+EV opportunities in sportsbetting?

[Sandwich]

Are the things described in this post strategies or techniques for +EV?


http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...=1#Post3759671



Maybe I'm bumping up against this truism from dankhank, (i.e., the posts on here are truly over my newbie head!):

"in general i think this forum's advice is a level or two up from beginner's advice. the posters don't tailor their message for newbies to understand."

In any event, maybe pointing my to some of those threads with "system-level disagreements" will help me understand this stuff better.... can anyone provide a link or two?

Thanks!

A +EV situation in sports betting is pretty much exactly the same as in poker. It's just a situation where the payout exceeds the probability that an event occurs. So given a spread, you have to determine how likely it is to occur, and then if the payout is greater, you have a +EV bet. A good example would be the last game of the NLCS with Oswalt and the Astros getting +150 or so. A +150 price is basically saying, this team will only win 40% of the time, which is obviously way off for a Cy Young candidate like Oswalt. The true odds are probably a coin flip at worst, therefore making the line a great +EV situation. Of course, most lines are not as glaringly off and most edges are small at best. Being able to identify the edge is the real trick and that's where research, experience, etc. come into play.

[ QUOTE ]
Disappointing, really. I was (naively?) hoping that there were specific strategies or situations that were +EV (in the mathematical sense).... i.e., ways to beat the vig on a consistent basis.

[/ QUOTE ]

Many people have their "systems", but they aren't always inclined to share, since it makes their +EV bets less +EV.

[20Five]

unlike poker, when all the cards are out on the table.. and there are obvious %'s involved in a variety of plays, it often can be difficult to find these +EV situations. As you spend more time and effort around sports betting, you'll get a better feel for where these chances are, whereas in poker its easy to learn about pot/implied odds in some situations and make the mechanical +EV calls raises or folds.

[SumZero]

Like you I know a lot more about poker than I do about sports betting.

That said sports betting is very unlike poker. In poker you can perform fairly simple calculations to figure out what percentage of the time your hand beats a specific hand, or what percentage of the time your hand beats a range of hands, what your pot odds are, or even more sophisticated ways to turn cEV into $EV using something like ICM.

In sports betting there is NO generally understood or agreed upon way to make these type of calculations. Some people have non-public simulations and systems and what not that they believe do an adequite job calculating these things for specific situations and teams, but unlike a situation where you hold JJ and face a raise and a reraise, which is going to happen a lot, the October 25th 2005 White Sox are only going to play the October 25th 2005 Astros once and never again in exactly the same circumstances. And while there are wrinkles in the JJ case (like chip stack sizes of the other players and if you are in a tournament what everyone's chip stack and blind sizes are), the variables in play in a sporting event are way more varried and way more difficult to keep track of.

In addition, in poker helping other 2+2ers to be better is only very, very, very marginally -EV. This isn't true in sports betting as if someone shares information it can lead to line changes and what not and if someone were to share the internal secrets of their system then they'd face the possibility that others might beat them to placing bets and then their system would no longer be valuable to them.

The nice part about sports betting is if you can beat $10/bet sports betting the skill level to beat $1000/bet sports betting is of minimal difference. The same is obviously not true of poker where beating $1000/bet poker is much, much, much harder than beating $10/bet poker.