Hi all. I posted this question in the Newbie forum yesterday and haven't gotten alot of input. Although thank you to Statnerds for giving me a little direction. I understand it's a littler early for some to be focusing on football but I'm a junkie.
I'm a casual bettor for the most part. I usually come out ahead on the year but I am very much a feel bettor that also relies on statistical mismatches and situation plays. I play NFL, CFB, and CBB and win at a 52-53% clip normally with some good seasons and some not so good seasons. So basically, I win enough of the time to have the vig eat up most of my potential profits. I'm not necessarily looking to quit my job and cap full time but I don't mind putting in the work to be a better player.
What I'm looking for is some help getting me started in coming up with some type of procedure that uses the abundant amount of information on the internet and then apply that to a system to handicap my lines ahead of time as apposed to looking at my book's lines and doing my reactionary analysis from there. I'm not a math genius but I'm a computer tech and am certainly good with math and I'm not afraid of learning knew things. I just don't know where to start and I want to do this "the right way", if there is such a thing.
I'm seeing alot of information about yards per point for both teams and dividing that into the average yards allowed by the opposing teams. I've also seen some people talk about using strength of schedule, QB Rating, ... even yards per pass attempt ... and so on.
I understand noone is going to come in here and hand over the keys to a productive system they have spent years perfecting for free. So I don't expect that. I'm just looking for some advice on what stats and news are more important that others and maybe some other pointers on how to come up with an efficient process to get a somewhat accurate starting line and then I will use situational data and other information to determine if a particular line presents value.
Any input from some of the veterans to help this casual bettor become more of an intermediate capper and possibly a sharp at some point down the road would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone knows of a book that isn't complete garbage, I'd be interested in doing some reading up on the subject. Looking for literature on gambling at amazon.com is like walking through a cow pasture. Thanks again guys ... and good luck to all.
I agree it isn't easy picking out the useful books on Amazon compared to the useless ones. I saw in the other thread that you have just gotten Conquering Risk - after I had read through that I was looking for other books, and appened to notice that the author of that had written a favourable amazon review for another book I saw (I can't remember offhand now exactly what that book was) but if you find it and click on his other reviews then there was a list of other books he had reviewed as well.
I had a quick scan down the list, noted which ones he had given good reviews for and then went and had a proper look at each of them books individually to see if any sounded like they would be useful to what I was looking for, and ordered a few of the ones that did sound useful.
It's not a fool proof plan by all means, but I have to say that the books I have bought this way all live up to expectaions so far so has worked for me.
Maniac ... I received your pm but was unable to reply as I only have 12 (now 13) posts. Thank you so much for the information and guidance. I know this is going to be a process that will take years and I already had plans of getting into programming. All my computer experience is computer repair, server management, and networking. This project will give me some motivation to get moving on my programming skills. Good luck to you and I'll definitely look you up if I have any more questions. You've been extraordinarillly helpful!
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