Entire books have been written on how to handicap sporting events and lives have been dedicated to the practice. Of course, we don’t have the space to lay out the entire process in this article but here we can give a quick and dirty overview of the process for those who might be interested in transitioning from being a recreational bettor to a sharp/professional bettor.
Step 1: Make Your own Lines
Using handicapping tools you have at your disposal, come up with your own point spreads or totals, before you see them published by sportsbooks. If you view the published lines before coming to your own conclusions, you’ve tainted your process and risk bias or subconsciously steering yourself toward the sportsbook’s conclusions.
If you’re new to the handicapping process, and don’t have many tools or resources at your disposal, you can still practice this technique by guessing the lines based off your gut instincts. Once you get into this routine enough times you will start to notice trends and patterns. For instance, “I’m really overvaluing home teams a lot more than sportsbooks” or “I have a bias against teams in the Eastern Conference who are actually better than my perception.”
Once you have come up with your numbers, compare them to the market and see where the gaps are. If your numbers are far off of the market’s numbers, try to find the reason why. Hopefully the reason is that you’ve done a great job and you’ve just discovered value. However, you may also have a blind spot that is causing you to have a bad number.
Step 2: Grade your Bets
The next step to the handicapping process is grading your bets. This sounds easier than it is.
Just because a bet won, doesn’t mean it was a good bet and just because a bet lost doesn’t mean it was a bad bet. For instance, you could have thought the Team A was going to beat the Team B because you identified a weakness in the Team B’s defense that Team A’s running game was going to exploit. If Team A wins by 30, but averaged 2.2 yards per carry, you didn’t necessarily handicap the game correctly.
Track each wager meticulously and assign each game you handicapped an honest grade and resist the temptation to blame referees (though sometimes this is valid), bad luck, and other factors outside of your control. If you honestly can come to the conclusion that factors outside of your control caused your bet to lose (star player being injured early), then it’s possible you handicapped the game correctly even though it lost.
Step 3: Innovate Your Process
Handicapping processes should constantly be adjusted based on changes to sports over time, so your process should be liquid. Just imagine if people were still using handicapping systems from the 1990s to predict NBA games today. You can’t wait until it’s too late to update your system, so by grading each game, you can identify patterns which let you know it’s time to make an adjustment.