[dankhank]

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(7) Before you make a bet, ask yourself why there would be value in the bet. Ask yourself why the sportsbook would knowingly accept a bet from you if it were in your favor, not theirs. If you think the answer to this question is simply because you think you are better at assessing the teams than the linesmakers, you are almost certainly wrong. As an example, if your betting angle is to fade the general betting public (this is what I do most often), then the answer is likely that the book is willing to take on a little sharp action to manage the risk on the other side.

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i went looking for this in the FAQ because i was going to say that answer seemed "out of date" to me. but i guess it is from some other document.

while it is true that most linesmakers are smarter than us and know more about sports, many people here are succesful mainly through finding stupid books, who have bad lines for reasons ranging from laziness to risk avoidance.

by risk avoidance i mean the dumber the book, the more likely they are to balance their action. some books are "willingly dumb" because their marketing has allowed them to get a bunch of square customers, and they have to balance against that customer base. other books are dumb because their handicapping isn't good enough to realize when they are getting very profitable action on a line, and in those cases shouldn't want to balance.

and by laziness i mean if you find a book that does not move their number fast enough to keep up with the market average, then you have another simple system that works.

when you start betting more than $500 a game, or when you have gotten booted from several of the dumb books out there, then you have to start finding more complicated systems for finding winners.