How to Bet on Sports | Understand Your Return on Investment

Recreational sports bettors tend to put money on the games to add even more excitement to the action on the field. Everyone loves to win a bet, but when you do lose it often times gets chalked up to the price of admission. That may seem fine and well if you are talking about $5 here or $10 there, but even if you are only betting a small amount of cash from week to week, gaining a deeper understanding of the overall return on your betting dollar can actually help you win more of your bets.

If you are like most casual bettors, you will have a pretty good feel for your overall winning percentage and how much money you may have lost of won in any given season. The only way that you are going to gain that deeper understanding on your actual return on investment or ROI is to have exact numbers for all of your betting activity. If there is any guess work involved when it comes to your overall winning percentage as well as the amount of money you have won or loss during any given time frame, the you might as well flip a coin when it comes to putting down your hard-earned money on an actual sports bet.

You do not guess at how much money you make at your job or how much money you owe to the bank on a loan, so why would you guess at the money won or lost betting on the games. Knowledge is power in sports betting as you try and gain an edge against the online sportsbooks that are more than happy to relieve you of your money each week.

Before you place one more bet with that book, it is in your best interest to obtain a betting history report on your online betting account. This is the starting point for understanding and eventually improving your ROI on your overall sports betting strategy. You need to perform a thorough analysis of what is working and what is not. Even if you are betting $10 a week on one game, you could probably come up with a betting pattern that can be altered in quite a few different ways to add a few more winning tickets to pile.

It is not only important to know how much you bet on each game, but how you bet it. Did you go with the favorite ten times in a row only to win three of those games? Are you leaning heavily towards the OVER only to find that most of the bets you made on the total line stayed UNDER? A thorough analysis of your betting patterns and betting habits are vital to adding some more organization to your overall sports betting strategy.

Online sportsbooks thrive on unorganized bettors. They love the ones that chase losses on Saturday with even more bad bets on Sunday. They love bettors that get suckered into multi-team parlays and other types of bets where the odds are clearly stacked in the books’ favor and they absolutely love anyone who just keeps making deposits into their account with very few requests for a withdrawal.

Given today’s high level of sophistication in online sports betting software, most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you. Gaining a better understanding of what has worked and what has not in the past is the gateway to changing your betting strategy moving forward to improve your overall winning percentage. Creating a positive ROI on your betting bankroll should be your top priority no matter how much you bet on the games.

About the Author
Dave Schwab
Click to Contact
DocSports, The most trusted name in sports handicapping