Smart sports betting, and football betting first and foremost, is depending on the skills of the teams involved in contrast to random chance. This difference profoundly affects the appropriate betting strategies or systems. Understanding this difference is exactly what makes a highly 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 flip side, sports betting – and also poker – just isn’t according to random chance and probabilities, but on the skill of the contestants. This means the underlying premise of sport betting is significantly different than betting on games of chance.

Although most gambling 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 a highly effective means of betting. Within the long term, the failure of such systems might be more or less inevitable because it is based upon the Gambler’s Fallacy. Gambler’s Fallacy is the mistaken impression that particular results are “due” according to previous outcomes in a series of independent trials of a random process. For example, the if one is tossing coins, and heads come up repeatedly, the gambler may conclude that this implies tails is “due” to come up next; whereas, actually, the chances that the next coin toss will cause tails is precisely the same whatever the range of times heads has come up already.

In skill-based wagering, the bettor with the most understanding of the contestants involved has a definite advantage over the bettor which is hoping that the desired outcome “is due” based on probabilities. There isn’t any sound mathematical probability that any specific playing online football gambling site 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 determining factor of such runs was the skill of the teams, not random chance.

That is not to say that random chance isn’t involved, of-course it’s. Any team might make mistakes or have accidents, leading to upsets and surprise outcomes. On the other hand the smart sports bettor knows that the skill level of the team in question will be much more more likely to influence the outcome than chance and luck. This is what makes a successful sports bettor in the long run. Anybody can get lucky on occasion, but if one learns to make intelligent bets in accordance with the skills of the teams involved, one is much more likely to win significant amounts of money over the long run.