You'd be best served becoming an expert in roulette. I know I read that somewhere.
I don't know about that... I think there's a legitimate ground for skill to give you an edge here.
Years ago, I spent an entire season publicly posting and tracking picks on my blog. Over the course of one season (2005 or 2006, can't remember which), I was picking 62.5% ATS, and all you need to beat the vig is 55%. I think college has much more variance (and probably a lot less attention) than picking NFL, and it's a lot easier to spot places where the line is just flat out wrong.
I did this through several ways:
- I did not pick games involving Purdue or Notre Dame. Too much emotional bias.
- I did not pick weeks 1 & 2 because it's too early to know what teams look like due to the degree of turnover on college rosters.
- I primarily picked Big Ten games because those were the programs with which I had a high degree of familiarity.
- Outside the Big Ten, I looked for games where I had a gut feel that the spread might be "wrong", and if my additional research backed up that claim, I included it in my spread tracking.
Essentially what I found was that I'd be picking about 6-8 games per week. Assuming 8 games per week and betting $110 per game (to win $100, just using this for the math), I'd average winning 5 bets per week and losing 3. So I'd gain $500 per week vs a loss of $330, or $170 per week. Averaged over a season, I could've pulled down a good $1500 or so.
The follow-up question, of course, is "well then why don't you do it?"
To that I say this... It takes a lot of time and effort to put into those picks. At the time I didn't really want to devote $800 a week to a betting pool, knowing that a bad week could hit me hard. And all that work and research over a span of 3-4 months, for only $1500? It just wasn't a big enough win to justify the time and risk. If I'd actually wanted to make $1500 over that time, I probably could have found much less risky ways to do so.
To make enough money to be worth it also meant risking a lot more, and especially in 2005/2006 I didn't have a significantly higher bankroll (say betting $550 per game x 8 per week) to do it.
That said, I'd bet that a lot of us on this site could pick games at a money-winning clip. Don't you think you could do better than a 55% record against the spread if you really put your mind to it?
