New bettors often lose for predictable reasons. Avoid five common mistakes involving price, bankroll, research, market selection, and short-term results.
Back to VideosIf you've ever held off on a bet because someone told you never to lay more than minus 150, or if you love to put parlays together just for fun, congrats. You've just made two of the five rookie mistakes I see new bettors make every day. But don't worry, I'm going to show you all five mistakes and how you can get past them. And if you can master this last one, well, you'll have the key to smarter bets and bigger profits. Are you ready? Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide software, tools, and education to help people find and place sharper bets.
I've been a professional gambler for over 20 years, and a lot of the mistakes that I made along the way were valuable lessons learned. Nobody is perfect, and you're going to make mistakes as a sports bettor. Hopefully, this helps you recognize some of the common ones and learn from them. Imagine for a second you're looking over the schedule for NFL's week 2. You like the Lions over the Bears at your only sports book, Bet MGM, because the Bears look lousy against the Vikings in week one. You're sure the Lions are going to win, but you aren't so sure about the 6 and 12 point spread. So, you'll take Detroit on the money line.
But minus 300 on the money line is more than you want to pay. So, you parlay them with the Cowboys, Niners, and Steelers. Three other big favorites playing against questionable teams. That way you can bank those four easy wins and turn it into a better payday than betting 50 bucks to win about 15 if you were playing the Lions by themselves. Sounds good, right? Well, not so much. So, what did you do wrong?
The first mistake you made was that you only had one sports book.
You see, the sports books are selling you the chance to win $100. Would you rather pay $300 for that chance or $270? Well, you don't get to choose when you only have one sports book available. The mistake is not opening up as many accounts as possible in your area. That's because it allows you to line shop. And line shopping is the single sharpest thing you can do to make better bets. Before you make a bet, scan what's available on all the books. It helps to use an odd screen like the free one you can use at Unabated to see where the best number is for your bet.
If you had, you'd have seen Circus Sports offered the same Lions bet for minus 270 for bettors that have that book available in their state. That's a huge difference. If Chicago pulled the upset, you'd have lost 10% less at Circa over MGM. $270 versus $300. Of course, both those bets require you to lay out a lot more than you stand to win. And a lot of bettors just don't like doing that. If that's you when you bet, hey, you're not alone. That's why it's next up on our list. A team that's priced at minus 300 is a big favorite.
And big favorites demand laying a big price if you want to back them. In our first scenario, the book had priced Detroit like a team that wins its games 75% of the time. But it's not uncommon for newer btors to stay away from these kinds of bets because of mistake number four, being scared to lay a big price. If that's you, it means you're potentially passing on long-term winners because you're afraid of short-term risk.
But sports betting isn't a slot machine and it isn't a lottery. That's because every price is just a representation of a probability. And the key to being a long-term winner in sports betting is finding bets where your probability of winning is better than the probability that's being sold to you. It doesn't matter if the bet is priced at plus 120 or -200. You have to be right 45% of the time to break even at plus 120 or 66.7% of the time to break even at -200. If you can accurately estimate that the probabilities of those bets winning are 47% and 68% respectively, you're going to win in the long run.
That's because newer bettors often fall into the trap of thinking that sports betting is about just figuring out which team will win a game. When in fact, it's a game of identifying the right price and acting on that. No matter what the team is or the game is, there should be a price where you'd be willing to back the team you think is likely to lose. If the 85 Bears played the 2017 Browns in the Super Bowl and someone offered you a million to1 on Cleveland, you'd be a fool not to take it. And you'd be just as much a fool to bet a million dollars on the Bears to win $1. Price always matters.
And it's the probability relative to that price which really matters. Otherwise, if you're only looking to bet a little to win a lot, you're playing the lottery.
And that's what's behind number three on our list. Instead of laying minus 300 on Detroit, remember we were going to parlay Dallas, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh with them. That parlay paid around plus 350. But how often does something like that hit? Even if all four teams were huge minus 300 favorites, you'd only win that parlay less than one out of three times. In this case, if you subtract out the vig and multiply their probabilities together, you'll find that the true probability should be nearly 4.5 to 1, you're getting plus 350 when you should be getting plus 450. And the parlay is only going to win about 19% of the time.
It's fun to triple your money when you hit, but in the long run, you're just going to lose faster than the wins can replenish your bankroll. And the math says you're going to lose four out of every five. Just like on that week 2 Sunday when the Lions, Cowboys, and Niners all won, but the Steelers fell flat. Missing it by one game might seem like a bad beat. But consider this. Your odds of missing a parlay by just one leg is equal to your odds of winning times however many legs are in that parlay. So in this case, your odds of winning were 18.6%.
But your odds of missing by just one leg, 74.4%. No wonder sports books like to remind you that you were oh so close. It may seem like having four big favorites all win is a layup. But the truth is the probability is against you, even if you've seen those same quality teams racking up win after win.
And that's because recency bias messes with your head. If you roll six straight sevens on a pair of dice, does that mean that the next roll is more or less likely to be a seven? Well, neither. Of course. Every roll is its own event, and the chance of rolling a seven is always the same, one in six. The Bears looked really bad in week one when the Vikings stunned them with a big late rally. Does that tell you whether minus 300 is the right price for Detroit in the next game? Bad teams can get hot and good teams can go cold. A few games in either direction doesn't tell you anything meaningful in a vacuum.
When you bet because of these kinds of trends or streaks, you're falling victim to number two on our list, recency bias. You see this all the time in the NFL, where a team has a dominant performance one week and loses to an opponent everyone expected them to easily handle in the next week. NFL sample sizes are small and bettors overreact to them all the time. To make sharp bets, you need to consider a team's full body of work and what it tells you about their chances in the bet you're considering, not just what they've done lately. You can even be blinded by recency in your own betting.
It can be a symptom of the biggest mistake that I see newers make.
And it's the number one problem on our list. You see, winning is great, but I see people all the time who'd rather win a bad bet than lose a good one. You need to have a winning process to find those good bets. Something you stick to even when the short-term results aren't coming. It helps if you have a feedback loop so you know when your process is working right and when you're doomed to lose money because they weren't great bets to begin with. Sharp bettors have tools and techniques like closing line value to help evaluate whether the bets they've made would have been good or bad in the long run.
One bad beat shouldn't send you scrambling to revamp a fundamentally strong process. Nor does it mean stringing together a couple of wins proves you have it all figured out. Bets made with a bad process behind them win all the time. And incredibly, sharp bets lose a frustratingly frequent amount as well. This is a game that's built around the long haul. And over the long run, you're going to make mistakes. But all these mistakes I've laid out from just this one game weren't so much five different mistakes, but rather the same mistake five different ways. It was a mistake in the process or lack thereof.
You see, you didn't shop for a better line because you assumed the Lions would win and the price didn't matter. You like Detroit because they were playing a team who collapsed the week before, not because you thought the bet had positive expected value. You didn't want to lay a big price because it made you nervous to lay out nearly triple of what you stood to make. Instead, you threw Detroit into a parlay when the math said it was a bad play. And that's just because you wanted to chase 3 and 12 to one with what felt like no risk. And worst of all, at the end of the day, you felt good about the whole thing because it almost worked.
Actually, it would have been worse for you if it did work. Then you might have kept on doing the same thing, thinking you were just running bad for a little while. You didn't lose because you made one bad bet. You lost because you never made a good one.
