When winning a bet, it's easy just to chalk it up to "correct" handicapping; in fact very few times have I seen bettors come out and say "yeah I didn't deserve to win that one". When losing, it's seems much easier to find points about the game that cost you the bet, but still preserve your idea that the bet was "correct". These tendencies seem vulnerable to significant biases by the bettor.
So my question, how do you determine after a game if you had a good bet? It seems like this skill would be very important to good handicapping, but I don't do it myself, nor have I seen others talk about doing it. When I do see it, it tends to be fairly limited and subjective.
A bettor who uses pure handicapping should have this a little easier, specifically: Did the game go how you expected it to go, in all the facets you handicapped?
For those that use power ratings, this seems harder, although I suppose you could look at weird anomalies that popped up that you don't include in the power rating used.