[Lori]

First off, anyone who has been sports betting for any amount of time is likely to learn nothing from this post. I'd appreciate it if they read it though, maybe they could teach me a thing or two.

Something I've been fighting for some time now is the instinct to work out home advantage and then factor it into my capping.
It's fine, and likely neccessary, if you're using a mechanical system, however when you're using a mixture of stats and observing what is going on, it's actually a strange concept when you boil it down.

What is slightly perverse is the following.... I suspect at least 90% of the people reading this have done this before (I certainly have.)
It's typical to break down the two teams, see who you think is the better, make a line and then add a number according to home advantage.
This seems all very logical of course, until you think about what you're doing.
In the process of working out which team is better, you've had to eliminate home advantage from all your working (again, this is understandable in a purely mechanical system), work out who is the better team on a neutral field (which accounts for 2-3 games a season in football) and then add it back on. I'm going to hypothesize that humans are bad at this. (As can be seen by typical BSP scenarios)

Something I've found that has aided the non-mechanical side of my capping is to think about how teams play at home and the road, without assigning a specific number to it. If the Chiefs are playing at home to Denver, I consider games where I've seen the Chiefs at home, and Denver on the road. Obviously the conclusion I come to will be 6-7 points different (or possibly 8 or 9 in that exact extreme example) to the one I would come to if the roles were reversed, but the difference is that I'm not making assumptions twice... assumptions that at best cancel out.

Of course, I'm still using info gained from the games at the opposite fields to the game I'm capping, but I'm using those as a guide and to increase my sample size. I'm mentally attributing less weight to those games.

The reason I've started doing this more and more this season is quite simple. Not all points have the same value.
You could be in the position where a team is a 4 point dog on the road and a 2 point fave at home. Have you really done that team justice?

Similarly you could turn a 7.5 point road fave into a 13.5 point home one. All very nice, but have they gained anything?

On the other side of the swing, you could move a 8 point road dog into a 2 point home dog.

The above three examples are all viable, however it should be clear that they don't all carry the same strength.

I've found I've understood the game better since I considered teams at home and away as similar, but seperate entities where one helps you to increase your sample size and modify the other, rather than removing and adding points in a somewhat arbitary fashion.

All thoughts appreciated.

Lori