What can Dr. Bob do for you?

My monthly and season sports analysis subscriptions give you access to my Best Bets (and Strong Opinions in football) at a discounted price and allow you to use my Best Bets release page – which releases each Best Bet simultaneously to everyone, one at a time, on a countdown.

While my success in sports handicapping over the years has led to movement in the point spreads shortly after releasing my Best Bets, most of my clients that use my Best Bets release page have successfully gotten their plays in before the line moves on each Best Bet. Being able to get down before the lines move is a major benefit to purchasing one of my season packages rather than buying my weekly or daily packages, which are only available after all Best Bets are released to subscribers on the Best Bets release page.

Given the long history of success on my Best Bets (73% annual returns), the cost of my sports betting advice is very affordable. In fact, if you’re going to be wagering on sports you probably can’t afford not to use my service since most amateurs, and most other professional handicappers, don’t even win 50% of their bets.

Make sure to read my Sports Betting as an Investment article for more information on how good of an investment Dr. Bob Sports has been and whether you can afford the cost of the service based on your bankroll.

The Origins of Dr. Bob

My illustrious sports handicapping career began at Berkeley when I entered a $2 NFL pool and, after doing a few minutes of simple math, won $100. I was pretty much hooked right out of the gate.

From that point on, I started using my statistics classes as excuses to feed football data through the campus mainframes. In those first three years I won a respectable 63% and decided I'd had enough of school. I quit and became a tout.

The first thing I did was publish a betting guide. After that was released I started advertising a 900 number, writing columns for gambling publications and appearing on radio shows. It wasn't all easy street though, believe me. I was forced to wait tables for a long time on the side. Finally, in 1998, as 900 numbers began to fall out of vogue, I decided to make a desperate move: I equipped my new website to take credit cards. This turned out to be the best bet of my career. Over the next six weeks I made $30,000 "and that was that!"

For most of my career I handicapped teams by looking for situations or "angles" that had a way of predicting future results. If a college football team was favored by seven points or more in a minor bowl after losing their last game, for instance, I would know that the last 36 teams who met that criteria had covered the point spread only eight times. If one of these strong angles applied to a team, I would bet accordingly. This became the basis for my sports betting advice at the time.

However, I suffered a pretty bad losing season in football in 2003, and decided to tweak my method with another layer of rigor. For NFL games, I built a mathematical model to project how many points each team was likely to score in a coming matchup. Eventually, with three years of data and hundreds of hours of tinkering, I built a similar math model for college sports betting.

As well as these methods have worked, they have done nothing to my workload though. I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my win percentage and pass them on to my subscribers. In the months when basketball and football overlap, I tend to work about 18 hours a day nearly every day, sleeping in bursts of no more than four hours. The carpet below my desk chair has been worn bald! My wife has to come in and remind me to stand up periodically so I don't get blood clots in my legs!

Most of my time working is spent making tiny adjustments. If a team loses 12 yards on a running play, I check the game summary to make sure it wasn't a botched punt. I also try to compensate for the strength of every team's opponent. It typically takes me around eight hours just to calculate a rating I invented to measure special teams! Trivial as this seems, all this work makes predictions at least 4% better, and that 4% can have a huge effect when spread out over an entire season. It can sometimes be the difference between finishing with a winning percentage and a losing one.

As always, check out www.DrBobSports.com for picks on every game, every week.

Why the house always wins

Tired of losing his money to the house, a bored millionaire in Las Vegas turns to you and offers you a proposition that you can't refuse. He pulls out a stack of casino chips and declares:

"I've got a 100-sided, evenly weighted die, which I am going to roll. If it comes up 1 through 57 you win, if it comes 58 through 100 I win. We're playing for even money. How much do you want to bet?"

How would you respond? Obviously you accept, but you are uncertain as to exactly how much you should wager - you are a solid favorite, but not an overwhelming one. The answer to this question is much deeper and more important to an investor's bottom line than the average sports bettor ever realizes.

Now let's say that the bored millionaire had one constraint. He tells you you could start with no more than $500 (your bankroll) and if you ran out of money, you couldn't re-load. Also, every roll of the dice costs $100, or essentially 20% of your bankroll on each bet. Would you still take it? Think you could still come away with a profit?

