Apparently we are pleased to stake our cash on everything from bullock racing to a bullfight. The consulting firm H2 Gambling Capital released statistics recently which reveal that the standard UK adult or even the US adult will lose around US$400 gambling each and every year. But they are nowhere near the Australians (the most prolific bettors) whom shall lose more than $1,400 for every adult this coming 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 on a yearly basis. 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.

On the contrary, all this effort from the bookmakers is nothing with regards to the time expended by punters themselves. Look at the time you spend turning a bet over in your mind before you place it and then multiply that by the number of bets placed each day. Tens of thousands of man-hours are spent trying to predict the outcome of sports events daily.

But could this effort be better utilised?

You will discover only two things which determine the expected payout of a bet. The very first will be the likelihood of the predicted result as well as 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 the effort expended attempting to predict the right result, it appears that proportionately very little effort is expended securing the top possible odds.

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

Professional gamblers often have accounts with multiple bookmakers, pay close attention to the odds offered by each, and seek out the very best odds before they place a bet. However the average punter tends to mindlessly accept the odds offered by his usual bookmaker. This really is a big oversight as well as a costly missed opportunity.

Bookmakers often post noticeably different odds for playing casino the exact same event and it’s common to discover mismatches of up to 10% from one bookmaker to another. This percentage is there for the taking and it mystifies me that more people are not shopping around for better odds.