Sports, an activity that requires a body and mind to work in perfect coordination, is a passion for many. The world has seen sports lovers go crazy while supporting their favorite teams. Sports are equally fun for those who truly love this activity, whether they are sportsmen, die-hard fans, or bettors.
While a sportsman is there on the field and facing the opponent, a sports bettor is biting their nails and standing on their toes. The excitement and the adrenaline rush are all there, regardless of where a person finds themselves. The only difference between a sportsman and a bettor is that the latter plays with their mind only. Today, you don’t even have to be physically present at the site where the game is going on. You can tune in to any reliable sports betting website like betsofa.com and get to it from the comfort of your home.
Understanding Sports Betting
We all know what betting is, right? A form of gambling money, time, or any other possessions, where a person predicts the outcome of an event. This event can be anything from sports, weather, or any other unpredictable event. Betting has existed for centuries, and proof of that is the invention of six0sided dice that was first introduced in about 3000 B.C in Mesopotamia.
Sports betting, specifically, is a form of betting where the bettors predict the outcome of a game. The most popular betting games are football/soccer (without any doubt), followed by horse racing, tennis, rugby, golf, and now eSports.
How does it work? Well, it is pretty simple. You bet on a certain outcome of a sport, and if your prediction is accurate, you win money. But ‘predicting the right outcome’ in such an unpredictable event as sports is not easy.
Your skills and understanding of the game might help you, but this is not enough to win a sports bet. There is another way you can go about this, and that’s basing your predictions on stats.
Using Stats to Win Big in Sports Predictions
Data is one of the biggest assets in the world. Be it multinational corporations or a country’s government, data has helped organizations and institutions take logical and well-informed decisions. While data aids one’s capability to make the right decisions, this is a given that it can also play a key role in making you win a sports bet.
If you wish to pursue sports betting in the long run, usually referred to as easy money (wish it was easy in real), you need to learn the art of designing a data-driven sports strategy to make it big. This is a way you can beat the bookies using their own numbers.
The question is, “if designing a data-driven strategy for sports betting is an art, how can you embrace it?”
Don’t freak out just yet, and let us help you go about this with absolute finesse.
Start by Setting a Benchmark
The first step here is to set a benchmark for your predictions. If you’re a regular bettor, you’ll have enough data to determine the exact percentage of accuracy of your past predictions. For instance, if you’ve achieved XX% accuracy on an average in the past, is this bad, mediocre, or good. Once you have calculated your degree of accuracy, you need to compare it with an expert’s.
You can follow a sports expert and find the accuracy degree of their past predictions. This will help you get tips and insights into how a match might end. This will help in building confidence in your own predictions and give you a benchmark.
This is how the ‘prediction algorithm’ works.
Decoding the Secrets
When using data for sports predictions, what people usually do is refer to a bookmaker’s probabilities. Once they get into this, they realize that the probabilities of a certain party winning, losing, or drawing when added don’t give an absolute 100.
This confuses them, and they come back to the starting point.
It’s time we decode this secret for you. If you wish to know the exact odds, you need to remove the fixed for a bookmaker’s advantage. When you add the probabilities and get a number bigger than 100, the number after 100 is the bookmaker’s advantage. To calculate the fair odds, divide the bookmaker’s odds by the total odds (including the bookmaker’s cut).
Why should we use a bookmaker to set our benchmark? Well, bookmarkers have teams comprising of data scientists dedicated to analyzing decades of data. This is not an extent you can expect a sports expert to go just to give their predictions. Bookmaker’s teams of data scientists are experts in the field. They develop smart and effective models for predicting outcomes based on extensive data collected over decades.
Before you take this guide and get into the whole sports betting scene, know that there are no guarantees. In the end, it all goes down to luck. Yes, statistics can really improve your chances of winning a sports bet, but you can never be sure, right? After all, gambling has been named so for a reason.
This guide will definitely give you a direction, but you sometimes have to rely on your instincts, as they are there for a reason. While you’re at it, always keep a watch out for free bet no deposit bonuses to enjoy all more.