Sports Betting Systems

Sports betting systems are nothing new. Even before sports betting existed online there were touts marketing winning sports picks or 45-0 sports betting systems. In the old days these were offered in newspaper classifieds, gambling magazines and flyers spread throughout Las Vegas casino parking lots as well as on most payphones in Nevada. Today these same offers can be found in sports betting forums, Google ads, banners, etc., and you might even get postal mail or telephone calls from a tout some sportsbook sold your info to. So with all these sports betting systems and winning picks for sale, who can you trust?

Hopefully you answered that question: “No one”

The bottom line is that if someone really had a sports betting system or had picks for sale that produced 97.8% winners (even 70% for that matter) or whatever it is they claimed, the truth that they could afford to be sitting on their own private island with their only worry in the world being how to spend their money. So if this was true, why would they sell you their sports betting system or their winning sports picks?

Generally, sports betting systems for sale are based on some form of the martingale double up system. How it works is like this. Let’s say the system requires you to bet $100 on the New Orleans Saints, then if the Saints lose, the next game you bet $200 on them. If they lose again, you follow that up with a $400 bet. You keep going and going. Now let’s say on the eight bet the Saints finally win. Well, the true betting record is 1-7, but as far as the system goes they count it as 1-0.

The danger with the martingale betting system is that odds always catch up, and the bettor does not have enough money to continue, or the sportsbook limits come into play. Did you know that if you flip a coin 500 times there is a 5.814% chance that heads will come up twelve times in a row sometime during that series of flips. Well, in sports betting with a $12.50 betting unit, your double up looks like this: $12.50, $25, $50, $100, $200, $400, $800, $1600, $3200, $6400, $12,800, $25,600. To translate this: you need a $51,187.50 bankroll and a sportsbook with over a $25,000 betting limit, to make $12.50 per win and there is a 5.814% chance that with in 500 bets you lose it all.

To put this into further perspective, it takes 4095 bets to double a bankroll. If you flip a coin 4,095 the odds that a streak of 12 in a row will occur at least once is 39.308%, so it is quite possible it occurs multiple times.

Hopefully, you can see by now that the Martingale betting system is very high risk, and most that use it do end up broke.

If you’re looking for sound betting advice, see our page Sports Betting Tips where some information about actual systems exists.

For a more technical article, refer to wikipedia entry Sports Betting Systems.