Sports Betting Books to Read?

[QuantumLeap]

My all time favorite (and one 100% recommended for beginners) is Stanford Wong’s Sharp Sports Betting. It’s still a classic book for serious sports betting. The math portions are very well written and easy to understand. Some of the content is outdated, but for the most part, it's still a very useful book.

Another one I truly got a lot of info out of, is Matthew Hilger’s The Poker Mindset. Not directly related to sports betting, but the mindset aspects discussed in the book (such as focusing on long term performance rather than short term results), are relevant for sports betting as well.

I after those you want to find more, I recommend you checking amazon reviews. Do a search like "betting books" or something like that:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=betting+books&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

Also check these couple of links, those sites list breakdown of what those books are about and mention a few more books on the topic

https://www.gamblingsitesonline.org/sports/articles/7-best-books-about-sports-betting/

https://www.payperheadhost.com/sports-betting/books/

I agree about Sharp Sports Betting. The principle I remember the most after reading it about 15 years ago is that buying points on or off key numbers will lose in the long run.

The author, Stanford Wong, showed tables of the frequency of the margin of scores in NFL games. He then went to show what price you would have to pay to buy on or off a key number, for example buying from -3 1/2 to -3 or buying from -3 to -2 1/2.

The thing that hit me that made perfect sense was that the books know this too. They aren't going to allow you to buy these numbers unless it was to the bettor's disadvantage in the long run.

[QuantumLeap]

I learned some skills for modelling sports which is the goal of the book. Making profit in sports betting is extremely hard. You're not going to open a book and follow it to the end of the rainbow to the pot of gold.

Thanks for the suggestion. Now that there is a break I hope to read this book in full.

Recently I've been looking for trends or "systems" in sports and have wondered why some systems don't work one year but start working for years after that. I also want to understand variance and whether a system is valid or just at the positive phase of variance.

[QuantumLeap]

Mr East's small amazon kindle books are good. use sports database to find winning angles (from the past, of course).

i can't believe the denigration of books and reading in general...... it's a great way to learn. and frankly, you could learn something about betting reading old russian authors or dickens. you learn human nature from those books.

learning via doing and street smarts is good too.

these things are complementary

I'll check them out. Thanks.

I've recently been getting back into the sports database queries to test out people's claims of winning systems and tweaking some of them to be more profitable. But that's not enough for me. I want to develop queries to discover new trends that are successful.