The bets you gamble can also increase gradually, and who knows you may even live on the betting, but you need a stable mind and careful planning if you are planning to make money sports betting. Reasonable bets. If you want to make money sports betting, you must start with a betting bank that can take some hits. One of the best strategies for wagering is betting against or fading the public. This strategy is used primarily for spread and totals betting in basketball and football. One of the best strategies for wagering is betting against or fading the public. This strategy is used primarily for spread and totals betting in basketball and football. Sports betting should always be fun to some extent, even if your ultimate goal is to make money. Avoid sports betting becoming more of a chore than a choice by taking regular breaks. This will help to keep it enjoyable, and coming back with fresh perspective can help with making good decisions too.

Whether you’re gambling on football, baseball, UFC, or any other sport, every sports bettor should follow a set of basic rules to bet smart and win money. Even if you are new to sports betting, establishing a consistent system early could lead to success in the outset of your gambling career.

Gambling can be a rewarding and profitable challenge if you know how to approach the industry. But, If you find yourself losing more than you’re winning, consider following the tips below.

For those new to gambling, or even veterans who are reevaluating your approach to betting, here are seven tips to help you make smarter sports bets.

1 – Stick to One Sport

If you find yourself on a losing streak or feel exhausted while scouting and placing bets, you might be overextending yourself. High volume betting is an excellent method for experienced gamblers who have an established system that works for them. If you’re somewhat new to betting or consistently lose, I recommend finding one sport to bet on and stick to it.

Whichever sport you pick is up to you; it truly makes no difference as long as you devote the time and energy to understand better how to win money on the sport. In the sports gambling world, being a jack of all trades and master of none might sound more enjoyable in theory, but stretching your sports acumen too thin can lead to consistent losses and a depleted bankroll.

2 ‒ Use Flat Betting

When I first started gambling on sports years ago, I made every textbook mistake out there. My biggest mistake was habitually developing tunnel vision on one particular bet and unloading several units, convincing myself it was a winner. Rarely do those large bets go my way.

Gamblers are prone to find a line that is too tantalizing to pass on and delude themselves into thinking they can outsmart the book. When this happens, you can sustain significant losses and take yourself out of action more often than not. Instead of making a few large bets, you should be mindful of your bankroll and make several bets of equal value with a smaller amount on the line.

This practice, known as flat betting, is a practice that eliminates the potential of suffering significant losses and forces you to maintain a consistent approach to gambling. Even if some of these smaller bets don’t win, you can bounce back and turn to some of the other bets you place to recoup losses.

3 ‒ Make Small Bets to Start

On the same line of thinking, placing smaller wagers is a great way to familiarize yourself with a particular sport. The only way to learn how to beat the book and win money is to find a successful strategy. This strategy can only be developed if you are consistently betting.

Smaller bets aren’t as appealing as one big bet that could potentially double your bankroll. But if a large bet loses and you blow past your bankroll, you take yourself out of the game and stunt any progress until you can reload your roll.

The amount you decide on depends on personal preference, but in my experience, betting 1% to 2% of your bankroll per bet works for me. So, if your bankroll is $750, each bet should be somewhere between $7.50 to $15. Once again, the amount is up to you, but never bet an amount you’re not comfortable losing.

4 ‒ Take It Seriously

At the beginning of any sports gambler’s career, the question of purpose needs to be asked. You need to figure out whether this is a side hobby to blow off steam, or if you’re sports betting to make money. If you fall into the latter category, you need to think of yourself as a small business.

The most important factor of a small business is profit, and you won’t achieve profits if your books aren’t consistent. Make sure to utilize a bankroll: a daily, weekly, or monthly budget, so you don’t jeopardize your financial security. This point cannot be overvalued. Virtually every successful gambler sets a limit and doesn’t exceed that amount.

5 ‒ Don’t Bet Like a Sports Fan

When you’re deciding which sport or which team to bet on, remind yourself why you’re gambling in the first place. If you engage in sports betting to add some excitement and entertainment value to the games you watch, that’s perfectly fine. But if you’re betting to win money, you need to approach lines like a sports gambler, not a sports fan.

This concept manifests itself in many forms, most prevalently in the form of the hometown bias bettor. Betting on your favorite teams and favorite players might make sense to you. I mean, who knows your team better than you, right? When you bet like a sports fan, you open yourself up to potentially making emotionally charged decisions, rather than adequately vetted.

I rarely, if ever, bet for or against my favorite team. Not only do I recognize that I’m incapable of removing bias from the situation, betting on my team can ruin the experience of watching games. Don’t let yourself believe that your diehard fanhood will translate to gambling wins.

6 ‒ Shop for the Best Line

Unless you have the luxury of knowing a bookie, most sites and sportsbooks have built-in “vigs” or advantages in the lines they set. The house always wins, even if they lose, they’re taking a small percentage of your winnings as a standard fee. Because of this, sports gamblers are still at a disadvantage.

To try to lessen this advantage, you should make sure you’re getting the best value on your bets. Lines can vary between sportsbooks and websites, so you have the opportunity to find the best line and maximize profitability. Shopping for lines can be tedious, and you might think a small difference between lines makes no difference.

However, if a book is giving you an extra point on a particular bet, that could be the difference between a win and a loss. Several well-reviewed sports websites all around the internet offer the potential of added value. Before you place a wager, make sure you’re finding the best line and best odds.

7 ‒ Research and Bet Sober

There are few things better than taking in a football game on Sunday with a cold drink in your hand: sports and drinking are a classic combination. Once again, gambling on sports and watching sports are two separate activities, and they should be approached as such. The best sports handicappers will tell you that a bet made under the influence can be a dangerous thing.

