professional sports daily.

But could this effort be better utilised?

There are actually only two things which determine the expected payout of a bet. The first will be the probability of the predicted result and also the second will be the odds accepted for that result. Improving on either one of these factors improves the expected return of the bet. Nevertheless, for all of the effort expended attempting to predict the proper result, it appears that proportionately very little effort is expended securing the best possible odds.

This really is hardly logical. It’s not possible to anticipate the result of a sporting event with any meaningful confidence and also guessing at the likelihood of a particular result will be extremely hard. At least several of the time spent trying to predict the outcome of a sporting event could be better spent comparing the odds offered by the different bookmakers and selecting the bookmaker which offers the very best return on this particular bet. It’s quick and easy to shop around the many online sportsbooks, compare odds, and find a better offer. There are actually even a lot of services available which will do it for you for free.

Professional gamblers often have accounts with multiple bookmakers, pay close focus on the odds offered by each, and seek out the most effective odds before they place a bet. But the average punter tends to mindlessly accept the odds provided by his usual bookmaker. This is a sizable oversight as well as a costly missed opportunity.

Bookmakers often post noticeably different odds for the exact same event and it is common to search out mismatches of up to 10% from one bookmaker to another. This percentage is there for the taking and it mystifies me that lots of folks are not shopping around for better odds.