Sports Betting Tips – What Are Value Bets, How and Where Do You Find Them?
A good bettor understands the difference between a team’s probability of winning and the chances of that team winning in relation to the betting odds available. Finding value bets and patiently betting on these value bets, combined with a staking strategy that maximizes the value found, is the key to betting success regardless of how unlikely the particular outcome appears.
It is sometimes necessary to see it with your own eyes. Consider all of the occasions that there was a big upset. You may sometimes wonder, “Who would have bet on that team to win that?” Who are they? Smart, seasoned bettors, that’s who.
The secret to long-term betting success is understanding value betting and seeking value bets. It may seem obvious to a seasoned bettor, but transitioning from sports fan to serious bettor with an understanding of betting value can be challenging for someone new to betting.
It’s difficult to feel comfortable betting hard-earned money on a team that no one believes has a reasonable chance of winning. However, becoming a good sports bettor necessitates just this. Finding value bets and regularly backing them, regardless of how awkward it makes you feel, is what makes a good sports bettor.
Where Can You Find Value Bets?
It is not easy to develop a sense of betting worth in which you can have confidence. It takes time and commitment, as with all good stuff. Here’s how you can increase your odds of finding good value bets.
Specialize
It’s a smart idea to specialize when you first start betting on sports. It’s a wise idea to specialize in tournaments and leagues that you’re already familiar with. You will be able to implement what you have learned to other tournaments and leagues once you have built your sense of betting worth by concentrating on leagues you are familiar with. Before you begin to broaden your area of knowledge, bet on what you know best.
It’s a smart idea to specialize in specific sports or leagues at the start of your betting career. It’s also a good idea to do so in a sport or league you’re already familiar with. Start with the leagues you are most familiar with in terms of team success and history. If you’ve begun to investigate the leagues you’re familiar with, you can adapt what you’ve learned to leagues you’re unfamiliar with.
Yes, baseball provides a plethora of betting opportunities during the season. But if you don’t know anything about the sport, you’re wasting your time, and it’s unlikely you’ll quickly grow a sense of worth. Before expanding your area of knowledge, bet on what you know best.
Choose Your Odds And Price
This is a good exercise that will help you improve your ability to spot value bets. You sit down and analyze the upcoming fixtures in the leagues or tournaments on which to bet, calculating what you believe the odds should be for each match. You do this without consulting any bookmakers’ odds. Nobody else’s opinion matters; it’s all yours.
What you are looking for is what we call the “uncomfortable compromise.” You are not specifying the odds you would like to see offered by the bookmakers. You’re putting up chances that you wouldn’t want to gamble on yourself. So, suppose you’re betting on the Asian Handicap market for the match between Watford and Liverpool. In that case, you want to come up with a handicap that, if set as the handicap for the match by the bookmakers, you wouldn’t feel comfortable betting on either side of, whether it’s Liverpool -1 goal or Watford +1 goal, or whatever you think is a reasonable handicap for that match. In this job, you are basically acting as a bookmaker.
We cannot overstate how beneficial this job can be to a punter who is just getting started in sports betting. Setting your odds forces you to think in terms of percentages and testing the outcome of your odds pits your betting wits against the seasoned bookmakers. It takes time to complete. Real. Consider it similar to going to the betting gym. You may not want to do it some days, but your betting fitness will only increase in the long run.
This is critical in cultivating an intuitive sense for value. The task is to reach what we call “the awkward compromise.” You are not writing the odds you want to see posted by the bookmaker. You’re making up odds that you wouldn’t want to take yourself. We cannot overstate how beneficial this task can be to a new punter. It trains your mind to think in terms of odds, and checking your prices’ outcomes helps you compete with wise and seasoned bookmakers.
It takes time to complete. It takes work. There can be weeks when you really cannot be bothered.
It Is A Betting Market
Never forget that this is a betting industry. The pull and sway of public opinion will determine the odds. Making this a standard way of thinking is difficult, but it can also reduce the sport you enjoy to a simple matter of economics.
Often you wish you could just watch a football match without worrying about how the result could affect next week’s odds or how the vast amount of casual punters will influence the odds for an upcoming match based on what they saw in this match. Will persuasion have value in the other direction? Can the stock market overreact?
It’s extremely difficult to unwire your brain after it’s been wired in this manner. It could mean the end of your romantic conceptions of sport’s noble purity. That is, however, a positive thing for knowing and finding value betting.
Review The Outcomes
If you don’t know where you’ve been, you won’t know where you’re going. Most of the work in creating a value mindset is in evaluating how previous assessments were conducted. Where exactly did you get it right? Where did you make a mistake? When you begin pricing matches, you are more likely to show pre-conceived prejudices. Some of them may be right. Many people would not.
You can correct this by studying your post-match evaluations and doing an overview of how your sport or league has done in recent years. What, for example, what is the real worth of home-field advantage? Is the market overvaluing it? Is there a general and long-term bias in the industry toward specific clubs or clubs competing in specific situations? All of this will assist you in tuning your mind to merit.
It is, indeed, work. What else did you think it would be? Never assume you know everything, and always be ready to reassess. This type of research, review and analysis will keep you a step ahead of the market.
Be Tenacious
Developing your ability to identify value bets takes time, just like any other skill or talent. Even if you intend to take a more abstract approach, such as developing a betting model, developing an intuitive sense for betting value and ‘gut instinct’ for the betting markets will also provide the foundation for potential success. Knowledge is power, and the most powerful knowledge is gained through practice. And knowledge is only valuable if it is gained.
Finally, keep in mind that it takes time. It’s the same as learning a new skill. Even if you wish to create sophisticated betting models for forecasting match outcomes, developing an intuitive sense for value and a “gut feel” for the betting markets can often provide the foundation for even such an abstract approach.
Knowledge is power, and the most powerful form of knowledge is experience. This is essentially the challenge when cultivating a sense of meaning. In the end, it comes down to cultivating a deep and rich experience for the betting markets, and the experience that is worth something is the experience that has been gained.
