Apparently we are pleased to stake our homepage money on anything from bullock racing to a bullfight. The consulting firm H2 Gambling Capital released statistics recently which reveal that a normal UK adult or perhaps the US adult will lose around US$400 gambling every year. But they’re nowhere near the Australians (the most prolific bettors) that will lose more than $1,400 for every adult this year.

All these losses add up and popular sports betting markets like English Premier League soccer, NFL football, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, and MLB baseball turn over billions of dollars each and every year. And, as in other billion dollar industries, the competition for your custom is fierce. Online bookmaking operations today are slick, sophisticated, and making a killing. They employ expert staff to set appropriate starting prices and use complex statistical models to deal with their risk in real time.

On the contrary, all this effort from the bookmakers is nothing in comparison to the time expended by punters themselves. Think about the time you spend turning a bet over in your mind prior to deciding to place it and after that multiply that through the number of bets placed each day. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours are spent trying to predict the outcome of sports events every day.

But could this effort be better utilised?

You will find only two things which determine the expected payout of a bet. The first will be the likelihood of the predicted result and also the second will be the odds accepted for that result. Improving on either one of these factors improves the expected return of the bet. Yet, for all of the effort expended attempting to predict the correct result, it seems that proportionately very little effort is expended securing the top possible odds.

This is hardly logical. It really is not possible to anticipate the result of a sporting event with any meaningful confidence as well as guessing at the probability of a particular result is extremely hard. At least some of the time spent trying to predict the outcome of a sporting event will be better spent comparing the odds provided by the different bookmakers and selecting the bookmaker which offers the very best return on this type of bet. It’s quick and easy to shop around the many online sportsbooks, compare odds, and locate a better offer. You’ll find even plenty of services available that may do it for you for free.

Professional gamblers often have accounts with multiple bookmakers, pay close focus on the odds provided by each, and seek out the most effective odds before they place a bet. Though the average punter tends to mindlessly accept the odds offered by his usual bookmaker. This really is a sizable oversight and a costly missed opportunity.

Bookmakers often post noticeably different odds for the exact same event and it is common to discover mismatches of up to 10% from one bookmaker to another. This percentage is there for the taking and it mystifies me that more folks aren’t shopping around for better odds.