In the exciting world of sports betting, keeping track of your bets and analyzing the outcomes is like a secret weapon for success. Just as a diligent coach reviews game tapes, you, as a bettor, need to understand your own performance.
When you track your bets, you start to uncover your strengths and weaknesses. It's like finding out what position you play best in sports. Maybe you're great at betting on certain sports or particular types of bets. This insight is like gold in your betting strategy.
The Benefits of Analyzing Results
Without understanding your results, then there's no way of knowing the all-important aspect of what your bankroll is. Your bankroll is your lifeline in betting, and by tracking your results, you ensure that you don't overstep and keep your betting journey alive and kicking for the long haul.
Betting can often be an emotional rollercoaster. By tracking your bets, you bring a rational perspective to your decisions, helping to control those emotions. It's like having a steady hand guiding you through the ups and downs of betting.
There's also the element of accountability. Keeping a detailed record of your bets is akin to having a personal coach who keeps you accountable, promoting discipline and responsible betting practices.
Lastly, every bet, whether a win or a loss, is a learning opportunity. By analyzing your betting history, you gain insights that are crucial for making better decisions in the future, much like how studying past games helps sports teams prepare for upcoming challenges.
What Metrics Should I Be Tracking?
GamedayMath's Bet Analysis dashboard breaks down information in a variety of different ways. There are breakdowns by league, bet type, sports book, and more. While GamedayMath hands you the tools to do more, I'd like to focus on the three metrics that are the most important.
- Total Profit/ROI: This one should be pretty self-explanatory. Are you making money or are you losing money? This may sound counter intuitive, but on a day-to-day basis, this isn't the metric one should focus on. Over the course of a year, this is surely the most important metric. However, because of the undulations and streaks that occur over days, weeks and even sometimes months, there can be better metrics to focus on to get more responsive feedback.
- Beat CLV: This is the first of two metrics that are great to look at in real-time to get instant feedback on how good your bets are. As we've written about tirelessly, if you can beat the closing line, then you will be a long-term winner over the sports books. We track this number as a percentage from 0 to 100%. What is a good percentage? That really depends. Personally, I strive to beat CLV 65 to 80% of the time. Beating CLV too often can raise some big red flags with the sportbooks. We cover this more in the next post in this series: How to Avoid Getting Limited By the Sportsbooks
- Expected Edge: With some math comparing your bets to the closing line, this metric tells the bettor how much they are projected to win or lose. This is, arguably, the best metric to target as actual profit and loss should merge with expected edge as the number of bets increase.
One important note here is that betting record is really of no importance. Obviously, if a bettor is only placing spread bets at -110 odds, then it would have high importance. However, the typical bettor isn't doing that. When mixing in money lines, parlays and bets of different type of odds, one can still be very profitable with losing betting record.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, if there is one target to focus on, then I'd say that you should try and have a positive expected edge every day. There are a variety of reasons one would want to place some bets that might not beat CLV. For instance, maybe you want to hide that you are a sharp bettor, or have handicapped a team or total and found value separately from CLV. However, those bets should be balanced out with some that are solidly positive EV.
Hopefully, this was helpful! Bet responsibly and good luck beating the books!
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