Apparently we’re 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 regular UK adult or perhaps the US adult will lose around US$400 gambling on a yearly basis. But they’re nowhere near the Australians (the most prolific bettors) that will lose more than $1,400 for every adult this coming 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 on a yearly basis. And, as in other billion dollar industries, the competition for your custom is fierce. playing online football gambling site 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.

In contrast, all this effort from the bookmakers is nothing when compared with the time expended by punters themselves. Consider the time you spend turning a bet over in your mind prior to deciding to place it and then multiply that by the number of bets placed each day. Tens of thousands of man-hours are spent trying to predict the outcome of professional sports daily.

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 the second is the odds accepted for that result. Improving on either one of these factors improves the expected return of the bet. Yet, for all the effort expended attempting to predict the correct result, it appears that proportionately very little effort is expended securing the best possible odds.

This is hardly logical. It’s not possible to anticipate the result of a sporting event with any meaningful confidence as well as guessing at the likelihood of a particular result is extremely hard. At least some of the time spent trying to predict the outcome of a sporting event would be better spent comparing the odds provided by the different bookmakers and selecting the bookmaker which offers the best return on this kind of bet. It’s quick and easy to shop around the many online sportsbooks, compare odds, and locate a better offer. You can find even a lot 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. But 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 is common to locate mismatches of up to 10% from one bookmaker to another. This percentage is there for the taking and it mystifies me that lots of folks are not shopping around for better odds.