Post-Game Handicapping: How do you determine if your bet was good?

[reno cool]

many ways to attempt to do this. You can, for example, look at the relevant stats and see if the scoring was in line with them. But I wouldn't recommend over analyzing a single result,
btw, beating the closing number is not the end all of all handicapping. There can be winning strategies betting into that#.

[THE PROFIT]

The best legit capper in the biz IMO is marc Lawrence. He always talks about "in the stats". That is very important but like Pitt it doesn't always work out. You can't predict TO's. Even for a team with +12 TO can fumble & turn the tide of the game. Back to how do you know if you capped a game well? When a team is-3 & win by 4, I'm happy with the win but not my capping. Today I had Colorado +10.5 & they threw a TD pass with 00:00 on the clock to lose by 8. Happy with the win, not my capping. What I like about Marc Lawrence is he is on dogh 95% of the time. He finds value in them & hits way more of his plays than he loses. What I love most is a DD dog that wins SU or a 17 point fav that wins 63-10. Not a game where you're sweating for 60 minutes.

[reno cool]

just because you lost 28-0 doesn't mean you handicapped badly. Or that you should do the opposite of everything from now on.

[u21c3f6]

Here is how I look at it. First, I don’t handicap per se. There are certain factors that I am looking for but I am not trying to pick the winner. For me, it is not about a single game/event. I determine a method of play based on expected % of outcomes. As I play, I keep a check on the actual % of outcomes. As long as my expected %’s translate into actual %’s over a series of wagers, then I know my method is still valid (and I should be showing a profit). If I develop a method that I expect to hit 75% of the time and I go 4 for 10 at the start, while statistically possible, I am going to take a much harder look at it because there is a good chance that the method is not valid for 75%.

After discussing wagering with many different players over the years, here is something that I think happens to them. First, since I am not a “real” handicapper, most players don’t agree with or like what I have to say. Some get it, most do not. The main comment I get is how can you wager on something and not even know the names of the players/animals and not even know all the (usual) stats. etc. I then ask what I feel is the critical question, Do you collect more on your winning wagers than you lose on your losing wagers? The answer I get is usually something along the lines of, I would have won if so and so didn’t: drop the ball, miss the lay-up, fumble, get bumped and any other of the 1000’s of ways one can lose. Of course, those same 1000’s of ways someone can lose are also the ways that someone can win. Theoretically, it should be a wash in the end. I think most players only remember how they lost, not how they won, which distorts their mind-set. They believe that if it wasn’t for those “bad” games, they would have had a winning season. Since they believe that, they do not change their way of “handicapping” because they convince themselves that their method is profitable ignoring those “bad” games even though in reality it is not a profitable method.

The bottom line for me is this: I know I am doing something right when a series of wagers are performing as expected which ultimately means that I am collecting more on my winning wagers than I am losing on my losing wagers.

Joe.