Smart sports betting, and football betting first and foremost, is in accordance with the skills of the teams involved instead of random chance. This difference profoundly affects the appropriate betting strategies or systems. Understanding this difference is what makes a highly effective sports bettor.

Many of the betting systems and strategies available today are based upon general probabilities of a win or loss and are modified versions of systems developed for games of chance. On the contrary, sports betting – and even poker – isn’t determined by random chance and probabilities, but on the skill of the contestants. Consequently the underlying premise of sport betting is significantly different than betting on games of chance.

Although most gambling strategies designed for games of chance are mathematically unsound, in practice if one has roughly a 50% chance of winning, these systems can at least appear to offer an effective means of betting. In the long term, the failure of such systems is more or less inevitable because it is based upon the Gambler’s Fallacy. Gambler’s Fallacy is the mistaken impression that particular results are “due” according to previous outcomes in a series of independent trials of a random process. As an example, the if one is tossing coins, and heads come up repeatedly, the gambler may conclude that therefore tails is “due” to come up next; whereas, in fact, the chances that the next coin toss will end in tails is precisely the same in spite of the range of times heads has come up already.

In skill-based wagering, the bettor with the most understanding of the contestants involved has a definite advantage over the bettor that is hoping that the desired outcome “is due” based upon probabilities. There is no sound mathematical probability that any specific football-team “is due” anything. Just think of Arsenal that won 14 consecutive games in 2002, or Derby County F.C. that lost 37 consecutive games in 2007-08. The critical element of these runs was the skill of the teams, professional online casino not random chance.

Which is not to say that random chance is just not involved, of course it is. Any team could make mistakes or have accidents, leading to upsets and surprise outcomes. Even so the smart sports bettor knows that the skill level of the team in question is significantly more likely to influence the outcome than chance and luck. This really is what makes a successful sports bettor over the long term. Anyone can get lucky on occasion, but if one learns to make intelligent bets depending on the skills of the teams involved, one is a lot more likely to win significant amounts of money over the long haul.