excellent point: the guys who get overly excited about winning simply aren't used to it, they typically are living and dying with every wager.
I have posted extensively on money management probably every month to some extent. At first, a lot of my ideas brought a lot of the flamers to my threads. Now, a greater portion of the posters are catching on. For me, this is bad, the more people catch on the worse the market. So I dont post a whole lot of ideas anymore, I act on them.
What the vast majority of bettors lack is a plan. They have no idea how many bets they will make tomorrow, the next week, or the next sports season. They have no idea what their advantage against the number is, or if they have one. They have no idea how to apply any advantage in a way that will maximize profitability while keeping them from going bankrupt, all the while keeping losses from wrecking their outlook. Most people can get away with betting 2% a game, but how will you react when you hit that sample in which you lose 20 events overall? It will happen, it's only a matter of time. And the more games you bet, the more likely it will occur and more than once. At just 2% that 20 game deficit cuts your bankroll by close to one-half...remember there is vig. One of the ways the books get it in the end is b/c they count on this, at this point the mind becomes so muddled that there is no advantage and the majority of bettors begin the chase. Very similar to a under-funded poker player having to go 'all in' on a sub-par hand.
The most profitable way to make money in any market is through volume. By applying a small advantage over a large number of games you also minimize risk. How so? Anything can happen in a sporting event. So instead of putting a large sum of money on one or two events if you spread it out on multiple events that 1st quarter injury or referee with PMS wont affect your bottom line as much. It is complicated and I'll stop there, I've explained it before, but the primary necessity is to be able to spot value. It's not just about knowing what the numbers should be, but why they are SET the way they are. With experience, you can learn to recognize which way lines will move. Also, there are angles that consistently win in every sport almost every year that are correlated to human performance and pulic betting patterns. Hell, I dont know a thing about hockey, maybe watched three Stars games in my life, but that probably helps. A lot of lines are set to majority perceptions and are not predictive values.
Flat betting is the best strategy, especially when starting out. And especially if you find yourself taking a ton of favorites. It takes experience to recognize when bets hold enough exceptional value to double or triple a wager. Even if your larger wagers do win over time, the majority of wagers should still be of the same size IMO, unless you have a completely statistically based formula system which spits out the arbitrage for you. Otherwise you will go crazy trying to figure out what each bet is worth, and in the meantime the number will be gone. I will bet 5% sometimes 6% on a game. But it is almost always in the playoffs and after I have made around 10 times that amount in that sport during that season, it is house money. Another key point is that in the playoffs, a lot of the lines are much less predictive of events, but are set to keep one-sided action from getting out of control. So there is often exceptional value in that subset, and I typically wager more during the playoffs for that reason, my win historical win percentage during the playoffs warrants it. It's not like I just dream all this stuff up...I wondered why I did so well in the playoffs, and this is the most conclusive reason I can find, the lines often just arent more than placeholders to get action.
