Ok. I see that I have made exactly one post since the middle of November. It seems like every new post starts off with my surprise at how long it’s been since my last post. I checked back to when I first started the blog, and I realized that I used to post maybe a paragraph, sometimes two, about random thoughts I had. I believe what happened was that I started over thinking it too much, and forcing the content too much. I realize now that this is exactly the problem. I encountered the exact same thing when working on writing a book. Once I started changing my writing habits to serve the purpose of having a book, rather than serving only the individual stories within it, the work suffered, and I ended up getting burned out. I am going to attempt to take a different approach towards the blog, and take it old school, and feature shorter posts more often. Ultimately, the blog is for me more so than anything else, so if this bothers you, dine on some poo.

So, its playoffs time in football again. I bet on football. I will be in Vegas for the conference championship games, and I am rather excited about it. To prepare for this adventure, I have been doubling up my efforts towards capping the games building up to the conference championships, so that I can make quality wagers. TO do my research, of course I turn to the hard stats, but I also have spent countless hours reading forums, and learning which users on the forum are the best of the best, so that I can use their opinions to confirm my own. Any sports bettor worth his weight in gold knows that YOU cap the games, YOU decide what is right, then, and ONLY then, do you look for confirming evidence from your peers, rather than the opposite. If you go look for a "lock" pick, you will find tons of them, and they will be wrong. The odds makers set the spreads and the totals at exactly the right amount to make THEMSELVES money. These numbers are set based on all the statistics that are available to everyone. Just about any mathematical analysis you can apply to any set of available statistics, will invariably end at exactly the outcome, which will directly coincide with the outcome the odds makers have set. If you go look at polls asking sports bettors what they are going to pick, it will usually land about 50% on each side. So on any given game, half the wagers win, and half the wagers lose. If enough money comes in on a particular side, the odds makers simply move the spread until money starts coming in on the other side, to keep themselves balanced, to insure that half the people will lose.

So what does this mean? Well, I suppose it means you can use math or whatever you like and cap games all day long, and roughly be no better off then simply flipping a coin, because you really never know what is going to happen during a game. Most sports gamblers usually break even in terms of their win percentage, they may make larger wagers on certain bets to try and capitalize winnings, but overall their win percentage will be mediocre. A sports bettor who hits 60% or more is considered VERY good, or extremely lucky, and the latter is more likely the case. A gambler will always tell you about how much he won, and about his amazing win streak, but he will seldom mention his losses, or about his streak of breaking even. What does this mean for me? I guess nothing, cuz I'll be wagering anyway. Maybe I will flip a coin and bet 20 bucks on what the coin decides.