The best way to increase your earnings from betting is to develop a basketball betting guide. Such a guide will help you cut your losses, and increase your earnings. This is precisely how professional bettors operate. They don't place bets on whims and fancies as is the general belief, but after considerable hard work.
In contrast, amateur bettors go with the public mood. They win some, and loose more. So if you want to win you must have your own betting guide.
This guide should include the following details: 1. Know your teams. Go through the newspaper reports carefully. Also listen to the team analysis done by professionals on the TV. Make a list of the strong and weak points of the players in each team, and the performance of teams at home and away.
A good guide should cover at least two, if not three, seasons. Check which players are injury-prone and are likely to miss big games. Work out the impact of their absence on team performance.
Use an Excel sheet, and make a noting of team ratings by different newspapers, TV channels and websites. Based on this, arrive at you own rating. 2. Team Motivation: several bets go wrong because the bettor has not evaluated the motivation level of a team to win a game.
A team that has already qualified will save its best for the final. It would rest its key players or experiment with new team formations. These are useful strategies that coaches adopt. In contrast, a team that is facing elimination will go the extra mile to win, even if the opposition is full of stars. Team performances are also affected by back to back matches.
A team may be too drained to put up its best when made to play a game the next day, and end up loosing to a weaker team. Your guide will alert you to these possibilities. 3. Follow a match closely: Your guide must have a column that must describe in detail why your team won or lost. Very often, the final scores do not tell the correct tale of a match. A team that may have lost may have actually played better basketball.
Such match descriptions will help you form a better opinion of teams, and their players. 4. Public opinion: Strong public opinion in favor of a team leads to heavy betting on them. Every one wants to wager on a team that is winning.
This makes the bookies reduce the odds. Even if you win, your earnings are meaningless. So, stay away from such teams or bet low on them. Put you money on teams that are dark horses or strong fighters.
5. Make more straight bets: It is better to win four straight bets and loose two over a week, than to go for two parlays and lose both. Parlays can bring you big money, but the stakes are very high.
Even one wrong result can undo your good work.
David Barnes phd. Social Sciences, UTSA http://www.ifantasy-basketball.info
