Its Important to Watch the Opening Line

By Tom Wilkinson

The most successful sports bettors that take a look at sports from a sports handicapping perspective will look at the opening odds posted at a casino sportsbook or sports gambling house and immediately try and determine if that odds have a team with an edge that a sports bettor can make a potential sports wager on. These initial candidates will then go through the sports handicapping process that a sports bettor has devised for himself to help him determine his minimum edge numbers and weed out the contenders from pretenders for sports betting purposes.

When involved in sports handicapping, a sports bettor must be cruel, ruthless and without heart. A sports bettor cannot have favorites. When making football picks, for example, a sports bettor may make a sports betting wager against the very team that gave him a huge win against the sports gambling house or sportsbook in just the previous week.

A successful and winning sports bettor must utilize all of the statistical and power rating tools possible to analyze how much of an edge he has over the sports betting line posted at the sportsbooks. When sports handicapping against the sports odds, a sports bettor must have some type of realistic formula that will correctly determine if the sports bettor has at least a minimum edge on a potential sports betting wager against the sportsbooks.

Although the final sports odds are man made there is a lot of computer statistical data and science that goes into the process utilized by the sports odds makers. First, there is no one odds maker. The making of a sports odds is done by a committee of sports betting experts as the job is simply too big and complex for one sports odds maker to handle. Despite the fact that a odds are figured by the very finest experts in the field of sports betting, these sports betting lines and sports betting odds that you see posted at sportsbooks and online sportsbooks do contain holes and flaws that can be exploited by smart sports bettors for profit. There are simply too many factors that can expose flawed sports betting odds or a sports betting line.