Book Review - Stanford Wong's Sharp Sports Betting
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This book is a great beginner to intermediate guide to sports betting, especially if you're interested in the NFL
Stanford Wong is a geek. That's the best way of describing it. He's one of those nerdy little Asian guys who knows math (in his case probability) inside out and back to front. His books on blackjack and other casino games are pretty much definitive works. So, when I saw he'd written a sportsbetting book, I had to read it. I picked up the book expecting a fairly mathematical treatment of sportsbetting and I wasn't disappointed. What can I say, I'm a bit of a numbers geek.
The book is a little too focused on the NFL for its examples. This is great if you only plan on betting football. However, Wong also explains how the concepts he is illustrating apply to other sports. Personally, even though I don't really like football, I like having most of the examples from the same sport, it makes general concepts easier to extract.
Most of the book focuses on how to calculate your own probabilities of events happening and then using this information to beat the lines that the books offer. I have a problem accepting that all sports data fits probability distribution quite as well as Stanford thinks. Sure, models are the best approximation of reality we have, but they are an approximation. He uses Poisson and Binomial distributions as well as Normal, to make his models more applicable.
The book also includes a lot of useful charts for estimating probabilities (both theoretically and based on past history). Sure, you can get the information elsewhere, but having it all brought together so conveniently is a nice bonus.
Overall, this book is good for beginners, and anyone looking to add a more mathematical approach to their sportsbetting analysis.
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Book Review - Stanford Wong's Sharp Sports Betting
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