We'll focus on College Basketball and take a look at various factors that can help you to improve your sports handicapping.
College Basketball
College Basketball is one of the workhorses for the professional sports bettor. Once the season starts in November, hundreds of teams play about two games a week -- vying for a spot in the Final Four. This frenzy leading into March Madness means that there are college hoop games almost every day of the week -- and especially Saturdays! Lots of opportunity... And lots of data overload... This makes college hoops a slightly different animal. We'll review some of the sports betting tools that might help you wade through the oceans of data.
Betting Against the Public and Square Plays
Betting Against the Public has proven to work across all of the major bwin sports. Its consistency is remarkable; we have seen that Betting Against the Public and SportsInsights' Square Plays have consistently won in the 54%-57% range, on average. As we know, winning streaks and losing streaks happen. For example, last year was a difficult year for many professionals in the NFL, as it has been called "The Year of the Favorites." This year, the NFL has bounced back strongly, with SportsInsights' Square Plays achieving 69% (!) winning percentage.
In College Hoops, Betting Against the Public works as well. However, due to the massive data overload, basing plays solely on Betting Percentages may not lead to results as good as, say SportsInsights.com's Square Plays. SportsInsights bases its Square Plays on its contacts within the industry (including sportsbooks and "sharp" bettors), actual money bet, and other sources -- to get VALUE for their members. We believe that College Hoops is one area where SportsInsights' contacts and knowledge helps to weed out the noise of "college hoops data overload" and noise.
Number of Bets
SportsInsights shows numerous indicators, with Betting Percentages being its most popular. We agree that Betting Percentages are very useful at helping to uncover value in the sports marketplace. We also feel, however, that other indicators - such as the Number of Bets and Line Movement - are important as well. At BettingCharts, we feel that this is particularly true in sports such as College Basketball. There are just SO many games, that this indicator can help to drive you to the games that the public is following most. We performed a test to look at how this factor can help improve results.
Using a simple system that typically takes College Hoops underdogs, we overlaid a filter that played only the top 1/3 of games in terms of number of bets. The winning percentage increased by more than 2%! This makes sense because games with public interest will lead to overpriced favorites. The moral of the story: if you are Betting Against the Public, focus on the games where there is a lot of Public interest.
