Winning bettors rely on learnable skills, not secret picks. Build a stronger foundation with five essentials covering price, probability, bankroll, markets, and evaluation.
Back to VideosThe sportsbook's biggest edge isn't their mountains of data or their rooms full of experts or even their deep pockets. It's your lack of knowledge. But you can learn the skills it takes to fight back. And today, I'm going to show you five of the essential tactics to level the playing field and start getting an edge over the sports books. Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide software tools and education to help people find and place sharper bets. Over the past 20 plus years, I've taken millions from casinos and sports books, largely based on these five key building blocks that I'm going to share with you today.
Sports betting has a massive surface area, and as long as you're willing to put in the work, you can find new angles to get an edge every single day. And if you develop the skills to be successful at it, you can scale it to fit your life. Whether it's a hobby or a side hustle or a full-time job where you can work when and how you choose. But all of those paths start in the same place with a few fundamental skills you need to master. So let's start our countdown with the best way to build a bankroll.
Everyone wants a bigger bankroll, but the size of the bankroll you start with plays a huge part in how big your bankroll can get. You see, a bigger bankroll allows you to generate more money with the same edges. It compounds faster, and it gives you more of a cushion to survive losing streaks. One of the easiest ways to build up your bankroll is to get the most out of your signup bonuses.
Now, it's a one-time deal, so you need to get it right when you have the opportunity. One of the most common bonuses that sports books use is the risk-free bet promo. First, play for the maximum bonus that your bankroll can sustain. Second, take advantage of every risk-free bet that you have access to. And third, don't use risk-free bets on big favorites. This strategy maximizes the expected value of your bonuses instead of wasting them on short price plays that don't do much to help expand your bankroll. And when you're signing up for as many bonuses as you can, you automatically jumpst start the next thing on our list, and that's mastering line shopping.
The more bonuses you sign up for, the more sportsbook accounts you'll have. And you want to have as many accounts at Sportsbooks that are as available to you as possible. That's because it gives you the ability to effectively shop for lines, which isn't any different than shopping for the best price on anything else. If you wanted to buy a new Jeep, you wouldn't go to just one dealership. You'd try to find which one in your area had the best price. Line shopping means before you make any bet, you scan the sports book to see who has the best price and make your bet there.
If you want to bet the Tigers, well, you should look at FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars, Bet MGM, Rivers, and all the other sports books that you have access to. Now, some might list Detroit at plus 140. Some might say plus 145. It might seem like a small difference, but when you're making dozens of bets a day, these small differences add up over time. Line shopping is the single sharpest thing you can do to improve as a bettor. It allows you to win more when you win and lose less when you lose. In fact, losing less when you lose is why we're going to do number three on the list.
Figuring out the hold. An essential skill is looking for bets that have the lowest possible hold even before we think about what team or even what sport we want to bet on. You see, the hold is the amount of money the sports book keeps on every market after all bets have been collected and winners paid out. Now, for major markets like the NBA or an NFL spread, books can expect to keep around 4 1.5% of all the money bet on each game. To be a long-term winner, you have to overcome the hold in the markets you bet. So, it's critical that you want to look for markets where there is as low a hold as possible.
Now, when the hold is low, you don't have to be right as often as you do in a higher hold market. And when you lose, you lose less. One way to make sure you're finding low hold markets is to calculate the hold by finding the best price on the underdog at all your available sports books and then the best price on the favorite. This is commonly referred to as finding the synthetic hold. You can calculate the hold in that market and decide if you have a good opportunity or if it's one where the hold is so high that it's not worth playing.
Once you're used to looking over all the books in the market to find good opportunities, well then the next thing on our list is a natural step.
Finding your source of truth. That's because you'll start finding information at one sports book that you can use against another. So, how does that work? Well, it starts by understanding that not all sports books are created equal. What's the difference between circus sports and Caesars? Well, they both let you bet on a variety of sports. They both have apps or places you can bet in person and they both are legal regulated entities that you can trust.
But circus sports is a sharp book and Caesars is a recreational book. And the difference comes down to how they run their operation. You see, books like Circa adjust their lines based on information they take in from customers that they know to be sharp. And recreational books tend to just follow the moves that the sharp books make. Now, when you know which books are making moves based on sharp information and which ones are merely following the herd, you can leverage that information. This is what top-down betting is all about. So, we've built up a bankroll and we've learned how to find the sharp betting opportunities and how to get the most out of them once we find them.
But there's one skill left that you need that touches on every single facet of sports betting. The number one skill you need to master to start betting sharper is to learn how to equate price and probability.
This is what drives all of your decisions as a bettor. When it comes to betting, we use the word price a lot, but what is a price? Well, every bet has one. If a moneyline bet is Dodgers -1 180, well, that's the price. Or a spread bet, that is the Knicks plus 3 1/2 110, well then the price of that bet is 110. But a price is really just another way of saying a probability. By translating prices to probabilities, you see exactly what it is you're betting. Dodgers minus 180 means that the sports book is saying they think there's around a 62% chance that LA wins the game once you account for the sports book's big.
They'll sell you that 62% chance to win $100 for the price of $180. If you have a good reason to think that the Dodgers have a 70% chance to win the game, it's a fantastic bet. That price should be closer to minus $230. You'd be buying the bet for much less than it's worth. Learning to think in terms of probability is how you go from a casual better with no shot at winning in the long term to a skilled sports bettor who can quantify their opinion. Successful sports betting is about quantifying those probabilities better than the sports books.
