Is Following the Money Always a Good Idea?
If you’re not an experienced handicapper of NFL games, that doesn’t mean there’s no chance of you becoming a winner this season.
The next best thing to being a winner via your resourcefulness is to “tail” those who are exactly that.
What Moves the Point Spread?
It is no secret within the trade that certain factors move the points spread or total in a game. While we grant to you that a mountain of
money wagered by the general public (i.e., the squares) could do that. But a more frequent occurrence is that the oddsmakers will move a number because sharp players have made that happen with heavy action on one side in particular.
The inference from this is that if they bet heavily, they know or see something the public doesn’t, or that the line isn’t set in the right place. This is information that is valuable to the people setting the lines for a sportsbook.
And it should be valuable to you as well.
If sharps are the people who are known to be the most successful at NFL betting, you would much rather have your money on the same side as them.
How to Spot Sharp Money
Allow us to offer you a direction where you could be looking. It is based on the basic principle that the public is weaker (i.e., wrong) more often, comparatively speaking than the sharp players.
And it kind of goes like this: in most cases, if one team is getting a larger share of the money relative to the number of bets that are placed on that team, there is a pretty good chance that is coming from sharp money.
Public vs. Sharp Betting
If the proportion of bets (the number of bets, that is) to money is disproportionate, that would be more likely indicative of the presence of an excess of public money being bet.
This operates on the assumption – an informed assumption, we might add – that the public has more of a tendency to make smaller wagers, while the sharps, when finding an opportunity, will make more sizable wagers.
This might not always be true, because, after all, some squares are “whales” or high-rollers. But in most cases, this truth is going to hold.
What you want to do is make a comparison between the percentage of bets and the percentage of the actual money that is bet.
When to Make Your Move
And you’ll get a truer picture of this on, say, a Sunday morning when the money is starting to roll in. You want to proceed with the best information available, so get a bigger sample if you can afford to do it.
So if Team A is getting 65% of the individual wagers but only 40% of the money bet, in all probability this is a team that the public favors. If Team B has only 40% of the wagers but constitutes, say, 60% of the money, then this is a good indication that this is a team the sharp players are on.
And it is interesting to see what accompanies these kind of circumstances. The line moves in the direction of the team that is drawing the sharp money.
Given the choice, that’s where you want to be unless you have a very good reason not to be
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