Smart sports betting, and football betting above all, is according to the skills of the teams involved compared to random chance. This difference profoundly affects the appropriate betting strategies or systems. Understanding this difference is what makes an effective sports bettor.

Many of the betting systems and strategies available today are based upon general probabilities of a win or loss and are modified versions of systems developed for games of chance. In contrast, sports betting – as well as poker – just isn’t based on random chance and probabilities, but on the skill of the contestants. This means that the underlying premise of sport betting is significantly different than betting on games of chance.

Although most gambling strategies designed for games of chance are mathematically unsound, in practice if one has roughly a 50% chance of winning, these systems can at least appear to offer a highly effective means of betting. In the long term, the failure of such systems is more or less inevitable since it is based upon the Gambler’s Fallacy. Gambler’s Fallacy will be the mistaken impression that particular results are “due” determined by previous outcomes in a series of independent trials of a random process. One example is the if one is tossing coins, and heads come up repeatedly, the gambler may conclude that this implies tails is “due” to come up next; whereas, in reality, the chances that the next coin toss will bring about tails is precisely the exact same regardless of the range of times heads has come up already.

In skill-based wagering, the bettor with the most knowledge of the contestants involved has a definite advantage pop over to this website the bettor that is hoping that the desired outcome “is due” according to probabilities. There’s absolutely no sound mathematical probability that any specific football-team “is due” anything. Just think of Arsenal that won 14 consecutive games in 2002, or Derby County F.C. that lost 37 consecutive games in 2007-08. The major point for these runs was the skill of the teams, not random chance.

Which is not to claim that random chance is not involved, of-course it’s. Any team will make mistakes or have accidents, leading to upsets and surprise outcomes. On the other hand the smart sports bettor knows that the skill level of the team in question is a lot more very likely to influence the outcome than chance and luck. This really is what makes a successful sports bettor over the long term. Anyone can get lucky from time to time, but if one learns to make intelligent bets based on the skills of the teams involved, one is a lot more prone to win significant quantities of money over the long haul.