Same-same never been to vegas though but that's how I would do it.Sports wagering the odds are best - it's the vig that gets pissy.Saw a few pages back of Black Jack discussion.
Yeah, sports betting is just like poker -- a skill game with a high variance due to inherent luck.
It's also like poker in that the house doesn't care who wins. In sports betting the goal is simply to have 50/50 betting on each side of a wager, and in poker it's just to have action going. Sports betting it's the vig where the house makes its money, poker it's the rake.
The problem with sports betting, though, is that you can't make money with a 1-2% advantage, because you need to win 55%+ of your bets to beat the vig. Which means the skill isn't in betting every game and hoping that you can win >55%, it's in identifying where the spread or O/U is
significantly wrong and that you can figure that out with >55% certainty.
Way back in 2006 I spent an entire season tracking picks on my old blog. I picked every Big Ten game--minus Purdue because I couldn't separate emotions--which is to say I *picked* Purdue but didn't count it to my season stats because I knew I couldn't be objective... I also would look around at the national scene and pick games where I thought there was something particularly interesting about the matchup or the line.
Over the course of a season, I would pick 8-10 games per week, and I finished the year with a 62.5% record against the spread. Which I was, and am, pretty proud of.
The problem was that when I did the math, if I had been betting $100/game, over 3+ months of work my entire winnings for the year would have been ~$1K. Based on the number of hours of analysis, the risk, etc, I thought to myself "this is a grind--it's just not worth it."
