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.