Sharp Sports Betting

Stanford Wong wrote the single best volume for the beginner to intermediate sports bettor (with an emphasis on football). The book teaches the basics of sportsbetting, terminology, understanding odds, and methods to make bets that should win in the long-term. This is an excellent primer on someone who is serious about making money from sports. The material is slightly dated - internet betting has made the sports markets more efficient. Notwithstanding this, most of the material is still useful (notable exceptions are trends of super bowl teams, and some underdog analysis). There is a recurring emphasis on mathematics, which any solid gambling book should have. Additionally, the book has several charts that are invaluable to sports bettors. It has frequences of pushes for NFL against different spreads, as well as different totals (these have not changed significantly since the book was published). Additionally, it has odds charts for Poisson distributions for 1 and 2 variables. While an advanced gambler could generate all these charts themselves, this book still saves the newer gamblers many hours - and the book is worth it for these alone. If you are serious about gambling to win (which means you are willing to put in long hours, and are very disciplined), there are a few other books you might consider: any of Stanford Wong's Blackjack Books; Larry Seidel's "Investing in College Basketball" and Don Pesynski's "Win more-- lose less!".

This is the classic book on sports betting and specifically NFL by Stanford Wong of the famous Wong Teasers. So many good tips that helped me get to top of my friendly regular season NFL football pool for the first time in 15 seasons.

I am NOT a sports person. I am a computer geek. I bought this book because I needed a reference manual to understand the math underlying a fantasy sports project I was working on. However, this book taught me a lot more than that. Definitely jargon rich, and probably geared more to the serious sports fan than me, this book should definitely give you the info you need to bet... It gave me the info I needed to understand how the odds are calculated, the various lines, what the different types of bets are, and so forth.

Item as described! Appreciate it

This book is just a simple compilation of an average bookie's 'rules and tips'. It's useful only when you just newbie in betting/online betting, then it will be yours 'The first complete guide to betting'. I don't think that an expereinced gambler will find something new in it. Some rules of betting (US sports oriented), odds definition, introduction to online gambling - the only information you will find in it.

Classic book for serious sports gamblers. Even non-gamblers who love the NFL will find this interesting. The math portions are well written and easy to comprehend even for non-math wizards like me. Casinos are already on to Wong teasers, so you will likely find it difficult to implement the teaser system as there are fewer and fewer games that meet the criteria.

New or old to betting great info on logic behind bets. This won’t give you a magic formula but proper thought process to focus on numbers.

This book is a nice overview of sports gambling with a heavy emphasis on football (specifically NFL). The author presents some handy data tables and good statistical basics for the beginning gambler. Overall, it was a good book with helpful information to build off of for future fun with sports gambling.

good book

Best sports betting book I have read so far mostly about American sports , and that's what I was after 10 out off10

This book is a beginner’s guide to betting NFL games. 30% of the book is devoted to explaining the basics of betting and there is plenty of general good advice. There is no practical information on handicapping games (you won’t learn what stats have value or how to make/use power-ratings) – the focus is on the arithmetic of comparing different types of bets, assuming that you have an edge. There is a chapter on proposition betting that explains a Poisson based approach but no evidence is provided that this actually works – you can’t just assume the Poisson is appropriate for the (count) data of interest. There are some tables of statistical data (e.g. % of games that push, win/loss against the spread) that may not be relevant, 13 years after publication. There is no information in this book that can give you, or help you to develop, an edge over the odds. Dan Gordons’ ‘Beat The Sports Book’, which focusses on NFL handicapping, or ‘Conquering Risk’ , which provides insight into modelling NFL spreads, are better bets.