How To Tell If Your Sports Betting System Is Profitable
5 min readSports betting systems are built around the process of analysis, in which you try to predict the outcome of a game or match before it happens. This is nothing new to anyone who follows sports news regularly.
Many people who dabble with sports betting develop a system that they hope will bring them long term success. After all, there are no shortage of systems out there, and if you spend enough time scouring the internet, you’ll find some claims of incredible returns on investment in sports betting.
But before throwing money at any one particular system, it is important to understand whether or not it is profitable.
With the advent of internet-based sports betting platforms such as those sports betting singapore-based sites, where you can bet with virtual currency instead of real money, it has become much easier to test out different systems without risking your cash.
How to Calculate Profitability
Before you can begin answering this question, you will need to know your ‘break-even’ point with the betting system in question. This means that if you had bet on all of the games using the same unit size every time.
Let’s say, for example, $10 per game. You would have neither gained nor lost money by the end of those games.
Fortunately, it’s easy to see if you have met this requirement or not without using any math at all. Simply check your results and look for a point where your actual profit equals your risk-free profit (the amount you could have profited by betting on each game individually). If you have met this requirement, your betting system is profitable.
Once you have determined for yourself whether or not you are profitable, there’s a simple formula that can be used to check if the bet sizes in your system are “correct.”
This formula is simply the following:
- (units won) / (risk-free profit) = bet size multiplier
- If this number is greater than one, the bet sizes are too big.
- If this number is less than one, the bet sizes are too small.
This may sound confusing at first, so let’s say you had a winning percentage of 50% and a risk-free profit of $100. In this case, your betting system would be profitable despite the fact that you have not won as much money as you could have by just picking games at random.
If we plug these values into the formula with our hypothetical bet sizes ($10 per game), we get the following:
50% = (units won) / 100
We can simplify this by dividing both sides by 50%:
1 = units won / 2
Since this number is less than one, our bet sizes are too small. In other words, we would be profiting more if we bet larger amounts on each game.
Now, let’s say that the same bets were made, but this time with a winning percentage of 60%. In this case, our formula gives us a number greater than one:
60% = (units won) / 100
1.8 = units won / 2
This number is greater than one, which means that the bet sizes are too big in this particular system. In other words, we would be profiting more if our bets were smaller on each game.
Thus, the bet sizes are too small if your betting system has a win percentage of more than 100% (which would be impossible to achieve by betting on sports). If your system has a win percentage of less than 0%, the bet sizes are too big.
What The Calculation Results Will Tell You
As you can see, this is a very simple way to tell whether or not your system is profitable. The main advantage of this method is that it can be done without any mathematical calculations, which means you won’t need to spend time learning how to calculate ‘expected value’ or anything else like that.
If your system is not profitable by at least some small margin (say $10-$20), then the best thing for you to do would be to simply save your time and money by giving up on the system altogether.
After all, why waste time trying to improve a betting system that isn’t profitable?
There is very little chance that you will ever come up with anything worthwhile unless your system already has some money-making potential. If you think about it, most “new” betting systems really aren’t new at all. The only thing that has changed is the person thinking of them.
In other words, if a betting system can make money with one person, it will likely be able to make money with someone else as well, even without any changes.
This is not to say that you should give up on your betting systems too easily, though. If you really think there’s something worthwhile inside of one, then it might be worthy of some further investigation before logging into your, say, favourite sports betting singapore-based sites. Just don’t expect too much at first.
Even if your system is profitable, remember that there are many things that can go wrong with them. For instance, one common problem is that people often over-bet the same games too much in their systems. This produces a lower winning percentage but increases risk-free profits by way of +EV plays.
If you have too many bets on the same game, they may not come through, and you could end up getting stuck with a very small gain. This can be fixed by simply making sure that you split your bets up enough to avoid this problem in the future.
Takeaway
The above calculations were only meant as an example of how to check your system’s profitability. In reality, there are a lot of other factors that you will probably want to consider before giving up on a system.
For instance, if your betting system has a very high win percentage, but it includes a few bets with bad juice, then even if all your bets were profitable individually, there’s a good chance that the whole thing would be unprofitable as a whole.
If your system is profitable, but it’s using bad lines or not taking advantage of all the +EV plays available to you. But then again, there’s a good chance that it won’t be as profitable in the future. Thus, take everything into consideration before giving up on your betting systems for good. And don’t be afraid to start from scratch if that’s what it takes.
After all, a good betting system is a lot more valuable than the time you might spend trying to improve an existing one. Thus, don’t be afraid to give your system a complete makeover if it means the difference between success and failure.