The sports betting industry is one that lacks regulation, meaning anybody can start a business, website or used auto salesman character to begin selling selections. Because there is no regulation, handicappers can correct false records and guarantees of unimaginable wealth in order to receive business.
When there are lots of legitimate and transparent handicappers in the industry, there are also an overwhelming amount using fake names, flashy cars, women of suspicious clothing and morals (we're guessing) and unachievable documents to convince new or uneducated bettors to purchase their picks.
Even though this might sound a bit over the top, we frequently get calls asking why we don't hit 70 percent of our games such as most of the other providers on the market. Our response is that a 70% win rate is not achievable over the long run.
To describe this in more detail, we examined the likelihood that a sports bettor can win 70 percent of wagers to illustrate exactly how unrealistic this is.
For the purposes of this article, we chose the z-ratio (also known as z-score) to show how many standard deviations away from"expected" an event is.
Example 1: No Edge
This example presumes a handicapper who hits 50% of his games, meaning the handicapper doesn't have any edge when picking games. The data assumes 1,000 plays against the spread (using a vig of -110) over a calendar year, across all major US sports.
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