You had better not! You are virtually guaranteed to go bankrupt in this situation. Over the long haul, you will win about 57% - it's a mathematical certainty. But, over the short term, you are not guaranteed a thing. You'll have ups and downs that not even the most sophisticated football analysis computers in the world could predict. On your first twenty rolls you could easily go 2-18! If I forced you to bet 20% of your bankroll, you'd be crazy to do it because I would take your money like taking candy from a baby.

Yet,if you think about it, most bettors routinely do the equivalent of taking this bet every day! Nearly every sports bettor bets too much per game relative to the size of their bankroll. It's insanity, to me, to think that someone would risk half of their "stack" (to borrow a term from poker) on one game of Football. But that's exactly what the house banks on...

THE HOUSE WINS BECAUSE YOU BET TOO MUCH PER GAME.

The average sports better runs out of money before they have a chance to let the odds work for them. They bank on you not knowing this simple rule. It's the main reason why they win time and time again.

It is very tempting to put down a lot on each game, especially when you are winning. Most betters do it for the added excitement it gives you when you watch the event. I'm telling you though, if you want to win money, the only way to do this is to BET BORING. Everyone goes through good and bad streaks in sports handicapping. No one can win EVERY bet. Do yourself a favor though and allow yourself to "stay in the game." Don't miss out on that late-season run of luck because you dropped you whole roll on a "lock" that busted!

To me, knowing that I control the biggest impediment to my winning is empowering! Regardless of whether or not you follow my other sports betting advice, this is the single biggest thing you can do to prevent yourself from going broke. Be disciplined. Bet boring. And win more money.

Maximizing your utility in sports betting

When deciding on your sports betting picks, you should seek a strategy that maximizes their utility. For the uninformed, utility is a measure of relative satisfaction (ie. success or value for your bet). In other words, it is a term referring to the total return that you can expect to receive from your bet.

In all of my sports handicapping strategies, I aim for utility maximization, because depending on a bettor's long-term financial goals, they can have very different marginal values for their money. Betting strategies can be aggressive or conservative, although in reality even my aggressive strategies are somewhat conservative compared with the ridiculous over betting advice that one will often find online.

Sports betting advice can also either be flat (where every unit is the same) or progressive (where units grow or decrease with the bankroll). For both flat and progressive strategies, bet sizing is correlated to confidence (more confidence = larger bets). Yet where other touts' unit sizing is arbitrary, I size all my wagers as described by mathematically optimal ratios for growth as correlated with win percentage confidence. Furthermore, all necessary precautions have been taken to avoid over betting, which can be dangerous to your bank roll and your bottom line.

You can learn more about this and all of my other strategies for sports investing at DrBobSports.com!

Looking To Make A Little Money Doing Sports Betting Handicapping

There are bettors everywhere hoping to earn some cash placing winning bets, but the seasoned ones knows that simply looking at the spreads on games is not enough to make an informed decision. They understand a sure thing is never a sure thing. There are always other variables that must be studied before doing sports handicapping can be effective.

Some of these people will tell you that one of the first things to understand is how well the players play together and work as a unit. Did someone special that most of them relied on recently get traded, or did someone that most dislike get signed to their team?

Another consideration is what their track record has been over the past few games they have played. Are they on a losing streak or on a winning streak? These things have a tendency to go in spurts.

Of course, knowing what your team is doing is important, but it is just as important that you study the team you are betting against. Do they have a tendency to always perform poorly against your team, or do they seem to dominant them every time they play each other?

Everybody has issues and problems in their lives and athletes are no different than the rest of us. There are things that can happen that affect their emotions that will determine how well they play. Maybe they recently lost a loved one and are either inspired or depressed. Perhaps they are suffering from an injury that will let them still play, but not at their best level.

When it comes to sports betting advice it is as much a science as it is in understanding human emotions. If you are going to be good at it you will need to understand the dynamics that goes into creating a spread.

Are you tired of making poor sports betting choices? Would you like your friends and colleagues to value your wager decisions? Then check out Dr. Bob Sports for the best in sports handicapping! The world famous Bob Stoll offers wagering tips on collegiate and pro football as well as the NBA. Free analysis is available on the site, along with essays on sports betting, money management, football analysis, and other useful information.