Apparently we are pleased to stake our money on anything from bullock racing to a bullfight. The consulting firm H2 Gambling Capital released statistics recently which reveal that the common UK adult or the US adult will lose around US$400 gambling every year. But they are nowhere near the Australians (the most prolific bettors) which 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 annually. 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.

However, all this effort from the bookmakers is nothing when compared with the time expended by punters themselves. Look at the time you spend turning a bet over in your mind before you place it and after that multiply that through the range of bets placed each day. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours are spent trying to predict the outcome of sporting events every day.

But could this effort be better utilised?

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

This really is hardly logical. It really is not possible to anticipate the result of a sporting event with any meaningful confidence and also guessing at the probability of a particular result is extremely hard. At least several of the time spent trying to predict the outcome of a sporting event would be better spent comparing the odds provided by the many bookmakers and selecting the bookmaker which offers the most effective return on this kind of bet. It’s quick and easy to shop around the many online sportsbooks, compare odds, and find a better offer. There are actually even plenty of services out there that will do it for you for free.

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

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