All the research and analysis you engage in should be conducted with a clear mind to make sure your decisions aren’t impaired. Sports gambling, like any other form of gambling, is challenging enough as it is. There’s no need to make it more complicated.

If you’ve placed your final bets for the day and want to reward yourself with a drink, make sure you don’t go down the rabbit hole of drunkenly chasing potential losses. This is where inexperienced gamblers routinely find trouble. To win serious money, you need to think of gambling as a second job. You don’t drink at your day job, so consider setting that standard for your sports gambling career.

Conclusion

Sports gambling is a serious business, and as a part of the betting world, you should take yourself seriously. Even if you consider gambling a hobby, it’s always more fun to win than it is to lose. New gamblers need to make sure to start on the right foot and themselves to a high standard.

Profit may be hard to come by in the early stages, but if you follow these tips, you will put yourself in a position to succeed. Make sure to start with smaller wagers on one sport, remove emotional attachments to particular teams and players, manage your money, and treat gambling like a small business. Following these tips will give you a strong base to learn about the industry and figure out the best strategy for you.

Ever wondered how you are actually doing in sports betting?

Just like tracking your finances can be an eye opening experience (I spent how much at restaurants last month?!), tracking your bets can shed some light on your performance.

Download the free sports bet tracking spreadsheet below to get started (available for both Excel and Google Sheets):

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet: Instant Insights

If you want to measure your performance and see where you are succeeding and failing, you need to track it.

With this free tool, you can see your performance broken down by various dimensions.

Have a great ROI on betting NBA 2nd halves? Getting solid closing line value on NFL point spreads? This spreadsheet allows you to answer questions like this and more.

How to use the spreadsheet

While the spreadsheet is pretty straightforward, I’d like to walk you through how it works.

How to track sports bets

Everything lives in the “Bet Log” tab. This is the only place information is manually entered. Once the data is entered there, all other tabs will automatically populate.

In the “Bet Log” tab, blue columns are required while red columns are optional. The more information you input, the more useful the spreadsheet will be.

Entering things like the closing line, while slightly annoying, will also be the most important to your success.

How to analyze performance

Each tab will have different graphs and tables that show your performance. The beauty of this is that you can filter the data by any dimension you like.

Any yellow cell is an “input” cell that can be changed. All of these are dropdowns that are pre-populated based on the information you enter in the Bet Log.

How to add more leagues and teams

To add new leagues and teams, you will do so in the “REF” tab. This tab holds all of the lookup information for the dropdowns throughout the spreadsheet.

Again, the cells available to modify are in yellow. You can add the following dimensions:

• Leagues (ex: WNBA)
• Teams (ex: Chicago Sky)
• Tags (ex: 2nd half)

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Metrics

Deciding what to track is important in determining how you measure success. The spreadsheet tracks the following key metrics:

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Closing Line Value

Closing line value (CLV) is a measure of how much better or worse the odds you bet at were compared to where they closed.

If you believe the markets you are betting into are efficient (NFL point spreads, MLB moneylines, etc.), then CLV is a great predictor of long term success.

All you need to do is input the odds you placed your bet at as well as where the odds closed. Preferably you use a market making sportsbook like Pinnacle to decide what the “true” closing line was.

Profit

Profit is about as simple as it gets. Are you making or losing money?

While this is the “bottom line”, surprisingly it isn’t always predictive of long term success. Still, you will obviously want to see how much money you have made or lost.

ROI

This is what most people tend to look at. It is a measure of how profitable you are relative to how much you are risking.

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While at the end of the day, the money in your pocket is what matters, this metric focuses more on results rather than process and is a measure of efficiency.

ROI isn’t as predictive of long term winning as CLV, but is useful to track to see where you stand.

Risk

This one is simple, yet will likely give you insights into where you are putting your money.

If you have a model, does it consistently value the Dallas Cowboys differently than the market? Thus making many of your bets on the Cowboys? Analyzing your risk by league/team/bet type can give you these types of answers.

Bankroll

Bankroll will track our running total of how much money you have in your accounts across all sportsbooks. You can also see this trended over time to help you see any changes in your betting strategy and how that has affected your bankroll.

It is very useful to see, at a glance, where your money lies. Is 95% of our bankroll at FanDuel? Maybe you should shift some to DraftKings.

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Dimensions

Having these metrics available is important, but insights really come from slicing the data by different dimensions.

League/Team

Tracking your performance by league or team can give you clues into where your strengths or weaknesses are.

Do you watch every second of every New York Knicks game? Think you have an edge on Knicks games? You can find out using the spreadsheet.

Same goes for leagues. Do you follow NFL closely but use strictly numbers for NCAA Basketball? Compare the performance of the two and see what’s working.

Bet Type

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Looking at performance by bet type can also shed some light on your process, especially if it is model driven.

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Track your performance by the following bet types:

• Spread
• Moneyline
• Total
• Prop
• Future

You can also use the “Tag” field to designate special types of bets. For example, if you want to see your performance on moneylines for NBA 2nd halves, you would put “2H” (or something similar) in the Tag field and “moneyline” in the bet type field.

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Date

A common way to analyze performance is to look at metrics trended over time.

Look at any of the metric/dimension combinations above trended over any time period you’d like.

Want to see your performance over the last 14 days? Or how about the last 12 weeks? Both are possible here.

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Google Sheets Sports Betting Tracker

The sports betting tracker is also available on Google Sheets. While the features are the same as the Excel file, Google Sheets has some notable benefits:

• Available/online at all times
• Can enter bets on your phone using the Sheets app
• You don’t need to be at a computer to enter your bets
• Google Sheets auto saves any changes
• Allows multiple users to be in the sheet at the same time and make changes