Smart sports betting, and football betting especially, is in accordance with the skills of the teams involved as opposed to random chance. This difference profoundly affects the appropriate betting strategies or systems. Understanding this difference is exactly what makes an 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 other hand, sports betting – as well as poker – is not based upon random chance and probabilities, but on the skill of the contestants. This means that the underlying premise of sport betting is significantly different than betting on games of chance.

Although most trusted online gambling agency 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. Within the long run, the failure of such systems might be more or less inevitable because it is based upon the Gambler’s Fallacy. Gambler’s Fallacy will be the mistaken impression that specific results are “due” according to previous outcomes in a series of independent trials of a random process. One example is the if one is tossing coins, and heads come up repeatedly, the gambler may conclude that it indicates tails is “due” to come up next; whereas, as a matter of fact, the chances that the next coin toss will cause tails is precisely the exact same no matter the range of times heads has come up already.

In skill-based wagering, the bettor with the most comprehension 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 absolutely 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, not random chance.

That is not to state that random chance isn’t involved, of-course it is. Any team can make mistakes or have accidents, leading to upsets and surprise outcomes. Even so the smart sports bettor knows that the level of skill of the team in question will be much more prone to influence the outcome than chance and luck. This is what makes a successful sports bettor over time. Anyone can get lucky from time to time, but if one learns to make intelligent bets in line with the skills of the teams involved, one is much more more likely to win significant amounts of money over the long run.